ABSTRACT
Jack Simmons is one of the most eminent of British railway historians. His main interests, like those of most railway historians, lay in locomotive-hauled railways. In the opening chapter of The Railways of Britain: an historical introduction, he writes: ‘The history of railways, as we know them today, begins in the year 1830’.1 But, as he admits, transport using wheeled vehicles on rails has a much longer history, tracing its origins back to the growth of mining activity on the continent in the early modern period.2 There is clear evidence in Germany for miners pushing trucks on rails from the fifteenth century onwards, but this paper is concerned with trucks on rails drawn by animal power, usually horses. Such pre-locomotive railways are often known as tramways, tramroads, or waggonways: it is the intention of the authors to retain the term ‘railway’ in this chapter since it causes the least confusion.3
