Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/52

 CHAPTER IV.

have had occasion to remark in a former chapter that the permanent way of a first-class English railway of the present day represents a very advanced stage of development as compared with the rude methods of construction of the earlier railways, and perhaps this fact can most forcibly be illustrated by a brief retrospect of the various changes and improvements which have from time to time been introduced, and which have finally resulted in giving us the magnificent steel track of the present age, upon which a train weighing, with its engine, nearly 300 tons may travel with ease and safety at a speed of from fifty to sixty miles an hour.

As we have already seen (Chap. I.), the earliest conception of a railway or tramway found its embodiment in a wooden track consisting of oak rails laid upon blocks of wood about two feet apart, and upon which carts with flanged wheels were drawn. Tramways of this description are said to have existed in the neighbourhood of Newcastle-on-Tyne more than two hundred years ago. Nicholas Wood, in his "Treatise on Railroads," published in 1825, gives the Coalbrookdale Iron Works Company the credit of being the first to construct cast-iron rails, which they are said to have done in 1767, the rails being 5 feet long,