History of rail transport in Great Britain to 1830
| 17th century – 1830 | |
| Followed by | History of rail transport in Great Britain 1830–1922 |
|---|---|
The history of rail transport in Great Britain to 1830 covers the period up to the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first intercity passenger railway operated solely by steam locomotives. The earliest form of railways, horse-drawn wagonways, originated in Germany in the 16th century. However, the first use of steam locomotives was in Britain. The invention of wrought iron rails, together with Richard Trevithick's pioneering steam locomotive meant that Britain had the first true railways in the world.
The first recorded use of rail transport in Great Britain is Sir Francis Willoughby's Wollaton Wagonway in Nottinghamshire built between 1603 and 1604 to carry coal.
As early as 1671 railed roads were in use in Durham to ease the conveyance of coal; the first of these was the Tanfield Wagon Way. Many of these tramroads or wagon ways were built in the 17th. and 18th. centuries. They used simply straight and parallel rails of timber on which carts with simple flanged iron wheels were drawn by horses, enabling several wagons to be moved simultaneously.
These primitive rails were superseded in 1793 when the then superintendent of the Cromford Canal, Benjamin Outram, constructed a tramway with 'L'-shaped flanged cast-iron plate rails from the quarry at Crich: it was a little over a mile in length descending some 300 feet (91 m) and had a gauge of 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm). Wagons fitted with simple flangeless wheels were kept on the track by vertical ledges, or plates. Cast-iron rails were a significant improvement over wooden rails as they could support a greater weight and the friction between wheel and rail was lower, allowing longer trains to be moved by horses.
Outram's rails were superseded by William Jessop's cast iron edge rails where flanged wheels ran on the top edge of simple bar-shaped rails without the guiding ledges of Outram's flanged plate rails. The rails had been first employed in 1789 at Nanpantan at the Loughborough Charnwood Forest Canal. Such rails could be manufactured in 3 ft (914 mm) lengths. Jessop, a former pupil of John Smeaton, became a partner with Outram in 1790 in the latter's Butterley ironworks.
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