Railroad transportation is a type of land transportation where goods and passengers are transported by wheeled vehicles on tracks. Unlike road transport, where the vehicle simply moves on a prepared surface, rail transport is guided by the tracks on which it travels. Railroad tracks usually consist of iron rails mounted on sleepers and ballast over which rolling stock, usually equipped with metal wheels, moves. However, other track arrangements are also possible, such as ballastless track, where the tracks are attached to a cement base.
Railroad rolling stock usually has less friction resistance than cars, and passenger and freight cars can be coupled into longer trains. The driving force in trains are locomotives that use electricity or produce their own power, usually by diesel engines. Railroad transportation is a safe mode of transportation compared to other modes of transportation. Rail transport can handle large volumes of passenger and freight traffic and is energy efficient, but it is usually less flexible and more capital-intensive than road transport with less traffic on the transportation network.
The oldest railroads, where humans pulled their own cargo, date back to the sixth century B.C., and Periander, one of the Seven Sages, is considered its inventor. Railroads flourished after the invention of the steam engine in Britain, which became an important source of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Steam engines made it possible to build railroads over long distances, which, in turn, was a major component of the Industrial Revolution. Railroads reduced the cost of delivery as well as the loss of goods compared to water transport, where ships often sank. Moving goods from the canals used in Europe before railroads created a “statewide market,” where prices for goods were almost the same in different cities.
In the 1880s, trains powered by electricity appeared, as did the first streetcars and subways. Beginning in the 1940s, the non-electrified railroads of most countries began to replace steam locomotives with diesel-electric ones, nearly completing the process by 2000. In the 1960s, electrified high-speed railroads appeared in Japan and some other countries. Some other systems of land guided transport, such as the monorail and the maglev, are not as widely used.
Railroad
A railroad refers to a strip of land or surface of an artificial structure (tunnel, bridge, overpass) equipped with rails, which is used for the movement of rail vehicles. A railroad may consist of a single track or several tracks. Railroads come in electric, diesel, turbine, steam, or combined traction. A special type of railroad is cogged railroads. Usually railroads are equipped with a signaling system, and electric traction railroads are also equipped with a contact network. A distinction is made between public railroads, industrial railroads (access roads of enterprises and organizations) and urban railroads – subway and streetcar.
The term railroad is also used to refer to a railroad system for transporting passengers and freight in general.
Rolling stock
A train is, in modern parlance, a formed and coupled train consisting of a group of cars, with one or more active locomotives or motor cars driving it, and having prescribed signals (audible and visible) that indicate its head and tail. In addition, many railroads give each train a specific number to distinguish it from other trains. Trains also include locomotives without cars, motor cars, and special self-propelled rolling stock (for example, self-propelled cars and railcars of non-removable type) that are sent to the line and have set signals.