About Trains

By Dr. Frederick C. Gamst, Professor Emeritus, Umass/Boston

The railroad industry started in England after 1600, with wooden-railed track (hence the very word rail ) and draft-animal motive power. The industry gradually evolved with iron rails by 1765, printed operating rules for the movement of trains of cars by about 1770, and practical locomotive steam engines by 1820.

Highly formative was the use, beginning in the late 1830s, of organizational models from the British Army and Navy, first, in British and, subsequently, in North American railroad management and operations. The British armed forces' focus on various kinds of so-called signals for conveying information. ("Signals have been received, sir.") The railroads thus used a number of codes for signals conveyed via various media: whistle, flag, lantern, hand, pigmented surface, shaped surface, semaphore-blade position, etc. plus a distinction between the Royal Navy's "day signals" and "night signals."

Existence of the railroads facilitated the United States' Industrial Revolution, after 1840--a period, not coincidentally, also called the Railroad Age. The technology and operations of British railroading began its earliest diffusion to North America ca. 1795, with the construction and operation of a wooden gravity railroad of the English style on Boston's Beacon Hill.

For the first two centuries and one-quarter in industrializing Great Britain, the "trains" of cars had both livestock and down-grade gravity as the sources of motive power. The freight hauled was mainly products of the earth, especially coal. The freight handling companies were reluctant to trust their valuable merchandise to the slow and inconsistent railroads. Speeds were slow and the driver needed no audible device beyond his own voice. The first regular railroad passenger service was in 1807 by a rail coach on the south coast of Wales. But, freight trains had been hauling a few non-revenue passengers for two centuries.

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