Chapter 7: Land Transportation

The engineering involved in transportation provided one of the points from which the modern mechanical engineering profession in the United States emerged. The shops that produced the steam engines for river boats and the locomotives for railroads had, by the 1840s, become a leading training ground for the first generation of professional mechanical engineers. As railroads became the primary means of long-distance transport for goods in the late nineteenth century, they also became a leading employer of mechanical engineers. Not surprisingly, the Rail Transportation Division was one of the original eight divisions created when ASME in 1920 adopted a divisional organization; it remains among that organization’s most active divisions. Unfortunately, despite the rail industry’s importance to American history and to the history of mechanical engineering, few articles dealing with the history of this form of land transportation have appeared in Mechanical Engineering magazine over the past fifty years. None were selected for this volume.