Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The first railroads were built in the 1820s and 1830s, and by the 1850s were moving west from the east Coast." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "It is impossible not to share the mood of excitement, of self-confidence, of pride, which seized those who lived through this heroic age of the engineers, as the railway first linked Channel and Mediterranean, as it became possible to travel by rail to Seville, to Moscow, to Brindisi, as the iron tracks pushed westwards across North American prairies and mountains and across the Indian sub-continent in the 1860s, up the Nile valley, and into the hinterlands of Latin America in the 1870s." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 55-6] "By the end of the 1830s, there were 450 locomotives in the country, only 117 of them imported from Britain, and 3,200 miles of track--as much as the total canal mileage and, amazingly, more than twice the track in all Europe. . . . When prosperity began to return around 1842, railroad construction resumed at full throttle. . . . By fair means or foul, railway mileage had more than doubled to 7,500 by the end of the 1840s. . . . If the railroads did not initiate the industrial revolution, they certainly speeded it up. They stimulated the mining, processing, and importing of iron and steel (and, after the eventual switch in fuel, coal). They created vast primary industries in the manufacture of rails, locomotives, and rolling stock. They encourage the workforce to continue to leave agriculture and move into other occupations." [Howe: What Hath God Wrought, p. 563-6]