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July 15 – Sidney Breese, U.S. senator from Illinois known as the "father of the Illinois Central Railroad" (d. 1878). July 29 – George Bradshaw, English cartographer, printer and publisher and the originator of the railway timetable (d. 1853).
1720: A railroad was reportedly used in the construction of the French fortress in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, Canada. [1]1764: Between 1762 and 1764, at the close of the French and Indian War, a gravity railroad (mechanized tramway) (Montresor's Tramway) was built by British military engineers up the steep riverside terrain near the Niagara River waterfall's escarpment at the Niagara Portage ...
Trains became a national medium for the modernization of backward regions and a leading advocate of this approach was the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine. One writer hoped that railways might improve the lot of "populations two or three centuries behind their fellows" and eliminate "the savage instincts born of isolation and misery."
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (reporting mark BO) was the first common carrier railroad and the oldest railroad in the United States. It operated as B&O from 1830 until 1987, when it was merged into the Chessie System ; its lines are today controlled by CSX Transportation .
1795–96 & 1799–1804 or '05 — In 1795, Charles Bulfinch, the architect of Boston's famed State House first employed a temporary funicular railway with specially designed dumper cars to decapitate 'the Tremont's' Beacon Hill summit and begin the decades long land reclamation projects which created most of the real estate in Boston's lower elevations of today from broad mud flats, such as ...
Trains average speeds of 160 km/h (100 mph) due to congested shared urban tracks, with top speeds of 210 km/h. 1967 – Automatic train operation introduced. 1968 – British Rail ran its last final steam-driven mainline train, named the Fifteen Guinea Special, after of a programmed withdrawal of steam during 1962–68. It marked the end of 143 ...
Congress added railroad worker safety laws throughout the 20th century. [118]: 16–25 Significant among this legislation is the Federal Railroad Safety Act of 1970, which gave the FRA broad responsibilities over all aspects of rail safety, and expanded the agency's authority to cover all railroads, both interstate and intrastate. [123]
George Hudson (1800–1871) became the most important railway promoter of his time. [2] Called the "railway king" of Britain, Hudson amalgamated numerous short lines and set up a " Clearing House " in 1842 which rationalized the service by providing uniform paperwork and standardized methods for apportioning fares while transferring passengers ...