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Railroads, Rail Travel, Passenger & Freight Trains, Locomotives, Rail Transit playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF0553B37AA77ED25 more at http://travel.quickfound.net/railroad_news.html "A young boy travels from Chicago, Illinois to Lamy, New Mexico via passenger train." Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound. Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport The history of rail transport dates back nearly 500 years and includes systems with man or horse power and rails of wood or stone. Modern rail transport systems first appeared in England in the 1820s. These systems, which made use of the steam locomotive, were the first practical forms of mechanized land transport, and they remained the primary form of mechanized land transport for the next 100 years... Railways began reappearing in Europe after the Dark Ages. The earliest known record of a railway in Europe from this period is a stained-glass window in the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau dating from around 1350... n the late 1760s, the Coalbrookdale Company began to fix plates of cast iron to the upper surface of the wooden rails... The first working model of a steam rail locomotive was designed and constructed by John Fitch in the United States in 1794.[19] The first full scale working railway steam locomotive was built in the United Kingdom in 1804 by Richard Trevithick, an English engineer born in Cornwall... The first commercially successful steam locomotive was Matthew Murray's rack locomotive Salamanca built for the narrow gauge Middleton Railway in 1812... In 1830, there were only 39.8 miles (64.1 km) of documented railroad track laid in the United States (there is ample historical evidence that a more correct figure would be a little over 75 miles (121 km) due to a failure to count special purpose railroads hauling only coal and granite.[35]). After this, railroad lines grew rapidly. Ten years later, in 1840, the railways had grown to 2,755.18 miles (4,434.03 km). Two decades after that, the number had reached 28,919.79 miles (46,541.89 km), and 20 years after that, the number had tripled once more to 87,801.42 miles (141,302.69 km)... Prior to the development of electric railways, most overland transport aside from the railways had consisted primarily of horse powered vehicles. Placing a horse car on rails had enabled a horse to move twice as many people, and so street railways were born. The world's first electric tram line opened in Lichterfelde near Berlin, Germany, in 1881. It was built by Werner von Siemens (see Gross-Lichterfelde Tramway). Seven years later, in January 1888, Richmond, Virginia served as American proving grounds for electric railways as Frank Sprague built an electric streetcar system there. By the 1890s, electric power became practical and more widespread, allowing extensive underground railways. Large cities such as London, New York, and Paris built subway systems. When electric propulsion became practical, most street railways were electrified. These then became known as "streetcars," "trolleys," "trams" and "Strassenbahn..." Diesel-electric locomotives could be described as electric locomotives with an on-board generator powered by a diesel engine. The first diesel locomotives were low-powered machines, diesel-mechanical types used in switching yards. Diesel and electric locomotives are cleaner, more efficient, and require less maintenance than steam locomotives... Starting with the opening of the first Shinkansen line between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, high-speed rail transport, functioning at speeds up and above 300 km/h, has been built in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands. The construction of many of these lines has resulted in the dramatic decline of short haul flights and automotive traffic between connected cities, such as the Boston-New York City-Washington, D.C. corridor, London-Paris-Brussels, Madrid-Barcelona, as well as many other major lines...