Railway

Railway, a means of mass transport in vehicles running on parallel rails. By the 18th century workers in several European mining areas had discovered that movement of a loaded wagon was easier if its wheels ran on, and were guided by, a crude track of metal plates, because friction was thereby reduced. The wagonways served only to move goods from their source to the nearest waterway, then the principal means of bulk transport. The onset of the Industrial Revolution in early 19th-century Europe demanded more efficient means of moving raw materials to the new factories and finished goods from them. The solution was pioneered by Richard Trevithick, a Cornish engineer. In 1804 he successfully adapted the steam engine, in use since the early 18th century for pumping water, to drive a wheeled locomotive that hauled wagons at the Pen-y-Darren ironworks, South Wales. Two decades elapsed, during which cast-iron rails were developed to withstand the weight of a steam locomotive and traction power for haulage of trains, as opposed to one or two wagons, was secured by mounting a steam locomotive on two or more driven axles with their wheels coupled by rods. The world's first public steam railway, the Stockton & Darlington in north-east England, engineered by George Stephenson, was opened in 1825. For some years this railway carried only freight and also made some use of horses. The first public railway to carry both passengers and freight, and to be worked entirely by steam locomotives, was the Liverpool & Manchester, opened in 1830. This too was engineered by George Stephenson, now with the assistance of his son Robert Stephenson.

The commercial, financial and technical success of the Liverpool & Manchester transformed the concept of a railway, and not only in Britain. Previously regarded as a short-haul medium of primary benefit to mining, it was now seen as capable of revolutionizing long-haul transport, both of passengers and freight. It had been thought that anyone should be free, on payment of a toll, to put a train on a railway, as was possible with boats on a canal; but the volume of Liverpool & Manchester traffic soon showed that operation over a fixed track must be centrally controlled and trains kept at a safe space from each other by some form of signalling. The first mechanically operated lineside signals appeared in 1830.

From the mid-1830s onward inter-city railway construction developed rapidly in Britain and Continental Europe. The British railways were all built by private enterprise with minimal government intervention, but in Continental Europe most construction was controlled, and in some cases undertaken, by national or state governments. This established (except in Britain) a European tradition of the railway as a public enterprise, and of government obligation to fund at least in part the upkeep and expansion of national railway infrastructure. Government involvement was concerned to avoid wasteful duplication of competing railways on the most lucrative routes—as happened in Britain—and to ensure that railways spread in a way that best served the social and economic development of the state or country concerned. Military considerations counted too, and in one country dictated choice of track gauge. Builders in Europe—and North America—generally adopted the 1,435-mm (4 ft 8y in) gauge of George Stephenson, which he is thought to have copied from wagonways in his neighbourhood that had found it empirically the most manageable dimension for human or horse haulage. But Spain deliberately selected 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) as a defence against French intrusion, and Portugal followed suit. Russia's standardization to 1,520 mm (5 ft), however, arose chiefly from the Tsar's appointment of an American advocate of broad gauge to engineer the country's first railway. Today the track gauge difference forces rail traffic between Western Europe and Spain, Portugal, Finland and the Russian republics to be trans-shipped at frontiers unless it is carried in vehicles with changeable or gauge-variable axles. Broad gauge was adopted by many of the first railways in the United States, particularly in the South, and standardization on 1,435 mm gauge was not enforced nationally until after the Civil War (1861-1865). The strictest government control of early European railway construction was in France, with the result that in the 19th century it assembled the continent's best-planned network of trunk routes, which was also the best-engineered for speed.

Railway construction spread so rapidly in the 1840s that by the end of the decade 10,715 km (6,658 mi) of route had been built in Britain, 6,080 km (3,778 mi) in the German states, and 3,174 km (1,972 mi) in France. Everywhere else in Central and Western Europe, except Scandinavia and the Balkans, railway building had begun. Passenger travel by train was soon popular, but until the second half of the 19th century the rapid European railway expansion was driven chiefly by the hunger of newborn industry for freight transport, and the railway's ability to supply it at rates ensuring attractive profits for investors. By 1914 today's European rail network was almost wholly in place, Scandinavia excepted, following completion of the great transalpine rail tunnels: the Mont Cenis (or Fréjus) from France to Italy in 1871; the St Gotthard in Switzerland in 1881; the Arlberg in Austria in 1883; and in Switzerland, the Simplon in 1906, and the Lotschberg in 1913.

In North America the spread of railways was spurred by eagerness to drive inland from the East Coast towns and cities established by the early British colonists. Following the opening in 1830 of the first steam-worked passenger railway in Charleston, South Carolina, railway construction was soon forging westwards from points all the way down the East Coast from Quebec, in Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Within a few years the railways had convinced traders of their superiority over canals, not only for speed and directness, but for all-weather reliability, compared with the proneness of the waterways to freeze in winter and fall to unnavigable levels in summer. By 1850 the continent already had 14,500 km (9,000 mi) of railway. In the following decade the rising number of private companies built new railway faster than the rest of the world put together, lifting the North American total to over 48,300 km (30,000 mi). Chicago, in the Midwest, transformed by the arrival of railways from a small town to a city, was now the springboard for rapid building to the south and west. The first US transcontinental line was completed in 1869, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads met in Utah; Canadian Pacific finished Canada's first transcontinental route, which included a crossing of the Rocky Mountains, in 1885. The spread of US railways peaked at 399,342 km (249,433 mi) in 1916: by the 1980s the total was 25 per cent less because road transport competition had forced the closure of numerous rural railways.

One difference between the infrastructure of North American railways and those of Europe was more generous clearance between tracks, between tracks and lineside features, and through overbridges or tunnels. In future years this was to allow North American railways to build locomotives and rail vehicles to greater cross-sectional dimensions (“loading gauge” in railway parlance) than was possible in Europe.

Africa, Asia and Australasia did not see their first railways until after 1850. Many builders in these continents chose to build to a smaller track gauge than 1,435 mm, while India's principal routes were laid to a broader measurement (see Narrow-Gauge Railway).

The first short African railways had been built in 1860-1870 by the continent's various colonial powers to simplify exploitation of mineral resources. Major development came after 1880, when the British statesman and financier Cecil Rhodes, foreseeing the railway's potential to foster trade within the continent, sought to complete a railway all the way from Cape Town to a connection with the newly-completed Cairo-Suez railway in Egypt. The project got no further than the Belgian Congo (now Zaïre), some 30 years later, but it spurred construction of other inland trunk railways. Australia's states failed to adopt a common gauge, building variously to narrow, 1,435 mm, and broad gauge, with the result that in modern times a good deal of costly conversion has been necessary to establish a core interstate freight route of 1,435-mm gauge and eliminate timewasting trans-shipments (see Trans-Australian Railway). Australian railway building began in earnest after 1870, when the flood of immigrants that raised the country's population from 400,000 in 1850 to over 3.25 million in 1890 raised a clamour for better transport to open up the country's interior. In the last 30 years of the 19th century the length of Australian railway jumped from barely 1,600 km (1,000 mi) to some 19,300 km (12,000 mi). The best-organized Asian railway network emerged in India, where in the early 1850s a far-sighted British Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, promoted rapid construction of trunk lines reaching inland from the ports to meet in the interior. India's first coast-to-coast line, from Bombay to Calcutta, was finished in 1870. With the stimulus of India's thriving agriculture and industry, the country had by 1913 assembled 56,300 km (35,000 mi) of railway, far more per square kilometre of territory than in Australia or Africa. Japan, hostile to any foreign influence under the feudal rule of the samurai, changed abruptly when the Emperor's power was restored in 1867, and enlisted western help to begin major railway building in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was defeat by Japan in 1895 that roused China to begin trunk railway construction.

After World War I, new railway building in the developed world was mostly of underground city and suburban railways until construction of new high-speed inter-city passenger lines was initiated by Japan in the 1960s. But in the developing world—especially in India, the Soviet Union and China, where trains remained the prime movers of passengers and freight—extension of the traditional railway network continued throughout the 20th century. Between 1950 and 1990 China doubled its length of railway, constructing a succession of new main lines; it was still building at an annual rate of over 400 km (250 mi) in the 1990s, aiming to have an 80,000-km (50,000-mi) network in place by the year 2000.

Continual advances in the size, power and speed of the steam locomotive in the railways' first 100 years had their most impressive results in North America. In the 1920s the requirement on some US railways for haulage of 4,000-5,000-tonne freight trains up lengthy grades in mountainous country prompted the development of the articulated steam locomotive. In this type, one long boiler supplied two separate engines that pivoted independently of each other so that the lengthy locomotive could negotiate curves comfortably. The final examples of this type, which with their big multiwheeled tenders carrying coal and water grossed over 500 tonnes, could sustain an output of 7,000-8,000 hp. The biggest, in the world as well as the United States, was the Union Pacific Railroad's 1941 Big Boy. It had a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement—that is, each independent engine had four small, unpowered bogie wheels and eight driving wheels. Big Boy weighed 345 tonnes without its tender. In the late 1930s, on the comparatively level main lines in the East and Midwest, streamlined, big-wheeled locomotives were timetabled to run inter-city passenger trains at average speeds up to 145 km/h (90 mph) between some intermediate station stops. The maximum speeds with steam were recorded in Europe, by British and German streamlined locomotives built for inter-city services that averaged 112.6 km/h (70 mph) or a little over between stops. In a 1936 test run, a German Class 05 4-6-4 reached 200.4 km/h (124.5 mph); but that was exceeded, and the ultimate world steam speed record set, by the 203 km/h (126 mph) of the Class A4 4-6-2 Mallard of the British company LNER (London and North-Eastern Railway) during a test run in July, 1938.

The development of the modern inter-city passenger train began in the 1860s, when George Pullman persuaded US railway companies to let him run his own sleeping cars, and later dining and day cars, in their trains. These carriages, on which a supplementary Pullman fare was charged, set standards of comfort previously unknown on trains. Pullman's initiative was copied in Europe by a Belgian, Georges Nagelmakers, founder in 1876 of the International Sleeping Car Company. As a result, by the century's end the furnishing, facilities, and cuisine of long-haul US and some European international trains (such as the Orient Express) justified their description as “hotels on wheels”. As the century ended, railways were driven by their passengers' enthusiasm for travel to begin significant improvement in the comfort and speed of their ordinary trains, in all classes of accommodation.

A disadvantage of the steam locomotive, which loomed larger as 20th-century road transport competition put pressure on railway costs, was its limited availability for continuous work, because of the frequency of its need for servicing. Diesel- traction engines need less attention, while electric-traction engines can run continuously for a period of days; thus to work a given number of trains, an electrified railway needs the fewest locomotives or self-powered railcars. Steam's demise was signalled in the early 1930s, when US and German industry almost simultaneously developed high-power diesel engines of a size and weight capable of use in a rail vehicle (see Internal-Combustion Engine). By 1958, 90 per cent of the traffic of the principal US railways was hauled by over 27,600 diesel locomotives, and only 1,700 steam locomotives were left. The diesel locomotive mostly takes the form of a mobile power station, in which the diesel engine drives a generator providing current for electric traction motors. It has all but eliminated steam worldwide on lines with insufficient traffic to repay the high first cost of electrification. A continuous output of 5,000-6,000 hp is now obtainable from a single diesel-electric locomotive.

Powering trains by electricity had become feasible in the last decade of the 19th century. Some main lines in Europe and North America, as well as metropolitan railways, were electrified before 1939. Widespread trunk-route electrification in the developed world (oil-rich North America excepted) followed World War II. Continental European countries restoring war-damaged main lines took the opportunity to electrify them. Then in the 1950s the French perfected an electrification system making direct use of 25-kV alternating current at the industrial frequency. This not only secured marked improvement of an electric locomotive's performance, but cut the capital cost of electrification, which now became economically feasible for lines with lower traffic levels, in the developing as well as the developed world. Much of the extensive railway building in China and the former USSR since 1950 has been accompanied by electrification.

In the 20th century's last quarter railway evolution has been marked chiefly by reaction in the developed world to the strength of road and air competition; by exploitation of electronics; and by a rapid spread of “Metro” (urban) systems, in the developing as well as the developed countries. Anxious to avoid strangulation by road transport, smaller cities became able to afford an urban rail system because of the rebirth of the surface tramway as an economical but efficient alternative to the high cost of building a traditional underground metro. The modern tram, known as a light rail vehicle (LRV), can carry 100 or more passengers and run at up to 100 km/h (60 mph) where the environment allows.

In rural areas with good roads, the railway can no longer match the car, bus, or lorry, either in cost or convenience, for local transport. The result in Europe has been steady closure of local railways since World War II, executed most drastically in Britain; the survival of such lines depends on their being treated by national or local government as an essential social service that must be subsidized with public money. As early as 1970 the number of US long-haul passenger trains—15,000 or so in the late 1930s—had shrunk to barely 500 as almost all US railways ended their operation, unable to make it economic in the face of air competition. Preservation of a skeletal nationwide service required the creation in 1971 of a Federally subsidized corporation, Amtrak, to run it.

In Western Europe, population centres are much more closely spaced; there, modernization of track and signalling, plus new traction technology, have enabled sustained running speeds of 160 or even 200 km/h (100 to 125 mph). This has kept trains on historic main lines competitive in speed with planes and private cars for inter-city journeys of up to about 400 km (250 mi). These inter-city trains have been helped to retain enough traffic for viability by great improvements in comfort: advances in running gear and elimination of rail joints by long-welding has made passenger carriages very smooth-riding; and interiors are often air-conditioned and sound-insulated. Passenger service viability over more than 400 km (240 mi) has demanded technological developments permitting operation at much higher speeds. After the first new Japanese Bullet Trains had proved this possible in the mid-1960s, the French perfected their TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or High-Speed Train). The first new TGV railway, from Paris south to Lyons, was completed in 1983, carrying trains able to run continuously at 270 km/h (168 mph). By 1994 four more TGV lines had been completed, which extended high-speed train service from Paris to northern and western France, and deeper into the south; on these the continuous speed was lifted to 300 km/h (186 mph).

In a special test in May 1990, a TGV raised the world rail speed record to 515.3 km/h (320.3 mph); 17 years later in April 2007 the record was raised to 574.8 km/h (356 mph) by a TGV V150 (the Japanese Maglev trains hold the ultimate world record but do not run on conventional rails). In general use the French run the TGV at 300 km/h (186.4 mph), but a new line from Paris to Strasbourg (opening in June 2007) will have trains running at 320 km/h (198.8 mph). New TGV lines link Paris to the east and south from Lyon to the Mediterranean coast and the Spanish border. Spain adopted French TGV technology for its first high-speed line, a 300-km/h (180-mph) route from Madrid to Seville. The Italians and Germans have developed their own technology for the new high-speed inter-city railway lines they have already built and are extending. The European Union aims to see these new national lines interconnected to enable uninterrupted international high-speed rail travel. The first non-European country other than Japan to decide to build a new high-speed inter-city passenger railway is South Korea, which employs French TGV technology in its linking of the capital, Seoul, in the north-west of the country with Pusan in the south-west.

One of many debts the modern railway owes to electronics is its contribution to traction technology. The high power needed for an electric train to develop and sustain a speed of 300 km/h (180 mph) has become possible because, in a variety of ways, electronics has sharply reduced the bulk and weight of the power plant. Whereas in 1950 an advanced 4,000-hp electric locomotive weighed 88 tonnes, in 1994 an 8,000-hp locomotive of only 80 tonnes was operational in Switzerland. This compactness also enables a self-powered train, in which some or all carriages are powered, such as a city commuter train, to have all its traction equipment mounted underfloor, thereby maximizing passenger-carrying capacity. Performance has also been greatly enhanced by microprocessor fine control of all component functions. Electronics has revolutionized signalling and traffic control, making possible automatic location of trains, automatic processing of the resultant data, and automatic issuing of speed control commands to trains so that they a keep safe distance from each other. In a computerized traffic control centre covering a wide area, entry of a train's code can automatically set its route; and the computers will automatically advise controllers how best to modify the timetable plan when some trains run seriously late. Thanks to such developments, the world's first fully automated passenger railway with crewless trains, the Lille Metro in northern France, was inaugurated in 1989.

Most railways have had their national freight market share seriously reduced by competition. Where freight is available in sufficient and frequent quantity to fill trains travelling directly from source to destination—for example, coal transported from a mine to a coal-fired power station—the modern railway's competitiveness is generally challenged only by a parallel canal system. But road transport is cheaper, quicker, more flexible and often more reliable when freight moves in units insufficient for a full-distance trainload. The cost and the extra transit time involved in shunting individual wagons en route disadvantage the railway. Most merchandise, which is a rising proportion of freight in the developed world moves in smaller-than-trainload consignments. To adapt this to conveyance in trainloads, “intermodal” systems have developed. This entails creating a network of trans-shipment terminals, from which road transport radiates for the collection and delivery of containers, swap-bodies or road trailers, which at the terminals are transferred to or from trains for the main part of their journey. These terminals must be strategically located to generate sufficient traffic for interlinking by full trainloads. But in the developed world, the running costs of the trans-shipment terminals, which must be highly mechanized for road-rail transfer of loads, are making it hard for railways to offer a price-competitive but cost-covering intermodal service over transit distances of less than 800 km (500 mi).

See also Air Transport Industry; Channel Tunnel; Public Transport.