Some blithering on the subject of trains.
          What is a train?
          Well, the word, or its equivalent means several things
in many languages. It is almost the same in english, French,
Spanish and Italian, and can mean many things, from the tail of a
ceremonial garment held up by pages to a complete procession of
people and animals. German and Scandinavian languages produce
Zug, Tag and Tog, which are practically the same as the English
verb tug, meaning to pull hard. The thing has a fascinating
etymology.
          In the general usage of our time, the word means some
sort of multiple vehicle, propelled by mechanical means and
running on a strictly confined track. So much for the word.
          This sort of train has done more to change the world of
mankind than any form of transport since the canoe evolved into
the ship. It did for the continental landmasses what the ship,
centuries before, had done for the oceans. After it came the
motor, and the aircraft which could overcome both sea and land
distances in very fast traffic. But between them first the ship
and then the train opened up the world.
          At a remote time someone invented the wheel. At a later
time, but still remote, someone invented the guided vehicle. Both
events probably took place somewhere in Western Asia, in
Mesopotamia, land of the great rivers.
          The guided vehicle?
          That was the wheeled vehicle whose course was
determined by the ruts it originally ran in. Ancient vehicles had
gouged out those ruts in the streets of Ur, of Babylon, and the
ancient cities of Assyria. Men soon saw that the ruts, once they
had formed, kept the vehicles to a fixed path, so that they
damaged neither themselves or the corners of the buildings they
went around in the close-built riverside cities of Tigris and
Euphrates. Then paving succeeded the mud roads and in that
paving, ruts were made deliberately by measure, so that the carts
should follow a disciplined course. When the four-wheeled cart
was still a new invention there were no swinging front axles.
          It was not the beginning of railways, but it was the
beginning of the railway idea. The prophet Isiah, who was a very
discerning man with things as well as people, knew more than a
thing or two about the Assyrians and their ways, when back in the
eighth century BC he wrote about the crooked being made straight
and the rough places plain. He had seen their marvellous stone-
ways, and he looked into the future, when every valley should be
exalted and every mountain and hill laid low.
          Those stone-ways, as suggested, were not railways, but
they were tramways of a sort. They were invaluable for the
movement of large blocks of stone from quarry to city, or of
religious monuments from quarry or city to some holy place,
and for these things they were used by the Greeks, who took the
idea with them when they colonized Sicily, whence the Romans
copied them. One can still see stone rut-ways in the quarries of
Syracuse, which served Dionysius Tyrannus both for building
materials and as a place to keep political prisoners and
captured soldiers out of mischief. One can see them in the
relatively modern paved streets of Pompeii, volcanically
overwhelmed and thus by the irony if history, preserved in 79 AD.
          The Greeks seemed to have gotten as far as making
turnouts and passing loops, the remote precursors of the points
and switches of a modern railway. The Greek word for them was
ektropoi. But there was no mechanical agent beyond that of the
lever and the pulley. Motive power was furnished by men, horses
mules, or possibly camels in some places. Yet the thing- the
Railway Thing- almost might have happened even then. Hero, an
Alexandrian Greek, devised a primitive reaction turbine- a steam-
filled whirling ball with opposed escape jets- about this time.
It was simply a scientific toy, though something like it was said
to have been used to turn spits in medieval kitchens, notably in
the great monasteries that kept learning alive in the Dark Ages.
          The Romans, like the Minoans before them, were great
plumbers and domestic engineers, and one of their appliances was
an internally-fired boiler, heated by burning charcoal in an
extraordinarily advanced watertube firebox. But its service was
only of the bathroom in the houses of the rich. Nobody bothered
about motive power for industrial machines and transport. As
suggested, there was plenty of slaves and POW's around, as well
as animals, for such power as people thought they needed.
          Classic Greece declined into a Roman satellite state,
ultimately to fall to the Turks. What we now call the middle
east, with the past glories of Sargon, King of Kings, buried in
the sand, furnished outposts for the Roman Emoire.Nor didImperial
Rome complete her civilization of Europe and western Asia, though
to be sure, her stone-ways as well as her ordinary roads
stretched far and wide, to be regarded and then forgotten, by
invading Celt, Goth, Frank, Saxon and Turk. For Imperial Rome
died as Assyria and Persia and Macedon had died, and the Dark
Ages set in for many countries over many centuries.
          They were ages so dark that only in the nineteenth
century did people of western Europe unearth the remains not only
of well planned cities and garrison towns, but of splendid
country houses, centrally heated and well drained; of beautifully
paved roads deep down below muddy packhorse tracks, and, rather
significantly, those rutted stoneways whereon wagons could pass
with heavy loads yet without need of steering. One of these
turned up in the British Isles, with quite curious significance,
on the site of Abbeydore Railway Station on the border of England
and Wales.
          That then was the beginning of the guided vehicle, but
not of the railroad proper. Whence came that? The most facile
explanation is that on rutted roads in wet months, men laid split
treetrunks im the bottom of the ruts to sustyain the wheels, and
that these constituted the first real rails. No doubt this was
done in many places where there was little stone and plenty of
mud. But the essence of the railway was the use of flanges,
either in the track or in the wheels themselves. The sone-ways
had provided flanges in the form of their track. But what of the
flanged wheel on the plain rail?
          In its most primitive form, this was produced by an
arrangement of great grooved bobbins to act as wheels for the
wagons, laid on and secured to much shorter section as right
angles, formed the track. Thus there was rails on sleepers or
cross-i\ties, and there was even primitive swiches. Just who
first made such a track, no man can say; but early in the
sixteenth century it was certainly been used in the gold diggings
of Transylvania, and specimens of both track and vehicle have
almost miraculously survived the centuries.

Con'd in TRAINS2.TXT