Richard Trevethick's Locomotive: Changing The Transportation Industry

With the invention of the locomotive in 1808, railways were changed greatly. The locomotive allowed for a quicker way for transportation as well as setting the bar for the different means of transportation to keep up with. Over time, changes to the locomotive allowed for a new and improved locomotive. Traveling on the railroads was as fast as any other means of transportation. Although there are small technical errors like scheduling, the locomotive changed the train industry like no other tool has done so before. Richard Trevethick introduced the world’s first successful locomotive in England, 1808. Later on George Stephenson put his touch on the steam engine in London, 1814. Stephenson’s locomotive was the first to be seen on the railways as Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer explain. “This machine was able to pull 30 tons of material more rapidly than a horse-drawn cart. Stephenson built many more engines, his most famous being the Rocket, which ran at the impressive speed of 36 miles per hour” (Schlager 609). Stephenson took Trevethick’s locomotive and built off of what was already an amazing development. With more speed allowed for the transportation of goods as well as …show more content…
Ravindra Ahuja from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida explains how locomotive scheduling can be fixed. “In the locomotive scheduling problem (or the locomotive-assignment problem), we must assign a consist (a set of locomotives) to each train with a pre-planned schedule to provide trains with sufficient locomotive power to pull the train from its origin to its destination” (503). This problem is still one that faces the locomotive today. Although scheduling has gotten better, there are still some people who feel that there can be more done to change this. This is a problem that will take some time to fix and cannot be done right