Rail uses about a twelfth of the energy of cars and planes per passenger
According to the International Energy Agency, moving a passenger one kilometre by rail takes roughly 12 times less energy than by private car or plane, and emits 7 to 11 times less greenhouse gas. That efficiency, rooted in steel wheels rolling on steel rails, has driven a revival of trains since the 1970s.
A train is a line of connected vehicles running on track, carrying people or freight, usually hauled or pushed by a locomotive though some units propel themselves. The word comes via Old French from Latin trahere, to pull. Terminology varies: Americans call any connected line of cars a train, the British speak of a rake of coaches, North Americans and Australians of a consist, and permanently coupled sets like the TGV are trainsets.
The ancestors were wagonways. Babylon built stone ones around 2,200 BCE, mines used them from the 1500s, and iron rails arrived in the 1790s. Richard Trevithick's locomotive ran the first steam train in 1804, but steam stayed mostly in coal mines until the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825. There George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1 pulled over 400 passengers along 40 kilometres at up to 13 kilometres an hour. That success and his Rocket in 1829 set off the speculative boom called Railway Mania in Britain.
America's first steam railroad opened in 1829, and most of continental Europe followed in the 1830s and 1840s. Imperial powers built lines in South America, Africa and Asia from the 1840s to control colonies and carry exports, while never-colonised Japan got its first railways in the early 1870s. By 1900 trains ran on every continent except Antarctica. In Germany, Werner von Siemens demonstrated an electric train in 1879 and Rudolf Diesel built his engine in the 1890s.
After the Second World War, damaged networks converted to diesel or electric traction, with France, Russia, Switzerland and Japan leading electrification. Cars, lorries and aircraft then drew away traffic and many lines closed. High-speed rail, running at 240 kilometres an hour or more on dedicated tracks, arrived in the 1960s, and maglev trains that float on magnetic fields have been under development since the 1970s. Freight trains still move coal and grain in bulk, and hydrogen and natural gas trains are a 21st-century development.
Source: Train
