The basic principle of the railway is one of great antiquity and wooden railways were used in many European mines from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. But the most far-reaching developments, as Dr. Lewis shows in this classic and hard-to-find reissued book, originally published in 1970, took place in British coalfields. Here on the many railways that were developed after 1600 the flanged wheel replaced the crude means of guidance found on the Continent and horses were employed to pull large waggons overland from the pits to rivers and harbours. This book, drawing largely on contemporary documents, discuss the early wooden railways of both Britain and Europe in terms of their operation, labour force, costs, engineering and location and demonstrates how these lines had a twofold importance. Economically, in supplying an adequate transport system, they enabled coal to be mined further from the waterways and thus encouraged a vast expansion in the coal trade; and they also laid the firm foundation on which the Railway Age of the nineteenth century was built.

M. J. T. Lewis spent nine years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where, after graduating in classics and acquiring a PhD, he was awarded a three-year fellowship. He spent it on research for this book, a pioneering study which is still regarded as the standard work in its field. From 1968 he worked in the Adult Education Department of the University of Hull, teaching industrial archaeology and the history of technology to evening classes and residential courses. He initiated an annual fieldwork course based at the Snowdonia National Park study centre, which ran for fifty years before falling victim to Covid. In 1976-78 he served as president, and thereafter a vice-president, of the Railway & Canal Historical Society, and from 1998 to 2018 he sat on the Early Railways Conference committee. A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he has published many books and papers on such diverse topics as early railways, the Welsh slate industry, and Greek and Roman engineering. He retired from teaching, though not from writing, in 2001.