First Railroad Research Paper

The first railroad was built in the 1820s. They were built to move goods and people across great distances. The earliest railways were built by quarries and mines and were built with wood that were short. In 1827, the first full size railways were built in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The first locomotive used on railways came from England in 1829. The first locomotive to ever carry people in the United States reached fifteen miles per hour and it carried thirty people. By 1840, railroad tracks in the United States reached almost three thousand miles. Iron rails were developed instead of wood and helped to carry the weight of large, steam powered locomotives. Other changes helped the growth of railroads between 1840 and 1860 including T-shaped rails that …show more content…
In 1887 is when air brakes for freight trains were invented. Today, we have automobiles, and a lot of them. In the United States in 2015, there were about 2,059 wrecks involving trains. 25% of crashes involving trains are caused because of a car running straight into them. A motorist is almost 20 times more likely to die in a crash involving a train, than involving another automobile. Most of the time people don’t really pay attention around railroad tracks because they’ve never seen a train there, but they have to realize that any time is train time. Also, when engineers see a person or a car in the tracks, all they can do is sound the warning horn and apply the emergency brakes, but the average train takes over a mile to come to a complete stop, which isn’t enough time if they see someone or something in their way. You could compare a car running over a pop can as a train running into a car- the results aren’t good. The average family car weighs around 3,000 pounds whereas the average train weighs around 12 million