Railroads turned distance into a timetable. In two centuries they went from a wager about hauling iron in Wales to bullet trains and a line across the roof of the world, and along the way they decided what time it was. These stories cover the engines, the routes, the people and the days that set the course.
Every tile in a Railroads game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Locomotives
nine stories
1The first railway journey, and an unsettled bet
On the tile: Penydarren1804
Two ironmasters in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, are said to have staked 500 guineas on whether a steam engine could haul ten tons of iron down the Penydarren tramroad. On February 21, 1804, Richard Trevithick's unnamed engine did it, and the world's first railway journey was underway: ten tons in five wagons, seventy men riding along the whole nine miles to the canal, at nearly five miles an hour. On the way back a bolt sheared, and whether the wager was ever settled is not known.
Before rails carried people, they carried coal. Puffing Billy was put together in 1813 and 1814 at Wylam Colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne by a colliery viewer, an enginewright and a blacksmith, and it spent its working life dragging coal wagons toward the river. It ran until 1862, when the colliery owner lent it to a museum in London. It is still there, the oldest surviving steam locomotive anywhere, older than nearly every railway it helped bring about.
3First locomotive on a U.S. commercial track, and too heavy
On the tile: Stourbridge1829
The Delaware and Hudson Canal Company sent a deputy engineer, Horatio Allen, to England to buy locomotives, and on August 8, 1829, one of them stood ready at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Allen took the first trip alone, since plenty of onlookers expected the machine to kill whoever rode it. The Stourbridge Lion crossed the bridge, went out of sight, and came back with Allen riding it backward. Then the company decided the light wooden rails would not stand up to the eight-ton engine, and it went into storage.
Peter Cooper's small engine carried Baltimore and Ohio directors to Ellicott's Mills in August 1830 at ten to fourteen miles an hour, fast enough to sell the railroad on steam. The story goes that on the way back it raced a horse-drawn car, pulled ahead, then lost its steam when a blower belt slipped off a pulley. The B and O Railroad Museum, which keeps a replica, says plainly that the race was never substantiated by any document.
The Best Friend of Charleston was the first locomotive built in the United States for public service, and it made its debut on Christmas Day 1830, carrying passengers out of Charleston at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Six months later an enslaved fireman closed the boiler's safety valve while the engine stood at a platform. The boiler burst when it moved again, killing him and injuring others. The engine was rebuilt and renamed the Phoenix.
The two locomotives that faced each other at Promontory Summit in 1869 did not survive; both were sold for scrap early in the next century. So when replicas were wanted, a California engineering firm started with nothing but an 1870 locomotive handbook and micrometer measurements taken from enlargements of the 1869 photographs. Two years went into more than seven hundred drawings. The new Jupiter and 119 were commissioned at Promontory on May 10, 1979, the anniversary.
Running London to Edinburgh without stopping meant asking one crew to work eight hours straight, so the railway built a tender with a passage through the middle of it. A fresh driver and fireman could walk back from the train, squeeze past the water tank and take over at speed. Flying Scotsman, built at Doncaster in 1923, pulled that first nonstop service on May 1, 1928, and in 1934 became the first locomotive in Britain officially clocked at 100 miles an hour.
Nigel Gresley shaped his A4 locomotives in a wind tunnel, hunting speed the way an aircraft designer would, and fitted them with an exhaust system that let the boiler breathe. In 1938 the one named for a duck reached 126 miles an hour. No steam locomotive has beaten that mark since. Mallard now stands in the Great Hall of the National Railway Museum in York, blue casing intact, holding a record older than most of the people looking at it.
Union Pacific ordered twenty-five of these giants, the first delivered in 1941. One runs 133 feet long and weighs about 1.2 million pounds, with sixteen driving wheels beneath it in two groups, because the frame is hinged so the whole machine can bend around a curve. No. 4014 sat in a museum in Pomona, California, for decades until Union Pacific reacquired it in 2013, spent years rebuilding it, and put it back in steam in May 2019.
Half a century before the canal, a railroad crossed the Isthmus of Panama: 47 miles of track finished in 1855, built to carry gold rush travelers between the Atlantic and the Pacific without the long sail around South America. It cost about eight million dollars and, by one estimate, six thousand lives, most of them lost to disease rather than accident. That was a staggering price for 47 miles of track, and the line was profitable from the day it opened.
No railway had climbed a high mountain range when Carl Ritter von Ghega started laying one over the Semmering pass in Austria in 1848. Six years of work put viaducts across the valleys and tunnels up to nearly a mile long through the rock, cut and stacked without machinery. Trains have run on it since 1854. In 1998 the Semmering became the first railway anywhere named a World Heritage Site.
London's answer to its jammed streets was to dig a trench along them, roof it over, and run trains underneath. The Metropolitan Railway opened on January 10, 1863, linking Paddington, Euston, King's Cross and Farringdon, and more than thirty thousand people packed the stations that first day. The trains were pulled by steam locomotives, so the air down there reeked of coke and gas and crowds. It worked anyway, and the London Underground grew out of it.
A train reached the summit of Mount Washington for the first time on July 3, 1869, on the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway. A toothed rack runs between the rails and a gear under the engine bites into it, which is how a train holds its place where plain wheels would simply spin. On the pitch called Jacob's Ladder the track tilts more than 37 percent, enough that riders at the front of the car sit about fourteen feet above those at the back.
To reach a hill town in the Himalayas, engineers did not force a straight line; they let the railway double back on itself. Opened in 1881, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway covers about 55 miles of two-foot-gauge track between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling, using six zigzag reverses and three loops, where the track curls over its own path to gain height. It passes through Ghoom at 7,408 feet. Its famous B-class steam engines have been kept in their original form, and UNESCO lists the line as a World Heritage Site.
The first Orient Express pulled out of Paris on October 4, 1883, from the station now called Paris-Est, bound for Constantinople in considerable style. It did not get there. The rails gave out in Romania, so passengers changed to another train for Bulgaria and finished the trip by ship across the Black Sea. Only in 1889, when the missing links were built, could the train carry travelers the whole way on its own wheels.
Grand Central Terminal hides its size. From the street it is a building with a clock; below it lie 44 platforms and 67 tracks on two underground levels, 41 tracks upstairs and 26 down. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest railroad station in the world by number of platforms. It was built between 1903 and 1913, covers about 48 acres, and moves roughly 125,000 commuters on an ordinary day.
The Tokaido Shinkansen opened on October 1, 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Olympic Games opened on October 10. Its Series 0 trains were the first in the world to run in commercial service at 210 kilometers an hour, roughly 130 miles an hour, over a new line of more than 500 kilometers between Tokyo and Osaka. The trip that had taken six and a half hours by express now took four. It has carried more than 100 million passengers a year for many years, with an excellent safety record.
Shinjuku Station in Tokyo moves more passengers than any other station on earth. Guinness World Records counted an average of 2,704,703 people a day passing through it in 2022, and even that was down about 20 percent from before the pandemic. The count takes in subway riders along with the railroads, because several operating companies share the building, JR East, Keio, Odakyu, Toei Subway and Tokyo Metro among them, each with its own gates and platforms.
Theodore Judah surveyed a way over the Sierra Nevada himself, with a small crew, finding a crossing at Donner Pass that never climbed more steeply than 110 feet to the mile. Others had called the crossing impossible. He then talked Congress into passing the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. A year later, at odds with the investors who had taken over his railroad, he crossed the Isthmus of Panama hunting new backers, caught yellow fever, and died in New York at 37.
In June 1867 thousands of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific put down their tools at once. Pamphlets written in Chinese had gone around the camps, and the demands were plain: forty dollars a month, shorter shifts inside the tunnels, and a workday cut from eleven hours to ten. Charles Crocker stopped the supply wagons, food included, and brought the sheriff and a party of deputized men up to the camps. After eight days the crews went back to work, promised nothing better than a fine.
Elijah McCoy left Canada for Edinburgh at fifteen and apprenticed five years as a mechanical engineer, coming home a master mechanic. In 1872 he patented a cup that used steam pressure to feed oil to a locomotive's moving parts, so an engine no longer had to stop to be greased. He held more than fifty patents by the time he died in 1929. The story goes that engineers asked for the real McCoy rather than a copy, though the Canadian Encyclopedia judges that origin for the phrase unlikely.
A train that has left the station cannot be reached, which is a dangerous way to run a railroad on single track. In 1887 Granville Woods patented a way to pass telegraph messages between moving trains and the stations, drawing on the static charge in the wires already strung beside the rails. Dispatchers could finally tell where their trains were. Woods earned close to sixty patents, a great many of them aimed at making the railroad safer.
The Pullman Company was the largest employer of Black Americans in the country, and its sleeping car porters worked long months on wages that assumed tips would cover the gap, buying their own uniforms and meals along the way. In 1925 they founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and elected A. Philip Randolph, who did not work for Pullman, as president. Twelve years later the company signed: better pay, fewer hours, a hearing before any firing.
Stopping a train once meant brakemen out on the cars, turning a wheel at each end to set the handbrakes and jumping from one car to the next while the train ran. It was uneven work and slow. George Westinghouse took out his own air brake patent in April 1869 and put every car's brakes under the engineer's hand, worked by a line of compressed air. He was twenty-two when he started the company that built them.
A storm washed out the Honey Creek trestle in Boone County, Iowa, on the night of July 6, 1881, and Kate Shelley, fifteen and living beside the tracks, knew a passenger train was due. Her lantern snuffed out partway, so she crawled the 673 feet of the Des Moines River bridge on her hands and knees, lit only by lightning, and reached Moingona in time for the train to be stopped. A high bridge near Boone carries her name.
John Luther Jones, known as Casey, was running the Illinois Central's Cannonball in the early hours of April 30, 1900, when he came on a stalled freight at Vaughan, Mississippi. He stayed with the brake. He was the only person killed, and his passengers came through without serious injury. Wallace Saunders, who cleaned engines at the Canton roundhouse and knew him, put the wreck into a ballad, and the song traveled further than the man ever had.
The song says John Henry outworked a steam drill with a hammer and died doing it. Folklorists and historians have spent a century trying to settle which tunnel, which year, and whether he lived at all. The usual candidate is the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia, started in 1870, where crews bored a mile through the mountain rather than lay thirteen miles around it. No documentary proof of the contest has ever been found, and the railroad said its tunnel records burned.
The Baltimore and Ohio broke ground on July 4, 1828, and the man chosen to lay the first stone was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, by then the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. He said of it: "I consider this among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence." The stone was the cornerstone of the Carrollton Viaduct, the first masonry railroad bridge built in the United States, finished in 1829 and still carrying trains.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway could not decide between stationary engines hauling trains on ropes and locomotives that carried themselves, so in October 1829 it put up 500 pounds for the best engine and ran a nine-day trial at Rainhill. About ten entries came down to five that showed up, one of them a machine called Cycloped, powered by a horse walking on a belt. Rocket was the only engine to complete the trials.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on September 15, 1830, with the Duke of Wellington aboard and crowds lining the route. At a stop near Newton-le-Willows, William Huskisson, a member of Parliament who had worked hard to get the line approved, stepped down to shake the duke's hand and did not notice Rocket coming up the next track. He was struck, and died that evening. The first modern intercity railway opened for business anyway.
4A stolen locomotive and the first Medals of Honor
On the tile: Andrews Raid1862
In April 1862 a civilian scout named James Andrews led a party of Union soldiers in plain clothes deep into Georgia, where they stole a Confederate locomotive, the General, at Big Shanty and ran it north, cutting telegraph wires as they went. They ran out of fuel short of Chattanooga and were captured. Andrews and several of the raiders were executed. Six survivors became the first soldiers in the United States Army to receive the Medal of Honor.
Abraham Lincoln's funeral train left Washington on April 21, 1865, and the burial in Springfield, Illinois, came thirteen days later: 1,654 miles through 180 cities and seven states. The scheduled stops were printed in the newspapers so that people could gather. About a million and a half Americans filed past the coffin, and more than seven million saw the train or the hearse pass, standing out in fields and at crossings to watch it go by.
The Union Pacific had laid eight and a half miles of track in a single day and boasted the feat could not be matched. Charles Crocker waited until the gap between the two railroads was too short for a rematch, then turned his crews loose on April 28, 1869. Eight Irish rail handlers muscled the iron into place, with more than four hundred Chinese workers spiking, bolting and tamping behind them. Between dawn and sundown they laid ten miles and fifty-six feet. The record has never been equaled.
Four ceremonial spikes were presented at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, among them a solid gold one engraved with the names of the railroad's officers and directors. Those were only tapped into a polished laurel tie and lifted out again. The spike that counted was an ordinary iron one, wired to the telegraph so the country could hear the blows. Leland Stanford swung at it and missed. Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific missed as well. A railroad worker stepped in and drove it home, and the operator sent one word: done.
Every town used to keep its own noon, which turned a railroad timetable into a nest of small contradictions. William F. Allen, who edited the Travelers' Official Railway Guide, proposed five zones, and on November 18, 1883, the railroads simply adopted them. Station clocks were reset as standard noon arrived, so in a good many places the clock struck noon twice that day. Cities followed the railroads, and eventually so did the rest of the world.
The Canadian Pacific closed its last gap at Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885. The company was out of money and could not afford a splashy celebration, so a handful of directors and company men gathered on a dull gray morning instead. Donald Smith, the eldest of the four directors present, swung at the ceremonial spike and bent it so badly that it had to be replaced. He posed again, and the camera clicked as he landed a good blow. The photographs are among the most famous in Canadian history.