Railways: From Stockton to the Shinkansen
27 Sep 1825 – 202454 items
railwaystransportTwo centuries of rails around the world
On 27 September 1825 a steam locomotive pulled a train of coal wagons and cheering passengers from Shildon towards Stockton-on-Tees. Within a lifetime railways crossed North America, Siberia and the Andes. Within two, trains ran at 300 kilometres an hour from Tokyo to Osaka, Paris to Lyon, and across China.
This timeline follows the rails across every inhabited continent: the first lines in Britain, Belgium, Cuba, India, Egypt, Japan and China; the great lines of empire and nation; the record runs; and the high-speed networks. It also counts what the lines cost the people who built them, from Chinese crews in the Sierra Nevada to Indian workers in Kenya and forced labourers on the Burma Railway, with death tolls given as the range the named sources give.
Two calendars
Russia kept the Julian calendar until February 1918, so Russian sources date the Tsarskoye Selo Railway and the Trans-Siberian Old Style. Those items are entered in the Julian calendar as the sources write them, and the app places them on the same axis as the Gregorian dates everywhere else: the first sod at Vladivostok, 19 May 1891 Old Style, is 31 May in the Gregorian calendar.
How it is laid out
Periods: Britain’s railway mania, the building of each great line (Panama, the first American transcontinental, Peru’s Central, the Canadian Pacific, the Trans-Siberian, the Uganda and Hejaz railways, the Burma Railway, TAZARA, the Channel Tunnel and Qinghai–Tibet), the diesels’ takeover in America and China’s high-speed build-out.
Threads to filter by:
steam,electrification,high speed,records,transcontinental,labourandcolonialism.The map: most lines are drawn as routes, from the Nullarbor to Tibet and from the Andes to the Hejaz, so the map shows where the rails went.
Items
The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
Rocket runs its trial at Rainhill
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
William Huskisson is killed by Rocket
The Best Friend of Charleston starts America’s first steam service
Brussels to Mechelen: steam reaches the Continent
Russia’s first railway opens to Tsarskoye Selo
Havana to Bejucal: Latin America’s first railway
Bombay to Thane: India’s first passenger train
Alexandria to Cairo: Africa’s first railway
The Metropolitan Railway opens under London
Three thousand Chinese workers strike in the Sierra
The golden spike at Promontory Summit
Shimbashi to Yokohama: Japan’s first railway
Siemens runs the first electric passenger railway
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway reaches Darjeeling
The first Orient Express leaves Paris
The railways put North America on standard time
The last spike at Craigellachie
The first deep-level electric tube opens in London
The Tsavo man-eaters
Rails across the frozen Lake Baikal
The Victoria Falls Bridge opens
The Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway opens
The Trans-Australian Railway is joined at Ooldea
- ≈ 16 years, 7 months
Mallard sets the steam speed record
The Tōkaidō Shinkansen opens
Britain’s last main-line steam train
The TGV starts service from Paris to Lyon
The Seikan Tunnel opens under the Tsugaru Strait
Breakthrough under the Channel
The last main-line steam in the world, on the Jitong line
The V150 TGV reaches 574.8 kilometres an hour
Beijing–Tianjin: China’s first 350 kilometre-an-hour line
The Wenzhou collision
A Japanese maglev reaches 603 kilometres an hour
The Madaraka Express: Mombasa to Nairobi on a new line
Al Boraq: Africa’s first high-speed line
Whoosh: Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway