Early Rails
The first recorded use of rail transport in Great Britain is Sir Francis Willoughby's Wollaton Wagonway in Nottinghamshire built between 1603 and 1604 to carry coal.
As early as 1671 railed roads were in use in Durham to ease the conveyance of coal; the first of these was the Tanfield Wagon Way. Many of these tramroads or wagon ways were built in the 17th. and 18th. centuries. They used simply straight and parallel rails of timber on which carts with simple flanged iron wheels were drawn by horses, enabling several wagons to be moved simultaneously.
These primitive rails were superseded in 1793 when the then superintendent of the Cromford Canal, Benjamin Outram, constructed a tramway with 'L'-shaped flanged cast-iron plate rails from the quarry at Crich: it was a little over a mile in length descending some 300 feet (91 m) and had a gauge of 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm). Wagons fitted with simple flangeless wheels were kept on the track by vertical ledges, or plates. Cast-iron rails were a significant improvement over wooden rails as they could support a greater weight and the friction between wheel and rail was lower, allowing longer trains to be moved by horses.
Outram's rails were superseded by William Jessop's cast iron edge rails where flanged wheels ran on the top edge of simple bar-shaped rails without the guiding ledges of Outram's flanged plate rails. The rails had been first employed in 1789 at Nanpantan at the Loughborough Charnwood Forest Canal. Such rails could be manufactured in 3 ft (914 mm) lengths. Jessop, a former pupil of John Smeaton, became a partner with Outram in 1790 in the latter's Butterley ironworks.
Cast iron rails had a propensity to break easily, and the short lengths soon became uneven. In 1820, John Birkenshaw introduced a method of rolling rails in greater lengths using wrought iron which was used from then onwards.
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Cross-section diagram of Tanfield Wagon Way circa 1765 with wooden rails and cast iron flanged wheels
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Cross-section diagram of Outram's Cromford Canal tramway showing cast-iron 'L'-shaped flanged rails and flangeless iron wheels
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Jessop's edge rails of 1789 with cast-iron flanged wheels running on flangeless iron rails
Read more about this topic: History Of Rail Transport In Great Britain To 1830
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