Railways

Although railway lines, plateways, waggon-ways or tramways had been used in Britain since the seventeenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth century that ‘modern railways’ were developed. This was when the locomotive — a steam-engine on wheels — was invented, to haul carriages along a track. It took the early locomotive designers some time to solve the technical problems but once they had been overcome, the potential of the ‘modern’ railway was quickly seen by businessmen and industrialists and the growth of the railway network between 1825 and 1875 was astounding.