Portal:Trains/Selected article/Week 45, 2006

The history of rail transport dates back nearly 500 years. Wagonways were developed in Germany in the 1550s and the use of these tracks, consisting of wooden (usually edged) rails for horse-drawn wagons, spread across Europe. At first confined to mines, they were in use in Britain for surface transport by the early 1600s. In the late 1760s, the Coalbrookdale Company began to fix plates of cast iron to the wooden rails. These (and earlier railways) had flanged wheels as on modern railways, but another system was introduced, in which unflanged wheels ran on L-shaped metal plates; these became known as plateways. Modern rail transport systems first appeared in England in the 1820s. These systems, which made use of the steam locomotive, were the first practical form of mechanized land transport, and they remained the primary form of mechanized land transport for the next 100 years.

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