Debra Weber, age 10, of San Diego, Calif., for her question:
HOW WAS THE TRAIN DEVELOPED?
Leading country in the world with the greatest number of main line railroad routes is the United States, where there are 209,001 miles of tracks. Coming in second, with 84,689 miles, is Russia, and Canada is in third place with 44,023 miles. Leading country in passenger service, even though not on the top 10 list in terms of routes, is Japan, where each year 193.189 billion passenger miles of service are provided.
A few primitive railroads could be found in Europe as early as the mid 1500s, most of them involved in the coal or iron ore business. Men or horses pulled the first cars which were little more than wagons with flanged wheels designed to move on wooden rails.
By the mid 1700s, the wooden rails were being covered with strips of iron to make them last longer, and it wasn’t too much after that the first all iron rails came along.
During the late 1700s and early 1800s, an inventor in England named Richard Trevithick worked on the first steam engines that were capable of using high pressure steam. His engine was mounted on a four wheeled undercarriage that moved along a track. An 1804 model pulled a 10 ton load of coal along almost 10 miles of track and became the world’s first successful railroad locomotive.
In 1825 a locomotive builder named George Stephenson put together the world’s first public railroad. The line operated between the towns of Stockton and Darlington in England, a distance of 20 miles. Steam freight trains were run on a regular schedule.
Stephenson’s second railroad ran 30 miles between Liverpool and Manchester, and it went into operation in 1830. It became the first railroad to run steam passenger trains on a regular schedule.
Stephenson decided that all railroads should have a standard gauge, and he selected a width of four feet, eight and a half inches. This width was chosen because it corresponded to the length of the axles that were found on most horse drawn wagons at the time. The gauge was eventually adopted by most European railroads and also by the railroads in Canada and the United States. ,
The first railroad to make a successful run in North America was a small one built in Hoboken, N.J., in 1825 by a man named John Stevens.
The first full size locomotive to run on a track in North America was one built by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company of Pennsylvania in 1829.
In 1830 a famous race was held between a horse and a small locomotive called the Tom Thumb. Planned by the owners of a stagecoach line and the owners of the new Baltimore and Ohio Railroad near Baltimore, the race was supposed to prove which means of transportation was best and fastest. Tom Thumb led the race until an engine belt slipped, and then the horse pulled ahead and won.