Railway development
- The first recorded use of rail transport in Great Britain is Sir Francis Willoughby's Wollaton Wagonway in Nottinghamshire built between 1603 and 1604 to carry coal
- As early as 1671 railed roads were in use in Durham to ease the conveyance of coal
- The first of these was the Tanfield Wagon Way.
- Many of these tramroads or wagon ways were built in the 17th. and 18th. centuries
- They used simply straight and parallel rails of timber on which carts with simple flanged iron wheels were drawn by horses, enabling several wagons to be moved simultaneously
- Some railways are 300 feet (91 m) and had a gauge of 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm)
- Wagons fitted with simple flangeless wheels were kept on the track by vertical ledges, or plates
- Cast-iron rails were a significant improvement over wooden rails as they could support a greater weight and the friction between wheel and rail was lower, allowing longer trains to be moved by horses
- The rails had been first employed in 1789 at Nanpantan at the Loughborough Charnwood Forest Canal. Such rails could be manufactured in 3 ft (914 mm) lengths
- Cast iron rails had a propensity to break easily and the short lengths soon became uneven.
- In 1820, John Birkenshaw introduced a method of rolling rails in greater lengths
- Roads of rails called Wagonways were being used in Germany as early as 1550
- These primitive railed roads consisted of wooden rails over which horse-drawn wagons or carts moved with greater ease than over dirt roads
- Wagon ways were the beginnings of modern rail roads.
- By 1776, iron had replaced the wood in the rails and wheels on the carts
- Wagonways evolved into Tramways and spread though out Europe. Horses still provided all the pulling power
- In 1789 Englishman William Jessup designed the first wagons with flanged wheels
- The flange was a groove that allowed the wheels to better grip the rail, this was an important design that carried over to later locomotives.
- Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) built that vehicle, the first steam engine tramway locomotive
- On February 22, 1804, the locomotive hauled a load of 10 tons of iron, 70 men and five extra wagons the 9 miles between the ironworks at Pen-y-Darron in the town of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales to the bottom of the valley called Abercynnon
- It took about two hours
This picture is how we see it but in 1789 they had really old railways. Railways were invented in 1776-1833 and to this day people are still creating new ones. Railway were (made) invented bySamuel Homfray Samuel Homfray. Railway were made in Nanpantan at the Loughborough Charnwood Forest Canal. In the 1789's. Samuel Homfray made railways and trains. But there was others help him but he was the one who thought of it and created it.