In the beginning, before there were airplanes and automobiles, there were railroad trains. Starting around 1840, we discovered that the newfangled Iron Horse could whisk people and goods from place to place at incredible speeds. A railroad construction boom began. Most of the steel that put Pittsburgh on the map and made Andrew Carnegie rich went toward making railroad tracks. Gradually Morse's telegraph, Westinghouse's signals and air brakes, and the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel code made trains safer and more efficient. By 1916, the peak year, America had 254,251 miles of operating train track. If you wanted to go somewhere faster than a walk or a canter, you rode a train. And many people still do, despite the inroads of airplanes (faster) and automobiles (more flexible but not faster-Amtrak trains at their speed limit of 79 miles per hour routinely pass cars and trucks where tracks run parallel to highways).
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