"Solar Penguin" wrote in message ...
--- Matthew Church said:

MORE TRIVIA:

WTF has the Croydon Canal got to do with uk.railway ???

IIRC it was filled in and became the trackbed on the line via Forest
Hill and Sydenham.

The track runs along the bottom of the canal, the brickwork and the
old basin form part of an earlier transport system.

Quite a nice link for the SIR:

"In 1803, the Surrey Iron Railway was opened in Mitcham. It was the
first public railway to be sanctioned by Parliament and made Mitcham
the first place in the world to be served by a public railway. It used
horse drawn wagons to carry coal from the Thames at Wandsworth as far
as Croydon. On the way back from Croydon to Wandsworth, these wagons
carried flour, copper, paper and the town's most famous product -
Mitcham Lavender. The Georgian station at Mitcham is still in use, and
is one of the oldest railway stations in the world."

http://tinyurl.com/3rgo4

"The line was opened on 26th July, 1803. It was therefore the first
horse railway for public transport which was independent of a canal.
The railway was fairly level and a horse could pull five or six loaded
wagons carry over 20 tons of coal at just under 3 mph."

http://tinyurl.com/4h9wc

I drove over, and looked under, the bridge at the Dean Lane junction
with the busy A23 by the Happy Eater today and it is still very much a
bridge. When those old engineers (Jessop in this case) took on
projects they didn't do things by halves did they?! The first ever
public railway and they wanted to extend it to Portsmouth! The
Liverpool and Manchester had to go for a swim in Chat Moss, and the
next one IIRC was the London & Chatham with a colossal viaduct which
shattered the wheels of the carriages.