ABSTRACT
There are numerous examples of grooved roads, or rutways, in Greece, and their similarity to modern railways has been mentioned by many writers from 1842 onwards, but they still await the detailed attention of an engineering historian. An interesting and little-known manuscript, undated, but probably about 1803 or 1804, preserved in the Outram family, is "Minutes to be observed in the Construction of Railways" by Benjamin Outram. William Jessop is possibly the man who introduced the iron rail in fundamentally its modern form. The rail as we know it is a beam, and its various sections are efforts to dispose the metal most suitably for that function. There are earlier illustrations of raining transport on the wooden tracklines, but none is sufficiently detailed to show any form of self-steering. In Agncola's time it appears that the primitive railways were used only from the working faces underground to the adits in the side of the mountains.
