The T-Rail

In 1830, Robert L. Stevens (1787–1856), “President & Engineer” of the newly chartered Camden and Amboy Railroad, travelled to England to order rails and a locomotive for the company. He had gained valuable experience in steamboat design and construction from working with his father, John Stevens. While on the voyage, he whittled from a piece of wood the T-rail which, with little variation, eventually became the standard in the United States. Formerly, early railroads in America had used an iron strap laid out on wooden rails. Stevens had difficulty finding an American rolling mill to produce the rails, so the earliest ones were manufactured in Britain. The first T-rails made in America were rolled in 1846 by the Cooper and Hewitt firm in Trenton. Over the next decade they came into common use. Stevens also developed the “hook-headed spike” and the “fish plate” for fastening the rails, and he replaced the stone blocks that rails were originally fastened to with logs that were shored up with crushed rocks. Thus he presaged the wooden “sleepers” still in use on today’s roadbeds. In 1882, an engineer quipped that in America “poverty is the mother on invention” because engineers such as Stevens “used cross-ties as a temporary substitute because too poor to buy stone blocks, and so made good roads because they were not rich enough to make bad ones.” Another Stevens invention was the pilot, or “cowcatcher” attached to the front of locomotives. He never patented any of his railroad inventions. The miles of rail crisscrossing the countryside are Robert L. Stevens’s “imperishable monument.”