Showing posts with the label Railway

The Braamfontein Explosion

Jan 25, 2024

The city of Johannesburg in South Africa was founded on gold after the precious metal was discovered on the Witwatersrand by Jan Gerrit Bant...

Boynton’s Bicycle Railroad

Oct 6, 2023

For a brief two years during the 1890s, there was a rail service between Gravesend and Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. The railway was u...

Pakistan’s Century-Old Horse-Drawn Train

Oct 4, 2023

In 1903, a famous social activist named Ganga Ram established a unique mode of transport in his village in Faisalabad, Pakistan. It was a tr...

The Get Out And Push Railroad

Feb 8, 2023

For a very short five years, Wilmington, Los Angeles, was connected to the Willmore area of Long Beach by a street railway, initially pulled...

How Kate Shelley Saved a Train

Jan 9, 2023

In 1901, the Chicago & North Western Railway erected a new bridge over Des Moines River in Boone, Iowa, the United States. The bridge wa...

William Huskisson, Railway's First Victim

Jan 7, 2022

William Huskisson was a British statesman, financier, and Member of Parliament. A leading advocate of free trade, Huskisson had been a highl...

Paper Railway Wheels

Sep 2, 2021

Paper has multitude of uses—from the newspaper that we read in the morning to the teabags that infuses our morning cup, from the toilet pape...

Horse-Powered Locomotives

Jul 22, 2021

Before steam locomotives became mainstream, railways were driven solely by muscle power, usually horses. These beasts of burden pulled wagon...

The Lartigue Monorail of Listowel

Jun 25, 2021

A small heritage market town called Listowel in County Kerry, Ireland, is home to one of the strangest monorail system ever built. Instead o...

Propeller Driven Railways

May 31, 2021

A locomotive can derive power from many different sources. The earliest locomotives were driven by steam. Then came electric trains powered ...

Brennan’s Gyro Monorail

May 19, 2021

In the early 20th century, at least two different engineers working independently in different parts of the world, put forward a unique conc...

Hitler’s Monster Railway

Feb 27, 2021

Hitler’s megalomaniac plans for Germany included a monumental new railway. This railway was supposed to connect the most important cities i...

The Train of The End of The World

Sep 10, 2020

At the southernmost tip of South America, beyond the Andes, lies the beautiful and colorful city of Ushuaia, regarded by some as the souther...

Slip Coach: Trains That Split

Aug 24, 2020

In the middle of the 19th century, British railway engineers realized that journey times could be appreciably shortened if trains didn’t hav...

Middleton, The World’s Oldest Operating Railway

Aug 19, 2020

The Middleton Railway in Leeds has been chugging along for the past 260 years, longer than any other railways in the world. It was establish...

Kinzua Viaduct: The Fallen Bridge

Aug 1, 2020

On 21 July 2003, a fierce tornado struck northern Pennsylvania and destroyed a large section of the Kinzua Viaduct, a historic railroad tres...

The World’s Largest Brick Bridge

Jun 10, 2020

Before the age of steel and concrete, bricks and stones were the only two materials available to architects and bridge designers hoping to s...

Aerotrain: The High-Speed Train That Almost Revolutionized Transport

May 19, 2020

Some of the fastest trains in service today have a top speed in excess of 200 miles per hour. With the exception of Shanghai maglev, all o...

Vennbahn: The Railway That Created a Peculiar Border Problem

May 14, 2020

Germany and Belgium’s border problem. Photo: gunnsteinlye/Flickr Along the German-Belgian border runs an old disused railway track, the ...

Kruger Shalati: The Train Hotel Over Sabie Bridge

May 9, 2020

For several years, it was possible to hop into a train at Komatipoort, on the South Africa-Mozambique border, and ride through the wildern...