An Unlikely Achievement

In the first part of the 19th century, engineers considered the plateway, which had been used for nearly a century on public railways in England and Wales, to be the most appropriate technology for the new steam-powered public railways. Edge rail, on the other hand, with its origins in the Newcastle wooden waggonway, was at that time almost entirely confined to the coal mining regions of northeast England. This study uses a social constructivist approach to consider how edge rail became the technological basis for the world's railways.