[CHAPTER III.]
WHO BEGAN RAILROADS—"PUFFING BILLY."
Familiar as it has become to us, who does not stop to look with interest at the puffing, snorting, screaming steam-horse? And who does not rejoice in the iron-rail, which binds together with its slender threads the north and the south, and makes neighbours of the east and the west?
"Who began railroads?" ask the boys again and again.
The first idea of the modern railroad had its birth at a colliery nearly two hundred years ago. In order to lighten the labour of the horses the colliers let straight pieces of wood into the road leading from the pit to the river where the coal was discharged; and the waggons were found to run so much easier, that one horse could draw four or five chaldrons. As wood quickly wore out, and moreover was liable to rot, the next step was nailing plates of iron on the wooden rail, which gave them for a time the name of "plateway" roads. A Mr. Outram making still farther improvements, they were called Outram roads, or, for shortness' sake, "tram-roads"; and tramroads came into general use at the English collieries.