Steam powered locomotive
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The Train
Era
Richard
Trevithick built the first locomotive. A
locomotive is a vehicle with an engine that
runs on railroad tracks. It pulls other vehicles
behind it.
Trevithick's
locomotive could pull seventy people along ten
miles of railroad tracks. It was powered by a steam
engine.
1807 Steamboat
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A
steam engine runs on boiling water. A fire of coal
or wood heats the water, and the boiling water
makes steam. The force of the steam pushes a piston
up and down. Gears change the motion of the piston
into the round-and-round motion of the wheels on
tracks.
People
also put steam engines on boats. Some of the first
steamships traveled the Mississippi River. Instead
of turning wheels round and round, the engines
turned giant paddlewheels, like the one on this
boat. Later on steamships used
propellers.
Not
everyone liked the new ways of traveling. One
scientist thought that high speed train travel
could make your brains fall out. Some farmers
didn't like trains because the noise and smoke
scared cows and horses.
Still,
lots of people wanted to use trains and steamships
to go long distances.
In
1840, an Englishman started the first steamship
service across the Atlantic Ocean. Soon there were
other services carrying mail, people and cargo
across other oceans, too.
The
first railroad line to carry people opened in 1825.
After that railroad lines opened all over the
world. The French built one in 1830; the Germans,
in 1835. The United States built a railroad that
went all the way across the country, from New York
to Sacramento.
Railroads
and steamships changed the way people lived. People
could buy fresh milk and vegetables that the trains
carried from faraway places. They could visit
faraway places too, or live in the country and
"commute" into the city by train. Steamships made
it possible for millions of people to travel to
live in other countries.
Trains
also changed the way people traveled in
cities.
Before
trains, horses and mules pulled trolley cars on
tracks. These didn't go very fast. Sometimes the
horse pulled the car off the tracks by accident,
and everyone had to get out and push the car back
on again!
In
the late 1800s, electric railways began to replace
the horse trolleys. These were much faster. Now
people could live much farther from where they
worked, and commute by train.
Los Angeles Red Car
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Cities
all over the world built public transit rail
systems. London built the first underground system
in 1863; it was followed by Budapest, and then by
Boston and New York. In Los Angeles, a millionaire
named Henry Huntington built the Pacfic Electric
railway: the biggest public train electric railway
system in the world.
Pacific Electric railway map
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Some
of these systems were much bigger than the public
transit systems these cities have today. The reason
was simple: it was the only way people had of going
places quickly! Most people wanted to live near a
transit stop. Business people made lots of money
building transit systems to serve them.
But
even as new trains were built and city engineers
were laying down new miles of railroad track, a new
machine was being created that would completely
change the way people traveled all over again. The
car.
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