Text 1b The First Railroads

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The first railroads were not much like the railroads we know today. The word railroad was originally written as two words» rail road, to distinguish it from other kinds of roads. The first trails were made of wood and had grooves in which the flat wheels of the coal wagons fitted. But a horse could draw a much heavier load on such a railroad than he could draw on an ordinary highway. The surface was more even, there was much less friction.

The very first railroads In the United States were horse-power railroads. We do not know much about the very first ones, bat «a do know about one of the early ones, the Quincy tramway. It was built in 1826, between some granite quarries at Quincy tramway. It was built in 1826, between some granite quarries at Quincy, Massachusetts, and a wharf on the nearby Neponset River, and it was used la hauling stone. This road, which was three miles in length, had wagons which were pulled by horses.

The year after the Quinsy tramway was built, another short railroad was built in Pennsylvania, to haul coal to the canal over which it was shipped to Philadelphia.

The fact that a horse or a mule could dram a much heavier load on a railroad than on an ordinary highway led some men to believe that railroads could be built for general use in trade and travel.

But horse-power railroads did not last long. In 1839 George Stephenson, an English inventor and engineer, built a successful steam locomotive. Stephenson, and other inventors too, had built "steam-wagons" before 16ЗД, but the earliest locomotives, like the firs* steamboats, and the first automobiles, and the first airplanes, did not work very well. They were slow, and they broke down altogether too frequently. Many people did not believe it would ever be possible to build serviceable steam locomotives, and they thought the Inventors were foolish for spending so much time and thought in an effort to build them. But Stephenson showed that It could be done. His first successful locomotive he named the "Rocket". It is still preserved in a London museum. It was very small in comparison to the huge locomotives we have on our railroads today. It weighed only eight tons, not as much as many of the loaded trucks which today speed over our concrete highways, but it could go, it could dram a small train of loaded oars on the railroad that had been built between Manchester and Liverpool, and it reached! the unheard of speed of thirty miles an hour.

The invention of the 3 team locomotive made the railroad the most important of all means of transportation.

Exercises

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Text 1c How a Railway Operates

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When you first think of what the railroad does, you are most likely to think of how it carries people from place to place, taking men and women to their work, taking them on journeys, with their children, to see friends or relatives, or to visit places of interest, or to spend vacations in the country and at the seashores. That is, you think of the railroads as a means of travel. It is true that railroads are used a great deal for travel, but their most important use is not for travel, but to carry goods or commodities from place to place. Today, using our buses and airplanes and automobiles, it would be possible f r us to get along without passenger trains, but it would be exceedingly difficult to do without the busy freight trains, which pass to and fro day and night, throughout the year, on all our railroads.

It can be said that practically all of the things we use in our daily life are carried on a railroad before we get them. Our bread and meat, our butter, milk, and eggs, and all the rest of our food generally come to us, at least a part of the way, by railroad. The lumber, the stone, the bricks, the cement, out of which our houses are made, are shipped in a railroad freight oar.

Our furniture – chairs, tables, beds, dressers, and bookcases; our dishes, the pots and pans and skillets in our kitchens; the coal and oil we burn in our furnaces; our books and toys; the cotton and wool of which our clothing is made, and the clothing too – nearly everything we have was hauled on a railroad before it reached our homes. The railroads still remain our most important carrier of goods, although there are today other means of transportation which in recent years have greatly increased their share of the nation’s transportation burden.