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Transportation in Europe in the 19th century
In the 19th century people started to travel increasingly quickly because of improvement in transportation means.

 the Golden Spike 

In 1869 two steam locomotives were facing each other in the Utah prairie. Hundreds of people were watching. As they were pushing each other aside, they did not see how a Golden Spike was driven into the rails between the locomotives. But the sounds of the hammer could be heard all over America at that moment. A reporter wrote: 'This mysterious voice from a place that had been completely unknown until a few years ago, made the human heart tremble with emotion'. With this Golden Spike the first railroad between the east and west coast of the United States had been completed. The journey from coast to coast had been reduced from more than half a year to one week. Driving the Golden Spike was special because it was also the first event that could be followed live from thousands of kilometres away. This was thanks to the telegraph, which represented the clicking sounds as telegraph clicking.

the definition Wikipedia gives us about the Golden Spike: The "Golden Spike" (also known as “The Last Spike”) is the ceremonial final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term "Last Spike" has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a meeting point. The "Last Spike" now lies in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Steam ships and canals Transportation over water also improved a lot. In Great Britain dozens of canals were dug to support the transportation of coal from the mines to the factories and final products from the factories to shops and buyers around 1800. Others followed this British example. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam was already connected to the North Sea in 1872 by the Nieuwe Waterweg and Amsterdam in 1876 by the North Sea Canal. For world shipping, the Suez Canal was really important, which was opened in 1869. From then on, ships did no longer have to sail around Africa to get to Asia. 1.	Suez Canal 2.	northern route from Europe to Asia At the same time, speed increased because of the arrival of steam ships. 1808 the first steam ship ever sailed and in the 1840s steam ships started to sail between Europe and America and after the Suez Canal was opened, East Asia could be reached easily and quickly. At the end of the 19th century steam ships got a lot bigger and more comfortable.

The Steamship Just as steam revolutionized land transportation with the invention of the locomotive, it also became the dominant power source on water -- replacing manual oars and sails. The early development of the steamship closely parallels that of the steam locomotive and the steam engine itself. In the late 1600s, Denis Papin, innovator of the steam piston and pressure cooker, theorized the use of steam-driven impellers to power a boat.

railroads: Until the arrival of the train, travelling over land had been a difficult affaire. In that time roads were mostly just sandy paths full of bumps and pot-holes, so travel times were very long. Transportation of goods/products was even more difficult, because heavy cargo was not easy to transport over land. In 1814 the English blacksmith George Stephenson built a steam engine on wheels. This had been done before, but such transportation tools were too heavy for the wooden rails they had in that time on which they were supposed to ride. But Stephenson was the first person to succeed in making iron rails so transportation of goods and people became possible by rail. In 1830 the railroad between Liverpool and Manchester was opened, the first passenger route in the world. Stephenson’s locomotive the Rocket travelled on it with a speed of 20 km/h. The railroads success was enormous. Because of industrialization the need had been created for quick transportation of goods and people in large groups and over long distances. In 1850 Great Britain and Belgium already had a dense railroad system, that connected all major cities. In the Netherlands the first railroad, Amsterdam-Haarlem, was opened in 1839. The construction of a national railroad system in the Netherlands started later. Constructing railroads in the Netherlands was not easy. The soft peat surface had to be replaced by sand and clay and rail bridges had to be built to cross large rivers. This only happened in the 1860s. In 1900 all parts of the country were connected by rail, and travel time was much shorter. Thanks to the railroads the contact between all parts of the country and the dutch people grew and the dutch people felt more closely connected to each other. This transportation revolution also took place in other countries, so international travel became increasingly easier.

Steam engines The first full scale working railway steam locomotive was built in the United Kingdom in 1804 by Richard Trevithick, an English engineer born in Cornwall. This used high pressure steam to drive the engine by one power stroke. On 21 February 1804 the world's first railway journey took place as Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Trevithick later demonstrated a locomotive operating upon a piece of circular rail track in Bloomsbury, London, the "Catch-Me-Who-Can", but never got beyond the experimental stage with railway locomotives, not least because his engines were too heavy for the cast-iron plateway track then in use. Despite his inventive talents, Richard Trevithick died in poverty, with his achievement being largely unrecognized.

The impact of the Napoleonic Wars resulted in a dramatic rise in the price of fodder. This was the imperative that made the locomotive an economic proposition, if it could be perfected.

The first commercially successful steam locomotive was Matthew Murray's rack locomotive Salamanca built for the narrow gauge Middleton Railway in 1812. This twin cylinder locomotive was not heavy enough to break the edge-rails track, and solved the problem of adhesion by a cog-wheel utilising teeth cast on the side of one of the rails. It was the first rack railway.

This was followed in 1813 by the Puffing Billy built by Christopher Blackett and William Hedley for the Wylam Colliery Railway, the first successful locomotive running by adhesion only. This was accomplished by the distribution of weight by a number of wheels. Puffing Billy is now on display in the Science Museum in London, the oldest locomotive in existence.

In 1814 George Stephenson, inspired by the early locomotives of Trevithick, Murray and Hedley, persuaded the manager of the Killingworth colliery where he worked to allow him to build a steam-powered machine. He built the Blücher, one of the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotives. Stephenson played a pivotal role in the development and widespread adoption of the steam locomotive. His designs considerably improved on the work of the earlier pioneers. In 1825 he built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the north east of England, which was the first public steam railway in the world. Such success led to Stephenson establishing his company as the pre-eminent builder of steam locomotives used on railways in the United Kingdom, United States and much of Europe.

sources:
 * geschiedenis werkplaats chapter 6.2
 * source2
 * source3
 * "History of Rail Transport," from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport, 2008