The need of finding a new way of working the coal mines of England, and of marketing the coal, which had been such an important factor in the development of the steam-engine, was a scarcely less important factor in the building of the earliest practical railway locomotive. The coal had to be hauled from the pit of the colliery to the shipping place. It was carried in cars that were pushed or pulled over a rude line of wooden or iron rails. But it was evident from the time when James Watt began to build his steam-engines to lift the coal from the mine that men of inventive minds would soon seek to send the cars over the level ground by the same power. We owe the railroad chiefly to the needs of the north of England, and there we find the real birth of the locomotive.
