The early history of the United States goes hand in hand with the early years of the railroad. Who was the first to build a small prototype of a steam locomotive? William Murdoch in 1784exactly one year later treaty of Paris The Revolutionary War ended. The first working steam engine, Richard Trevithick’s Coalbrookdale LocomotiveBuilt in 1802, and the world’s first public steam railway, belonged to George Stephenson locomotion number 1Was built in 1825.
Early railroad development occurred largely in the UK (Murdoch, Trevithick and Stephenson all built their locomotives there), and early American locomotives were British imports. However, British engines soon began to have difficulty running on American railroads. British railways were “the model of a civil engineering enterprise”, Happen,
…carefully graded roadways, ample tracks, and grand bridges and tunnels to overcome natural obstacles. Easy grades and generous curves were the rule. Because capital was abundant, distances were short and traffic density was high, the British could afford to build luxurious railways.
All this engineering came at a cost: early British railroads cost $179,000 per mile to build (although part of that was the cost of the land). But because of Britain’s high population density, traffic was greater, routes could be shorter, and so costs could be recovered.
Conditions were very different in America. Distances were large, populations were small, and financing for large engineering projects was in short supply. As a result, American railroads developed differently than British railroads. Rather than being straight, American railroads had winding routes that followed the curve of the land, and avoided tunnels, grading, or expensive civil engineering work. Instead of expensive stone bridges, wooden bridges were used on American railroads. Locomotives in America needed to deal with steeper grades and much less strong track than in Britain, and thus they needed to be designed differently.
An interesting example of the different railroad conditions in the US and Britain is a railroad technology that was popular for a short time for early American railroads: strap rail track. British railroads were built with solid iron tracks, which were effective as well as expensive. In contrast, strap rails were made by adding a thin plate of iron on top of a piece of wood. This greatly reduced the amount of iron needed to build rail track – whereas British track required 91 tons of iron per mile, strap rail required only 25 tons.
This style of construction was much cheaper than British iron rail, at only $20,000–30,000 per mile, 1/6 to 1/9th the cost of British rail. Building strap rails replaced comparatively precious iron (which was in short supply in early America) with wood, which was widely available. It is estimated that by 1840 2/3 of the 3,000 miles of railway in America was strap rail track.
But this austerity was not without results. Despite being cheaper to build than solid iron tracks, strap rail lines decayed rapidly, and their maintenance costs were incredibly high, more than twice as high per mile as iron rails (Material Culture 192). Strap rail lines were typically laid directly on the ground, rather than being built over crushed rock (which would allow proper drainage). Fungus, insects and moisture soon began to act upon the wooden tracks and after a few seasons they became “a dismal ruin”. And strap rail lines were dangerous: the repeated collisions of locomotive wheels could bend the iron straps at the wooden ends, in some cases derailing the trains.
Due to these various shortcomings, strap rails became less and less popular for commercial railroads in America. In 1847, New York banned the use of strap rails for public railroads, and gave existing railways three years to convert to iron rails. After 1850, new commercial installation of strap rail was rare, and by 1860 most of the existing mileage had been replaced with solid iron rail.
However, strap rail continued to be in some use in other areas. Horse-drawn streetcars, which began appearing in American cities in the 1850s, often used strap rail track. The comparative lightness of streetcars made the negative aspects of strap rail less acute, and until electric streetcars began to replace horse-drawn cars in the 1880s, strap rail was a popular choice for streetcar lines. Strap rails were also sometimes used on private, industrial railways and several such lines were built in the 1860s and 1870s. However, here too, the strap rail eventually went out of fashion.
A cheaper type of wooden railway was also sometimes built for logging railroads to transport cut timber: the pole road. A pole road was nothing more than two rows of logs, laid parallel on the ground, and thinned so that one log could fit into the other. The “locomotive”, little more than modified agricultural steam tractors, would run on flanged wheels wrapped around the pillars at the top of these pillars. Like strap rails, pole roads were cheap to build but destroyed incredibly quickly, and by the end of the 19th century they had become increasingly rare.
The history of technological development emerges from a complex interaction between people working to solve a particular problem (such as moving passengers and goods from one place to another) and the area in which that problem exists. The particular constraints present in early 19th-century America – small capital, limited access to iron, low population density – shaped the development of railway technology here, leading to technological turning points such as the rise and fall of the strapping railroads.