Railways are much older than trains

I love how Lindybeige dresses like he’s exploring the Congo in the 1880s, but he’s just wandering around train stations.

People always seem to lose sight of the fact that locomotives were invented to improve railways.

Fun fact in 'ye olde' days 'coal' was the name for what we now call 'charcoal'. What we now call 'coal' was known as 'seacoal' back then, partly because it was moved around by ship and partly because a lot of early coal was gathered from beaches after it had been washed out of coastal coal seams. As seacoal became more common as a fuel (in Tudor times) people started to refer to it as 'coal' and invented the term 'charcoal' to distinguish the two types.

The ancient Greek Diolkos was sort of a railway, or wagonway. It was a limestone track with grooves that wooden wheeled trolleys ran on.

"you could, in the darkness of a mine, walk forwards and hum to yourself" This is what history needs. Thanks for your channel, lloyd

This feels like... Lindy just wandering unsupervised through an interesting area, and I am living for the vibe

American steam engines often had big giant conical smokestacks, because most of them burned wood. Wood burning engines spat out lots of hot embers, which risked starting house fires, or sometimes even forest fires. So the ember trap was invented.

A bit of an etymological aside: wain is the English version (coming from Old English) of the German and Dutch word wagon (which was a later borrowing into English), coming from proto-Germanic. Notice how English words lack a g compared to their related German/Dutch words: nail-nagel, rain-regen, hail-hagel, sail-segel, say-sagen etc, etc.

There was also an intermediate stage in the evolution of railways -- the strapped rail. Strapped rails were an effort to reduce the wear on wooden rails by applying an iron strap to the top surface of the rail to make a more durable bearing surface for the wheels to run on. Because they were cheaper to build than full iron rail, they were used well beyond the introduction of full iron rail when it was necessary to build a railway quickly, or when the railway would only carry light or intermittent loads. Because strapped rail required more maintenance to avoid problems such as the strap coming loose and bending under the load, spearing up into the cars riding over them, they quickly passed out use for main lines or heavy loads.

You got to love LindyBiege. What a great guy with an incredible talent for making just about anything interesting. Also, great showman. Really grabs and holds ones attention. A man with many talents.

I'm so happy Youtube has given Lindybeige a voice. I knew of him - vaguely - before, as someone who just pointed out errors in things that other people did - films, series, etc. But now he's doing so much more -telling us how things were rather than how things weren't. And in such an interesting, English way! Well done, Lindybeige!

At 2:57 he goes from historical professor to 8 year old child in 3 seconds flat. I really enjoyed his enthousiasme and I really learned something. Thank you for sharing your knowledge on all the various transportation technologies.

Yes Lloyd, we all love a good steam engine, that's why we are here after all.

7:20 ... Don't you hate it, if someone sells you a 'real open world game' and then there are invisible walls everywhere?

Brilliant and informative as always, thanks for this.

1:55 From what I remember being told about bullock-wagons, the horses were there to guide the cows, make them easier to stop, start, turn corners etc. And the cows are much better at pulling heavy loads. That could be wrong; it’s just what’s been passed down to me from my great-grandparents’ day when bullock-wagons were still on the roads (we were a bit behind the rest of the developed world here; flush toilets only became common in the 1960s) There may also be something in the fact that you can lead a horse from the front or ride on it without it getting annoyed and trying to kill you, which is much less certain with cows. Could be useful for crossing narrow bridges and the like. But that’s just me speculating now.

Exactly what I need at 2:30 in the morning

One of the main reasons for the wheels having a sloped surface, on modern trains at least, is because of the bends in the tracks. It serves a similar purpose to a differential on a car. The outside wheel has further to go on a bend, but as the wheels naturally move to the outside on any given bend, the larger circumference, near the flange, compensates for the longer distance it needs to travel, along with the smaller circumference of the contact point on the inside wheel.

It's great to see the local heritage of the North East of England being championed. More please Lloyd.

You missed a trick. A lot of waggonways with static winding engines used the momentum of the descending trucks, loaded with coal, to pull up the empty ones by means of a continuous loop of cable or chain.