Canals never followed a direct path unless a “cut” was needed, which was essentially a straight path constructed in the canal system for infrastructural purposes but at a great expense. Finally, the last major disadvantage of canals was that they would freeze over in the winter, rendering them absolutely useless.

Despite its enormous positive impact on the economy of New York, the completion of the Erie Canal had several unintended negative consequences, and many critics grew to loathe the whole canal culture. Smallpox and cholera frequently “rode the canal,” affecting not only New York but also the Great Lakes states as well.

Disadvantages of Canal Irrigation:

• Due to imbalance in distribution of canal water, a situation of scarcity somewhere and water logging in other areas is caused due to collection of water there.
• Many diseases are caused due to spread of mosquitoes, worms and insects on account of stationary water in canals.

Canals are advantageous because they provide waterway short cuts from one region to another, allowing for more efficient and convenient transport of…

Richard Trevithick

inventor George Stephenson

1804 – First steam locomotive railway using a locomotive called the Penydarren or Pen-y-Darren was built by Richard Trevithick. It was used to haul iron from Merthyr Tydfil to Abercynon, Wales. The first train carried a load of 10 tons of iron. On one occasion it successfully hauled 25 tons.

Liverpool Road station

20 MPH was average. 30 MPH was really fast. Those numbers don’t sound like much today, but at the time, the next best thing was a horse-drawn stagecoach. If they never rode on a train, most people would never go 20 MPH in their lives.

In the early days of British railways, trains ran up to 78 mph by the year 1850. However, they ran at just 30mph in 1830. As railway technology and infrastructure progressed, train speed increased accordingly. In the U.S., trains ran much slower, reaching speeds of just 25 mph in the west until the late 19th century.

A penny left on a track does not typically derail a train. A train speeding along its track is a very heavy object with an immense amount of momentum. The penny is simply too light to do much of anything. It is flattened or knocked out of the way by the train.

The old steam engines were usually run well below 40MPH due to problems with maintaining the tracks– but could go much faster. I seem to recall a 45 mile run before 1900 in which a locomotive pulled a train at better than 65MPH…

But it was not uncommon for the Zephyr or other trains to hit speeds of more than 100 mph in the 1930s.

Do trains go slower at night? Short answer: Yes and No. Trains go at the same speed or even faster (explained in the next paragraph) at night as they do during the day. Dark doesn’t directly affect how a train operates and at what speed.

At the height of the Great Depression, more than 250,000 teenagers were living on the road in America. Many criss-crossed the country by hopping freight trains, although it was both dangerous and illegal.

You shift gears so that the engine can stay below the redline and near the rpm band of its best performance (maximum power). The five- or six-speed transmission on most cars allows them to go 110 mph (177 kph) or faster with an engine-speed range of 500 to 6,000 rpm.