Railways, a genius system

Editor's note: The history of railway development is often used as a comparison to discuss the positive and negative effects a new technology may have on society, as well as the resistance it may encounter. "Germany on the Rails" looks back on the history of railway development in Germany and dissects the relationship between this technology and social economy and politics over the past two hundred years. As the author said in the preface, "When I was young, I heard some stories about 'brave and visionary railway pioneers'. I was shocked by the historical drama of the beginning of the industrial age, which had nothing to do with the 'good old days'. Since that era, I have tried to introduce power and money, military recklessness and political crimes while introducing rails and wheels.

At a time when the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years may trigger a new round of technological revolution, this book may have a special enlightening significance for readers. This article is excerpted from some chapters of the book.

Germany on the Rails, Science and Technology Press of China

[German] Andreas Knipping

Translated by Xu Jing

Written by Andreas Knipping

Translation | Xu Jing

February 13, 1804 is a memorable date in the history of the modern world. On that day, the first locomotive with a name, built by the Englishman Richard Trevithick, pulled several vehicles loaded with steel at the Penydarren Steelworks in Wales. However, it did not immediately become a success. The new technology was even questioned by many people, who felt that the failure justified these doubts. Trevithick had to go through this pain. His experimental locomotive "Catch Me" ended in failure, which made him give up the idea of ​​developing a steam locomotive.

But the development of the locomotive did not stop there. Other designers, such as William Hedley and John Blenkinsop, continued to work on it. However, the real father of the steam locomotive was George Stephenson (1781-1848), who focused on locomotive construction for about ten years. As in Penydarren in 1804, his locomotives were designed for internal use: they were used to carry freight in the British mines.

That changed on 27 September 1825, when the world's first public railway, the Stockton Darlington Railway, opened. It was the first time that locomotives were used for passenger transport in addition to freight. Soon came a type of wagon that was very similar to a horse-drawn carriage. The operators of this 50 km long line did not rely solely on steam locomotives, they also partially used horses or stationary steam engines, with ropes to pull the vehicles.

The far-reaching significance of rail track “standardization”

The initial closed loop of British technology development had the advantage that by the time exports began to the United States and continental Europe, and particularly for use in the railway industry outside the UK, the ‘rail system’ had already achieved a degree of development and standardisation, the effects of which are still felt today.

It opened the way to track gauge standardization. To date, except for some narrow gauges that mainly serve local areas, Europe, from the Pyrenees to the western border of Russia, and even North America and China, has a unified track gauge of 1435 mm. This unit of measurement comes neither from the foot and the inch nor from the metric system of lengths, but from the mail coach, which was already proven by the ancient Romans. The unified use of track gauge according to the British model has become the basis for technically uncomplicated international transportation.

Track guidance is not limited to preventing the roller-shaped wheels with flanges from sliding out laterally. In the early days, the wheels were designed to be conical, and the track was slightly inclined inwards. On good track conditions, the train only had a slight lateral swing, and was hardly restrained by the hard impact of the wheel flange, but was guided by the (today very accurately calculated) circle between the tread and the wheel flange. On a railway curve, centrifugal force pushed the vehicle further outward, and the outer wheel had a slightly larger diameter, thus controlling the entire wheelset within the curve. The principle of this track running system is that there is very little contact between the wheel and the rail, so that the friction resistance of the loaded vehicle is minimized. One person's strength is enough to pull a not-too-heavy vehicle on the track. A running group of vehicles can be pulled by one person and continue to move. Try towing a rubber-wheeled truck trailer of the same weight. Only a ship has less resistance in water.

The narrow contact area between the moving steel and the stationary steel initially raised doubts about whether there would be enough resistance for the locomotive to start and move forward on the track, and whether the rotating wheels would slip at this point and break down. Therefore, people initially experimented with gear and rack drives, and it was considered necessary to replace the moving steam locomotive drive with a rope traction drive provided by a fixed steam engine on the slope. The British had solved this problem long before it was raised elsewhere (considering the unique mountain railways, discussions on this aspect continued on the European continent until 1850). On the one hand, people realized that the friction of the locomotive driving wheels was sufficient in principle, and found that the friction could be increased by using multiple driven wheel pairs; on the other hand, people invented a technology to limit the slope of mountain railways by artificially extending the line. When the British railway system obtained export opportunities, it already had the advantage of using a unified traction technology in plain and hilly areas, without the need to laboriously change traction technology before climbing the slope.

Narrow tracks with side guardrails or central guide bars, on which vehicles could run supported by horizontal auxiliary wheels (an idea that was originally well developed), made it easy to build switches and crossings, allowing the track network to branch endlessly to the preparation line at any intermediate station, and from there to factories, valleys and port terminals.

Everyone who owns a model railway knows that with four locomotives and 29 cars, there are millions of possible train configurations. With a standardized system of couplings and buffers, different trains can be built and reconfigured to suit different requirements. After the five cattle cars of a freight train, two asphalt or oil "tank cars" can be arranged, followed by three cars with cut and preserved telegraph poles, and finally a beer refrigeration car. At the next station, it can unload two cattle cars and load four brick cars. In the course of decades and centuries, goods such as honey, helmets, pickled meat or linoleum became obsolete, replaced by cars, bananas, oil-fired boilers for multi-storey houses and steel pipes. In passenger transport, steel four-axles replaced wooden three-axles, and steam engines were gradually replaced by their successors, electric or diesel engines. All these changes, then and now, took place step by step without changing the system.

To introduce another truly ingenious principle of the enduring steam locomotive, we need to explore its technology. Depending on the requirements of acceleration or normal speed, the locomotive driver uses the governor, which works alternately on both sides of the piston through the mechanism of the controller, allowing more or less steam to flow from the boiler to the cylinder on the flat, uphill or downhill. When the work is done, the steam enters the smokebox through the exhaust port and then exits through the chimney above. The steam in the smokebox creates a negative pressure through the air flow, allowing more combustion air to be sucked into the firebox through the ash box tuyere at the rear end of the boiler, where it fans the flames and allows more hot air to flow through the numerous water circulation pipes of the boiler. Therefore, the increase in steam consumption automatically produces more steam through higher suction. Stephenson's steam locomotive already uses this technology, and its basic mode of operation has never changed, although it has now been magnified many times and improved in detail to an astonishing degree.

Initially it was thought that the railways would be free to any user, like roads and canals, but the British realised early on that safety considerations necessitated the building of railways, the management and monitoring of railway traffic, the operation of rolling stock and access to the transport market all in one hand. Track keepers and track inspectors, signalmen and switchmen, locomotive drivers, firemen and brakemen, and those responsible for ticketing and waybills were all subject to a uniform hierarchy and discipline. This principle (and the interesting pattern of the steam locomotive's historical influence) has been greatly departed from in recent decades.

The moment of departure

In the Middle Ages, railroad vehicles were pulled or pushed through mines on wooden rails. Joseph von Baader (1765-1841) of the Bavarian Supreme Mining Office proposed in 1814 to build a horse-drawn tram line from Nuremberg to Fürth. His subsequent detailed design for a "continuous mechanical system on an artificial railway" was not practical, a vehicle that worked on both roads and railways and continued to use horsepower for traction. But at least he demonstrated his "test line" to King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1825 in the Royal Park of Nymphenburg on the outskirts of Munich.

The first German "steam car" was almost forgotten again. In 1816, Krieger, an inspector at the Berlin Iron Foundry, built a small locomotive of only 2.5 meters high and 1.5 meters long, which was based on an older British model, mounted on four wheels and ran along a rack track. After the locomotive caused a sensation after its demonstration in Berlin, it was dismantled in the city hall and transported to Upper Sicily. After reassembly, it was found that its track gauge was not suitable for the tracks there. Thus, the career of the first German locomotive ended again. A similar machine built in 1817 can still serve for at least a few years in the mines on the Saar River.

December 7, 1835 was another special day. The Stuttgarter Morning News wrote:

At 9:00 a.m., the Nuremberg-Fürth-Ludwig Railway was opened. In order to arrive on time, the Nurembergers set out on foot, on horseback or in carriages at 7 a.m. People looked at this sturdy railway and the elegant carriages for a long time. There were 9 carriages in total. However, the most exciting and concerned thing was the steam locomotive. There were so many extraordinary mysteries on it, but even experts could not explain its special structure just from the appearance.

It is fixed to the axles of the front and rear wheels like any other, between two larger wheels, which are actually driven by machinery. How? You can guess, but you can't see it. Between the front wheels, as from a closed chimney, rises a pipe about 15 feet high, from which steam is discharged. A huge cylinder extends from between the front and middle wheels to the rear wheels, where the steam boiler is located, supplied with water by a second four-wheeled suspended car. This rear car, which holds the fuel, also has a water tank, from which water is led by hoses into the water tank of the steam locomotive. In addition, people notice that there are many pipes, taps, screws, valves, springs, and it will take us longer to figure out these.

We were equally attracted by the quiet, cautious and trustworthy English engine driver. Every time he puts in a shovel of coal, he considers whether it is the right amount, the right time, and whether the furnace is properly allocated. He cannot be idle for a moment, he must pay attention to everything, calculate every minute, because he is the brain of the machine, unifying the huge forces because he makes the train run... The engine driver lets the power of steam work slowly. A large cloud of steam emerges from the chimney. The carriages are locked tightly together and begin to move slowly; however, soon the chimney spews smoke faster and faster, the train moves forward, and soon disappears from the sight of the onlookers...

Nuremberg's mayor Johannes Scharrer, the railway's major investor Georg Zacharias Platner, the local engineer Paul Denis who was commissioned to build the railway, and William Wilson, the first German locomotive driver who should not be forgotten, undoubtedly wrote history together.

Apart from its historical status as Germany's first steam railway used for public transport, the Ludwig Railway did not bring any innovations to railway standards during its pioneering era. Nor was the Ludwig Railway the first section of a national railway network. It remained privately owned, had no connection to the later Bavarian State Railways, and was closed in 1922, with the line used for trams.

Technology drives reshuffle?

The reason why later Germans valued the Nuremberg-Fürth railway so highly (even excessively) was that the pictures and texts about it well satisfied people's yearning for the idyll of the Biedermeier period. In the medieval imperial city depicted by Spitzweg, cautious councilors and staid entrepreneurs built a new road to the neighboring city within a stroll. They were revolutionary enough to buy a steam car, but also conservative enough to equip it with 11 draft horses. They had enough bourgeois courage to build a project to compete with the line granted privileges by Ludwig I, but they were loyal enough to the king to humbly ask His Majesty to name the company.

In this way, the railway seemed to complete an early bourgeois panorama that had not yet been disrupted by the hustle and bustle of the modern age. The Adler train did not irritate the citizens, whose wish during the Easter procession was recorded in Goethe's Faust: "May everything be in chaos; only the home remain the same."

In fact, the railways broke down the old social structures, money-making opportunities and monopolies in many ways. A memorandum from the Bavarian Higher Medical Academy stated that in their opinion this would inevitably lead to severe mental illness, which is why the railways needed to be surrounded by very high walls. However, this article was considered a satire in 1835, just as it is today.

After the opening of a railway parallel to the road, coachmen and roadside shopkeepers no longer smiled; the peasants became impoverished, and the wheat or potatoes they grew were not as cheap as those brought by competitors from Hungary or Galicia by rail. Every landowner and old noble felt the force of the new era, and although they hated financial losses, they were forced to give up part of their inherited rights to forests and fields because the states soon passed expropriation laws in favor of the railway.

Hackett had announced that these “revolutions” would lead to a national breakthrough in railroads, but the urban upstarts of Nuremberg and Fürth had not yet foreseen this. But they brought two happy news to all German railroad planners: first, the miracle of a machine driven by invisible steam running on narrow tracks with mobile homes that could accommodate half the inhabitants of a small town had actually come true without apocalyptic derailments and explosions; second, it was all worth it: Ludwig Railway paid a 16% dividend to its shareholders in 1841.

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