RAILROAD

mode of land transportation in which flange-wheeled vehicles move over two parallel steel rails, or tracks, either by self-propulsion or by the propulsion of a locomotive. The principle of the railroad is that steel wheels on steel rails have an extremely low rolling friction and require relatively little motive force to move a heavy load. This free-rolling characteristic gives railroads a ratio of roughly one horsepower per gross ton. By contrast, highway semi-trailer trucks require about 10 horsepower per gross ton. Railroads also enjoy a 10 to 1 advantage in fuel economy and in employee productivity. Railroads were first constructed in European mines in the 16th century, one of the earliest being that used in the mines at Leberthal, Alsace, in about 1550. Mining railroads in England date from about 1603 or 1604. From the inception of railroads cars have been built with flanged wheels, which keep them on the track and make them self-steering. Early railroad cars had flanges on either the inside or the outside, but in modern design flanges are on the inside of the wheels. Another primitive type of railroad, called a plateway, had vertical flanges on the track and used cars with ordinary wheels. This allowed the vehicles to travel on either rails or ordinary roads, but the plateways presented great difficulties when it came to building switches; the last plateway was constructed in about 1815. The earliest mining railroad cars were pulled by men or horses, and it was not until the first steam locomotive appeared in 1804 in Wales that the modern railroad emerged. Early locomotives were handicapped by the weakness of iron rails and the inefficiency and unreliability of their apparatus, but improvements in track materials and design and the technical advances made by such engineers as George Stephenson soon made railroads practical. The Stockton and Darlington Railway, which began operations in September 1825, was the first to carry both freight and passengers. It was followed by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, which, with the introduction of the locomotive Rocket, built by Stephenson and his son, Robert, can be considered the beginning of the railroad era. By 1841 there were more than 1,300 miles of track in Britain. Railroads grew quickly in the 19th century, becoming a major force in the economic and social life of nations throughout the world. It was also responsible for many technical advances. Most continental European countries adhered to Great Britain's track width, or gauge, of 4 feet, 8.5 inches (1.435 metres) between the inside faces of the rails. In Russia and Finland, however, a gauge of 5 feet was used, while in Spain and Portugal it was 5 feet 6 inches. In the United States, which adopted Great Britain's standard gauge, John Stephens built the first steam locomotive and demonstrated it on the lawn of his home in Hoboken, N.J., in 1825. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first railroad company in the United States, was chartered two years later. At first all locomotives were steam powered, but by 1900 electric engines were being used in specialized service. By the middle of the 20th century diesel-electric locomotives had replaced steam on most railroads. A variety of railroad cars have been developed to transport freight and passengers. Freight cars (called goods wagons in Britain), include closed boxcars, open-top gondola and hopper cars, and flatcars. Cars designed to carry special freight include tank cars, livestock cars, closed hopper cars, and refrigerator cars. Passenger cars include coaches, which have individual seats or benches; dining cars that provide meal service on long-distance routes; and sleepers, couches that convert into beds for overnight travel. George Pullman, whose name became synonymous with sleepers (especially in the United States), leased his first car to the railroads in 1859. Railroads reached their maturity in the early 20th century, as trains carried the bulk of land freight and passenger traffic in the industrialized countries of the world. By the mid-20th century, however, they had lost their preeminent position. The private automobile had replaced the railroad for short passenger trips, while the airplane had usurped it for long-distance travel, especially in the United States. Railroads remained effective, however, for transporting people in high-volume situations, such as commuting between the centres of large cities and their suburbs, and medium-distance travel of less than about 300 miles between urban centres. Although railroads have lost much of the general-freight-carrying business to semi-trailer trucks, they remain the best means of transporting large volumes of such bulk commodities as coal, grain, chemicals, and ore over long distances. The development of containerization has made the railroads more effective in handling finished merchandise at relatively high speeds. In addition, the introduction of piggyback flatcars, in which truck trailers are transported long distances on specially-designed cars, has allowed railroads to regain some of the business lost to trucking. For international statistical data on railroads, see the Britannica World Data section in the Britannica Book Of The Year. mode of land transportation in which flange-wheeled vehicles move over two parallel steel rails, or tracks, either by self-propulsion or by the propulsion of a locomotive. With the 20th century the railroad reached maturity. Railroad building continued on a fairly extensive scale in some parts of the world, notably in Canada, China, the Soviet Union, and Africa. But in most of the more developed countries construction tapered off until the second half of the century. Then it was revived, first by the demand for new urban transit railroads or the expansion of existing systems and, from 1970 onward, by the creation in Europe and Japan of new high-speed intercity passenger lines. The technological emphasis shifted to faster operations, more amenities for passengers, larger and more specialized freight cars, safer and more sophisticated signaling and traffic-control systems, and new types of motive power. Railroads in many of the more advanced countries also found themselves operating in a new climate of intense competition with other forms of transport. In the first half of the 20th century, advances in railroad technology and operating practice were limited. One of the most far-reaching was the perfection of diesel traction as a more efficient alternative to steam and as a more cost-effective option than electrification where train movements were not intensive. Another was the move from mechanical signaling and telephonic traffic-control methods to electrical systems that enabled centralized control of considerable traffic areas. Also significant was the first use of continuously welded rail, a major contribution to improved vehicle riding and to longer track life and reduced maintenance costs. From roughly 1960 onward the developed world's railroads, pressed hard by highway and air competition, progressed swiftly into a new technological age. Steam traction had been eliminated from North America and disappeared from western Europe's national railroads when British Railways dispensed with it in 1968. By 1990 steam power survived in significantthough steadily decreasingnumbers only in China, in parts of Africa, and on the Indian subcontinent; but in China the world's only remaining steam locomotive factory switched to electric locomotive manufacture in 1991. Diesel-electric traction had become far more reliable and cheaper to run, though electric traction's performance characteristics and operating costs were superior. But up to mid-century only high-traffic routes could optimize electric traction's economy, not least because of the heavy capital cost of the fixed works required to set up the traction current supply system. In the second half of the century, new technology achieved a steady reduction in electrification's initial cost and a rapid advance in electric traction's power and performance relative to locomotive size and weight. Particularly influential on both counts was the successful French pioneering of electrification with a direct supply of high-voltage alternating current at the industrial frequency. This stimulated particularly large electrification programs in China, Japan, South Korea, some eastern European countries, the Soviet Union, and India in particular. Those railroads already electrified to a considerable extent either kept their existing system or, with the perfection of locomotives able to work with up to four different types of traction voltagewhether alternating or direct currentadopted the high-voltage system for new electrification. Another stimulus for electrification came with the sharp rise in oil prices and the realization of the risks of dependence on imported oil as fuel that followed the 1973 Middle East crisis. By 1990 only a minority of western European trunk rail routes were still worked by diesel traction. Few industries stood to benefit more than the railroads from the rapid advances in electronics, which found a wealth of applications from real-time operations monitoring and customer services to computer-based traffic control. The potential of solid-state devices for miniaturizing and enhancing on-board components was another key factor in electric traction development. The latest technologies were deployed in the integrated design of high-performance track and vehicles, both freight and passenger, and for development of high-speed passenger systems to challenge air transport and the huge growth of private auto travel over improved national highways. Intermodal techniques were developed to keep a rail component in the trunk haul of high-rated freight, the source or destination of which could no longer be directly rail-served economically. The cost of maintaining high-quality track was reduced by the emergence of a wide range of mobile machinery capable of every task, from complete renewal of a length of line to ballast cleaning or packing, ultrasonic rail flaw detection, and electronic checking of track alignment. At the same time, new trunk route construction was considerable in the developing countries. It was most extensive in China, India, and the Soviet Union, where the railroad remained the prime mover of people and freight. Increase of existing route capacity by multitracking and creation of new lines was essential for bulk movement of raw materials to expanding industries and to foster regional socioeconomic development. Between 1950 and 1990 China doubled the route-length of its national system to some 33,500 miles (54,000 kilometres); a further 1,000 miles of new lines were proposed in the railroad's 199095 five-year plan. Many of the new routes, some more than 500 miles long, were built primarily for movement of coal from the country's western fields to industry and ports in the east. From 1950 to 1990 Soviet Union Railwaysthen the world's largest unitary railroad but since partitioned into individual state railwaysincreased route length from 71,000 to more than 90,000 miles. Extensions included a second Trans-Siberian line, the 1,954-mile Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM). Begun in the late 1970s and for almost half its length threading permafrost territory where winter temperatures can reach -76 F (-60 C), BAM carried the first trains throughout its entire length in October 1989. In India new trunk route construction continued in the 1990s. Construction of new railroads for high-speed passenger trains was pioneered by Japan. In 1957 a government study concluded that the existing line between Tokyo and Osaka, built to the historic Japanese track gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (1,067 millimetres), was incapable of upgrading to the needs of the densely populated and industrialized Tokaido coastal belt between the two cities. In April 1959 work began on a standard 4-feet-8.5-inch (1,435-millimetre), 320-mile Tokyo-Osaka railway engineered for the exclusive use of streamlined electric passenger trains. Running initially at a top speed of 130 miles per hour (mile/h; 210 kilometres per hour), these trains were until 1981 the world's fastest. Opened in October 1964, this first Shinkansen (Japanese: New Trunk Line) was an immediate commercial success. By March 1975 it had been extended via a tunnel under the Kammon-Kaikyo Strait to Hakata in Kyushu island, to complete a 664-mile high-speed route from Tokyo. A 1973 government plan to build up to 12 more Shinkansen made no immediate progress chiefly because of economic problems arising from that year's global energy crisis and the worsening losses of the subsequently dismantled Japanese National Railways. However, two further Shinkansen, the Tohoku and Joetsu, were inaugurated in 1982; and three more extensions were begun in 1991. Shinkansen top speed has been raised since the inauguration of the Tokyo-Osaka line; it is 150 mile/h on both Tohoku and Joetsu, and on one stretch of the latter it reaches 171 mile/h. Except for its automatic speed-control signaling system, the first Shinkansen was essentially a derivation of the traction, vehicle, and infrastructure technology of the 1960s. France's first high-speed, or Train Grande Vitesse (TGV), line from Paris to Lyon, partially opened in September 1981 and commissioned throughout in October 1983, was the product of integrated infrastructure and train design based on more than two decades of research. Dedication of the new line to a single type of high-powered, lightweight train-set (a permanently coupled, invariable set of vehicles with inbuilt traction) enabled engineering of the infrastructure with gradients as steep as 3.5 percent, thereby minimizing earthwork costs, without detriment to maintenance of a 168-mile/h maximum speed. A second high-speed line, the TGV-Atlantique, from Paris to junctions near Le Mans and Tours with existing main lines serving western France, was opened in 198990. This was built with slightly easier ruling gradients, allowing maximum operating speed to be raised to 186 mile/h. In 1991 three further TGV lines were being built. The French government approved eventual construction of 14 more under a master plan that would extend TGV service from Paris to all major French cities, interconnect key provincial centres, and plug the French TGV network into the high-speed systems emerging in neighbouring countries. The latter included Britain, to which a rail tunnel under the English Channel would be opened in mid-1993. This tunnel railway would be directly connected to a new TGV route between Paris and Brussels, but a dedicated high-speed line from the English tunnel mouth to London for TGV trains between that city and Paris and Brussels would not be completed until the 21st century. The Netherlands government approved plans for new lines to connect its western group of cities with both the Paris-London-Brussels high-speed triangle and the high-speed intercity network being created in Germany. In 1991 Germany completed new Hannover-Wrzburg and Mannheim-Stuttgart lines engineered to carry both 174-mile/h passenger and 100-mile/h merchandise freight trains. Further new line construction was under way and planned, notably in Germany's most heavily trafficked corridor, CologneFrankfurt am Main, and between Hannover and Berlin. In Italy the last stretch of a high-speed line from Rome to Florence, designed for 186-mile/h top speed, was finished in 1992; the first segment had been opened in 1977, but progress thereafter had been hampered by funding uncertainties and severe geologic problems encountered in the project's tunneling. After some controversy over finance, a mixed holding company of the national railway and European banks was established in 1990 to extend the high-speed line north from Florence to Milan and south from Rome to Naples and Battipaglia and to build a new high-speed west-east route from Turin through Milan to Venice. In 1992 Spain completed a new 186-mile/h line between Madrid and Seville, built not to the country's traditional broad 5-feet-6-inch (1,676-millimetre) gauge but to the European standard. It is operated by trains of French TGV design. Outside Europe, South Korea and Taiwan were firmly committed to construction of new high-speed passenger lines at the start of the 1990s. Lines were planned to run between Seoul and Pusan and between Taipei and Kao-hsiung. Several other countries, including China, had published proposals for high-speed intercity projects. From the 1970s onward such schemes were advanced in a number of U.S. states, but by 1990 the only one close to surmounting all political, environmental, and financial hurdles was Texas. There a private enterprise consortium, Texas TGV, was franchised in 1991 by the state's High Speed Rail Authority to develop the first Dallas-Houston segment of a 200-mile/h Dallas/Fort WorthHoustonSan AntonioAustin network based on French TGV technology. In Canada the Quebec and Ontario governments were in 1991 studying the feasibility of a private enterprise proposal for a TGV-based, high-speed system connecting the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. In the last quarter of the century the gulf between the technology and efficiency of the industrialized and developing nations' railroads was widening. In some African countries the national railroads were close to collapse because of the lack of adequate funds for maintenance, let alone asset renewals. Additional reading Current developments in railway transportation are documented and interpreted in Jane's World Railways (annual). The history of railway technology is presented in Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Railways: Past, Present & Future (1982); George H. Drury (comp.), The Historical Guide to North American Railroads, updated ed. (1991); Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, Hear the Train Blow: A Pictorial Epic of America in the Railroad Age (1952); Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Railways of the Twentieth Century (1983); and Gustav Reder, The World of Steam Locomotives (1974; originally published in German, 1974). Modern traction systems are the subject of Vilas D. Nene, Advanced Propulsion Systems for Urban Rail Vehicles (1985); and H.I. Andrews, Railway Traction: The Principles of Mechanical and Electrical Railway Traction (1986). Geoffrey Freeman Allen