During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), short wooden tracks were used in England to connect mines or quarries with nearby streams. Here the coal and stone were transferred to barges. On such tracks, called tramways, horses could draw far heavier loads than on ordinary roads.

Later, people began to think the tracks or railscould be used to carry passengers. In those days, the most comfortable way to travel on land was in a stagecoach drawn by horses. But the roads were rough and bumpy all the time. Rails could make travel much smoother and cleaner. The stagecoach was placed on tracks and was pulled by horses. This was the first passenger railroad.

It was not long before iron strips were being placed over the wooden rails. Iron made rails much stronger and they did not wear away so fast. Several carriages could be joined together to make a stagecoach train or wagon. But still, horses could not pull very heavy loads and could not travel very fast.

Many strange ideas were tried out to improve this simple railroad. A horse was placed right in the car, with the passengers, to work a machine called a treadmill. The experiments, however, were not successful. Another group of men tried sails on carriages. After all, they thought, sails make ships glide fast and smoothly before the wind. But sails did not work so well on railroad cars. When the wind blew strong enough toward the destination of the carriage, everything was fine. But when the wind changed, the carriage stopped. The real development of the car on rails began with the development of the steam engine.

The steam locomotive was the invention of no one man. Early models – the puffing Billy, the iron horse, and the steam wagon were developed from the stationary steam engine invented by an Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, in 1705. Newcomen's model was greatly improved by James Watt sixty-four years later.

The first steam engine to successfully pull loaded cars over a road of rails was built and operated by Richard Trevithick in England in 1804. His engine pulled a short train uphill on a coal mine tramway. It had taken 100 years to develop a railroad locomotive from Newcomen's simple steam engine. During the next twenty years there were several experimental locomotives.

The world's first common carrier railroad (a railroad for public use) to employ steam power was started in England in 1825. The train was powered by George Stephenson's famous Locomotion No. I. In 1829, Stephenson and his brother Robert built a better, faster engine and called it the Rocket. Though the Rocket was not the first such locomotive, it is looked upon as the beginning of effective steam power and the beginning of the age of the iron horse.

When the stationary steam engine was "put on wheels" and made to run on rails, it was called a locomotive engine, because it could move from place to place under its own power (locomotion). Later, it became simply a locomotive or an engine, and both terms have  been in common use for many years.

The first road of rails in the United States was probably a short inclined track used in Boston as early as 1795. The first railway company to build and operate a railroad in this country was Granite Railway Company, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1826. The cars were drawn by horses. The first railroad for passengers and freight was the Baltimore & Ohio which was opened for horse-drawn traffic in 1830.

An English-built locomotive, the Stourbridge    Lion, was brought to America in 1829 by    Horatio Allen, a young civil engineer, aboard a sailing vessel. It made a two-mile trial run on a coal track in Pennsylvania m the first steam engine to move on a regular railroad in this country. But the six-ton Lion proved too heavy for the rails and too stiff for the curves, and was honorably retired to serve as a stationary steam engine after its first run.

In America, too, people were beginning to build locomotives. In 1825, the first steam engine in the United States was built by Colonel John Stevens of New Jersey. This locomotive was operated on a circular track on his estate, but it was never used for commercial purposes.

The first really successful locomotive was the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, another young civil engineer, in 1830. People lined the tracks in Baltimore to see the wonderful sight of an iron horse going at the unheard of speed of 18 miles an hour.

This pint-sized engine, weighing only about one ton, once ran a race with a fast stagecoach horse. It was an exciting event; the puffing of the horse matched the puffing of the Tom Thumb. 

While Peter Cooper was trying to"sell" his Tom Thumb to officials of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Horatio Allen was helping to start a railroad in South Carolina. On December 25,1830, the South Carolina Railroad (now the Southern Railway System) became the first railroad company or line to use steam power in regular service. The locomotive, Best Friend of Charleston, pulled the first train of cars over their rails. A year later, this railroad began carrying the United States mail. In 1833, the Southern line was extended to 136 miles, making it the longest railroad in 'the world at that time.

Let us take an imaginary trip behind the famous De Witt Clinton. This was the third locomotive built in America and it was put into service between Albany and Schenectady in New York State on August 9th, 1831. The entire train consisted of a four-wheeled engine, a tender containing water and firewood, two passenger cars made from bodies of stagecoaches and fastened on the rails. The cars were connected with a three-link chain about a yard in length The engine was 11½ feet long and had a towering smokestack. One man operated the engine.

 Tickets for the trip were sold at hotels and other  public places. Passengers climbed into the carriages and took their seats. Then the conductor, standing on the platform outside each coach, collected the tickets, mounted to a little seat on the tender and blew a horn as a signal for the engineer to start the train. As the train started to move, there was usually a terrific jerk that sent the passengers in the coaches sprawling across each other. But once the passengers got back to their seats, the engine moved along smoothly. Then, as the fire in the boiler got hot, sparks, cinders and smoke showered the passengers. They had to beat the flames from their burning clothes, and put up umbrellas. When the train had to stop, the engineer pushed a lever that was designed to apply brakes to the wheels and slow the train. The device worked well; the engine generally was abruptly checked, the tender bumped into the locomotive, the first passenger car crashed against the tender, and the second coach rammed the first. The passengers, usually still fighting the sparks, were again sent sprawling, now forward from their seats instead of backward as they had been when the train started.

Train schedules were somewhat irregular in those days. When it rained, trains could not run because they had no way to keep from slipping on the wet tracks. They could not run at night because there were no lights on the trains. There were many delays in the service, too. Often the train ran out of firewood, and the passengers had to help gather more wood so that the journey of the iron horse could continue.

 The railroads had many problems in the early days. Some people were strongly opposed to all railroads and held mass meetings against them. Other people claimed that the cattle would be injured and that is was not healthful to travel at the dangerous speed of 15 miles an hour; also  you might be blown up! Unfortunately there was some evidence to support these claims, but the railroaders did what they could to make travel safe.

 To protect the engine from wandering cattle, a small truck (a set of wheels) was put ahead of it. One type truck model had two iron spears attached. Later a crossbar was substituted, and this in time became the V-shaped cowcatcher or pilot.

Most of the early locomotives had simple brakes or no brakes at all. When a train puffed into its destination, a group of citizens ran out, grabbed the train wherever it was handy, and pulled it to a stop. After these pioneer trains had been operated for a while using the trial and error method, the brakes were improved until the present air brakes came into use. These automatic brakes, worked by compressed air and controlled from the locomotive, can be applied throughout a long train in a few seconds.

The first trains ran only in daylight hours, and headlights were unknown.  As time went on, however, night operations became increasingly necessary, and inventive minds went to work to devise ways of illuminating the track ahead of the train. The first step was taken by Horatio Allen when he attached a small flatcar to the front of the locomotive and covered the floor of the car with a heavy layer of sand on which he kept a bonfire of pine knots. Soon, though, reflectors and oil lamps came into use. Today, our locomotives are equipped with electric headlights. Out of such problems and necessities came inventions. As the railroads grew, they created new problems. Ingenious men concentrated on them and many problems were solved by several men working independently. Eventually all the problems were solved.