this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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bUt tHe US Is a yOunGEr coUnTrY! wE haVeN't HaD mUCh TiMe tO caTcHuP.
Looks at China over the last 10 years...
Are we suggesting China is a younger country? I don’t deny they’ve caught up insanely fast though.
No, I didn't say anything like that. I'm saying they're a large country that only took 10 years to build out a high speed rail network.
It both is and it isn't. An entity know as China has existed for millennia, but the modern government has existed for a little over 100 years.
It's an interesting thought exercise on how to treat these types of things though. Like how old is the German state? Do you count it from the original unification in 1866, or do you count the government that's continued since the fall of the Nazi party? What about the Reunification after the fall of the Soviet Union?
The culture and the idea of a country can carry past the fall of its government, but how old does that then make the new state?
Truthfully I don't know how to answer this, it's neat though
I always find this one funny as perhaps more than any other nation railways massively shaped how the US grew into what it is today.
… Ukraine? Normally you’re not supposed to use “the” when referring to it these days.
And while I’m sure rail is an important element of the development of modern Ukraine, I don’t think its the most significant example.
Was a typo. Meant to type US.
It's much harder to plan around property ownership when you can't just kill the property owners.
American culture is generally anti-collective so that "independence" coupled with cars becoming status symbols ensured the death of rail in America.
US was constituted in 1787. Trains were invented in 1804 and made commercial in 1829. You've had the same time as the rest of us.
Railways were being built in the US as early as 1795, and their first purpose-built “main line”, the Baltimore & Ohio, opened in 1830, 5 years after its British counterpart the Stockton & Darlington.
If the train (with a locomotive engine, I assume) wasn't invented until 1804, as per the comment you're replying to, were those first railways in 1795 used with animals like horses? Or maybe there's a disagreement on what counts as the first "real" railway?
Trains have been in use since the mid-18th century, powered by gravity, men, or horses.
They were likely referring to an event in 1804 when, to satisfy a wager, Richard Trevithick’s second rail locomotive hauled ten tons of coal, 5 wagons and 70 men along the full length of the Merthyr Tramroad. It was this run which publicly resolved the question of whether enough tractive force could be generated with only the adhesion of the locomotive itself to the smooth rail.
While this was an experimental design, commercial use of steam locomotives started in 1812 on the Middleton Railway, which had been built in the 1750s and part of which operates as a museum railway today, the oldest route in continuous operation in the world.
Their 1829 date refers to the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which was the first purpose-built inter-city main line, but was pre-dated by a lot of other railways.
As there’s a lot of variability of what constitutes a railway (plateway / edgeway? wood / granite / metal tracks? Common carrier or single-user? Passengers? Nags or Kettles Etc) dates are tough. The British rail industry has decided that “modern railways” began in 1825 with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington, and there has been a full year of celebrations for Rail 200. This is a somewhat arbitrary figure and reflects more the desire to rebrand the “newly” re-nationalised rail operators, because the public apparently didn’t sufficiently notice when they were actually nationalised in 2020 as part of the covid emergency. Like I said, dates are tough.
Thanks for a great in-depth explanation. Very interesting knowledge. Yep, dates are tough, and even tougher without a common definition of the actual question, and of what counts as the answer.