Fascinating historic photos of the world's first trains and railroads

A journey back in time

When the first modern photograph was produced in France in the 1820s, another new technology was taking hold on the other side of the English Channel. The first railway to use steam-powered locomotives began operating between Stockton and Darlington in Northeast England in 1825. Over the next century, almost every country in the world embraced the railway age – and thanks to new photographic technology, it was all caught on camera.

Scroll through this gallery to take a journey back in time and explore the first 100 years of the railways...

1845: The earliest railway photograph

In 1845, 20 years after the first steam locomotives steamed along the Stockton and Darlington Railway, two photographers captured this image of Linlithgow Station on the recently opened Glasgow to Edinburgh line. It’s among the earliest known photographs of the railways. The tracks can be seen on the right of the frame, and there may be a freight truck emerging from a shed.

1851: Railways at the Great Exhibition

Early cameras recorded images in minutes rather than milliseconds, making it impossible to capture trains in motion. Thanks to this, the earliest photographs we have of locomotives show them stationary.

This photograph of the South Eastern Railway locomotive Folkstone was taken in the halls of the Great Exhibition of 1851, when rail companies vied to show off their shiny new technology to the world, and many of the exhibition’s six million visitors reached the venue by rail.

1858: Old York Station

The twin platforms of York Station, pictured here, were squeezed into a small site next to the city walls with York Minster as a backdrop. It was built in the 1840s, a period known as Railway Mania, when the amount of track in Britain more than doubled. Old York Station was eventually closed in 1877 in favor of a larger station a short distance away, although the site was retained as storage for carriages for another 90 years.

1859: Bridging the Niagara

Just 2.5 miles downriver from Niagara Falls, engineer John Augustus Roebling believed he could build a crossing point that’d allow trains to travel from Canada to the USA. His innovative idea was the world’s first railway suspension bridge, a two-tier structure that carried horse-drawn carriages on its lower level and trains on the upper deck.

The Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge opened in 1855, four years before this photograph was taken, and lasted until 1897, when it was dismantled and replaced with the stronger Whirlpool Rapids Bridge.

1862: Going underground

In Britain, many rail lines converged in the nation’s largest city, London. But once railway engineers reached the capital, they encountered a densely packed metropolis with little spare land to lay tracks on. The solution was to go underground.

Labourers dug deep trenches, laid a track, and covered it back over. The Metropolitan Railway – the first line of what Londoners soon dubbed '"he tube" – ran from Paddington to Farringdon. Here, government ministers and VIPs take a tour of the almost complete underground railway ahead of its opening the following year.

1863: Railways in the Civil War

By 1860, the United States had more than 30,000 miles of rails, and when the Civil War broke out, they were seized upon by both sides as vital supply routes. Trains proved useful to transport troops quickly to where they were needed, but despite mobile defenses like the mortar pictured here, soldiers took every opportunity to systematically destroy enemy rails, bridges, and rolling stock.

The Union’s greater industrial capacity allowed it to repair damaged lines, but the Confederacy’s network gradually crumbled.

1868: Building St Pancras

Britain’s rail companies didn’t just compete for custom, they also fought over which line could build the grandest station. The Midland Railway terminated at St Pancras on the northern fringe of London, and it recruited engineer William Henry Barlow to build an enormous iron and glass dome reaching 100 feet above the platforms. At the time the station opened in 1868, it was the largest ironwork structure in the world.

1869: The transcontinental railroad

After peace was declared in the American Civil War, railways expanded rapidly across the nation – and no construction project was bigger than the transcontinental railroad stretching 1,912 miles from Council Bluffs, Iowa to San Francisco Bay, California. Track-laying crews moved forward up to 10 miles a day and met in the middle at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869.

After the transcontinental railroad was finished, Americans could travel from sea to shining sea in a matter of days by a single mode of transport: the railway.

1872: Berlin’s star station

Berlin was already home to several train stations when the Magdeburg-Halberstadt Railway opened Lehrter Station as the terminus of its service to Hanover. The rail company aimed to differentiate itself from the competition by making an elaborate architectural statement in stone.

The new station’s five tracks and platforms were covered by an iron-arched dome, and the richly decorated exterior façades meant that Lehrter was known as the "palace among stations."

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1876: China’s first railway

The nine-mile narrow-gauge Woosung Railway was China’s first, but it was also short-lived. Foreign traders secured permission to build a supply route from the Yangtze River to Shanghai, but the Chinese authorities were angry that the traders built a railway, not a road.

The Chinese compelled the traders to sell the line to them, ripped it up and threw it in the river. The four locomotives that ran on the line were also dumped in the water, including Pioneer, pictured here. It was built in Ipswich, England and had a top speed of 20 miles per hour.

1886: Crossing Canada

On June 28, 1886, a train departed Montreal, Canada. Forty hours later it terminated at Port Moody, and a photographer captured this shot of its arrival. The train was the first to cross Canada from coast to coast, and it marked the completion of the Canada Pacific Railway. Most impressively, construction of the 2,858-mile track took just five years, and it only took three years of operation before the line broke into profit.

c.1887: The Forth Bridge under construction

During the early years of Scottish railways, trains wanting to reach the other side of the River Forth near Edinburgh had to be slowly floated across on platforms. Benjamin Baker designed an iconic solution that sped up the process: the Forth Bridge, a steel cantilever bridge 1.5 miles in length carrying two tracks 151 feet above the high tide mark.

This photograph was taken when construction was at its peak and 4,600 men were on the job. Three years later, the bridge was ceremonially opened by the Prince of Wales, who screwed the final rivet into place.

1890: The Mexican rail boom

Compared to the USA, Mexico was a late adopter of the railroad. In the mid-1880s, less than 400 miles of track existed in the country. That began to change when American companies saw the potential profit in building and operating track south of the border.

Soon, tracks radiated from Mexico City across the country and connected to the American network. This particular train ran on the Mexican Central Railway, and as can be seen here, large swathes of the line ran through sparsely inhabited territory.

1892: The end of Britain’s broad gauge

Ever since the first train had steamed along the Great Western Railway, its tracks had been laid seven feet apart. But most other railways adopted a narrower measurement, and that caused logistical problems as the national rail network expanded.

Broad-gauge locomotives and carriages wouldn’t work elsewhere, leaving the GWR isolated and unable to connect to other lines. After holding out for almost 60 years, the Great Western eventually converted to standard gauge. The end of the broad system in Britain was captured on camera here when this train left London Paddington bound for Penzance on May 20, 1892.

1893: Aftermath of a boiler explosion

Railways bosses competed for the honour of operating the fastest services, but using increasingly powerful steam engines to drive quicker locomotives did not come without risk. This extraordinary photograph taken near Christiania, Norway was the result of a huge boiler explosion that blew a locomotive into the air – and it landed on top of another.

Even more remarkably, the two men who were on board the flying train at the time escaped without injury.

1893: Rails above the road

American city planners had a novel solution for reducing the urban footprint of the rails: taking trains into the sky. New York’s first elevated railway opened in 1868, and it was joined by Chicago’s "L" (pictured here over Lake Street) in 1892.

Boston’s elevated railway began service in 1901, and Philadelphia’s joined it in 1907. The high-rise rails were not to everyone’s tastes and many elevated tracks were later pulled down to be replaced with underground subways, but the "L" is still going strong in Chicago.

1893: Tough terrain in Sri Lanka

Railways were a useful addition to Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, to transport tea and coffee from plantations located high in the hills. Tracks were laid that snaked through the difficult terrain to ports, from where the tea and coffee were exported around the world.

Building the lines was an engineering challenge, as this photograph of a bridge just outside Haputale shows. Engineers had to overcome steep hillsides, landslips, and thick vegetation, but this line is still operational today and offers stunning views of emerald-green plantations amid misty mountain ridges.

1895: The Montparnasse derailment

On October 22, 1895, the driver of the Granville-Paris Express was rushing to get back on schedule and approached his final destination too fast. The air brakes failed, and the train had nowhere to go but through the station wall at a speed of 25 miles per hour.

Miraculously, all the passengers survived, although a woman on the street below was killed by falling masonry. Thanks to the incredible photographs captured by Parisian press photographers, the Montparnasse derailment is now one of the most famous rail accidents in history.

1914: Tracks to the trenches

World War I is best known for the stalemate of trench warfare, where movement was at a minimum. But behind the trenches, fast rail transport provided crucial logistical support.

By 1918, every division of 12,000 soldiers required the equivalent of 100 rail trucks of food and supplies every day. Railways were also used to ferry soldiers to and from the front – and not just reinforcements. Here, Russian prisoners of war are being evacuated from the warzone after the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914.

c.1920: A mammoth cargo

At the turn of the 20th century, Indian railways carried elephants in open boxcars so regularly that the animals had their own fare rates. Once at their destination, the elephants were usually sold on by traders, and the buyers were often the rail companies themselves. At a time when locomotives were still an expensive investment, elephants were a cost-effective way of shunting carriages and trucks around rail yards.

1925: Centenary celebrations

On July 1, 1925, the oldest railway in the world celebrated its 100th birthday. The Stockton to Darlington Railway was the first to use steam locomotives, and the centenary of its opening was marked by a 54-train procession featuring some of the locomotives that had run on the track over the previous 100 years.

Here, one of the railway’s most modern engines – the three-year-old City of Newcastle – passes a stand that had been specially erected for spectators. At the time this photograph was taken, the British railway system was close to its greatest extent and covered 20,000 miles – a far cry from the Stockton to Darlington Railway’s initial 15-mile track.

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