10. Americans were the innovators of early railroad technology
When railroads first appeared in the United States they were tracked wagonways, with the wagons pulled by horses, mules, or oxen. Americans were at the time following the example and using the technology developed by their British cousins. In 1830, again following the British lead, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began passenger service in the United States, using horse-drawn cars. It was in the American South, too often wrongly referred to as being less technologically advanced than the North, where the first steam-powered locomotive in the United States entered regular service, in December 1830. The South Carolina Canal and Steamboat Company operated over six miles of track, by 1833 expanding to 136 miles, connecting Charleston to Hamburg.
During the 1830s American companies developed steam locomotives and American railroads experimented with them, but the most powerful and more importantly reliable engines still came from Great Britain. By the late 1830s American manufacturers caught up with the British builders, and engines such as the DeWitt Clinton, ironically named for the man who championed canals which the railroads rendered obsolete, allowed American railroads to purchase locomotives made in the USA. Railroads then expanded rapidly, with the Baltimore and Ohio’s mainline reaching the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia, in 1852.