Railway
Railway (railroad; Eisenbahn, chemin de fer, voie ferrée; ferrovia, strada ferrata) is, in the broadest sense, any vehicle track equipped with iron rails. A line (trackway; Bahn; ligne, voie) is an artificial surface for carts, which is created for the purpose of facilitating the movement of the carts by reducing the resistance to movement (road surface). If the railway has a track that regulates the vehicle‘s path and further reduces its resistance, then it becomes a track railway. The ancient Greeks had provided their roads, on which the sacrificial carts were transported to the great festivals, with ruts for the wheels; passing loops were also laid out. The Romans also used to make traffic easier on some roads by making ruts; on the old Roman roads in Bosnia there are still grooves in the rocky road.
In a different form and as the starting point of the railway, the track railway was used in German mines at the end of the Middle Ages, from where it was brought to England by miners and was first implemented in South Wales (around 1620) to assist in surface mining. The track consisted of wooden planks nailed to cross beams. These wooden tracks were gradually perfected; the most significant was the addition of battens to the inside of the planks, which prevented the wheels from slipping off the track. A fall in the price of iron in 1767 caused the co-owner of the Colebrook Dale Iron Works, Mr. Reynolds, to pour the iron produced in inventory into strong, concave slabs and use these to cover the wooden planks of the railway tracks in order to prevent the planks from wearing out quickly due to the heavy traffic on his coal railway. The arrangement worked so well that Reynolds did not follow through his intention of removing the plates when iron prices increased again; rather, the wooden railways elsewhere were also improved with Colebrook Dale rails.
Source: Röll, Freiherr von: Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens, Berlin, Wien 1917