thumb|right|220px|Steam locomotives of the [[Chicago and North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards, 1942]]
The Timeline of U.S. Railway History depends upon the definition of a railway, as follows: A means of conveyance of passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, also known as tracks.
1795–1829
- 1795–99 & 1799–1804 or '05 — In 1795, Charles Bulfinch, the architect of Boston's famed State House first employed a temporary funicular railway with specially designed dumper cars to decapitate 'the Tremont's' Beacon Hill summit and begin the decades long land reclamation projects which created most of the real estate in Boston's lower elevations of today from broad mud flats, such as South Boston, Eastern parts of Dorchester, much of the shorelines of the entire Charles River basin on both the left and right banks and Brighton from mud flats, and most famously, the Back Bay.
- 1815-1820s One interpretation of historical documents<!-- cite mislaid ---> indicates the same equipment was used for a longer, more ambitious period to level and effectively remove 'The Tremont', Copely, Cope's, and Beacon Hills again into what became Boston's Back Bay.[http://bostongeology.com/boston/casestudies/fillingbackbay/fillingbackbay.htm] These moves were far from completing the project; photos from the 1850s show the majority of the Back Bay was still tidewater.
1810s–1830s
- 1800–1825 Various inventors and entrepreneurs make suggestions about building model railways in the United States. Around Coalbrookdale in the United Kingdom, mining railways become increasingly common. An early steam locomotive is given a test run in 1804, but is then wrecked carelessly. For unknown reasons, the inventor does not rebuild it for nearly two decades.<!--
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- 1809 Scottsman quarry owner Thomas Leiper, in 1809 when denied a charter to build a canal along the Crum Creek from his quarry to the docks in the tidewater, commissions a railroad test track in the yard of the Bull's Head Tavern in Philadelphia. The track had a grade of one inch and a half to the yard, with a 4% grade to test whether a horse could successfully pull against the slope.<!--
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- 1810–1829 The Leiper Railroad, a horse-drawn railroad three-quarters of a mile long, opens in 1810 after Thomas Leiper failed to obtain a charter with legal rights-of-way to build his desired canal along Crum Creek. The quarryman's 'make-do' railroad solution was the continent's first chartered railway, first operational non-temporary railway, first well documented railroad, and first constructed railroad also meant to be permanent. It was perhaps the only railroad replaced by a canal, and also one of the first to close, and of those, perhaps is alone in reopening again in 1858.
1825–1832
Inspired by the speedy success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (1825) in England's railway historical record, capitalists in the United States — already embarking upon great public works infrastructure projects to connect the new territories of the United States with the older seaboard cities industries by the canals of America's Canal Age, almost overnight began dreaming up projects using railroads — a technology in its infancy, but one employing steam engines which were rapidly becoming widely known from their successful use on steamboats. American steam engine pioneers were willing to experiment with Heat Engines using higher pressures than the mainly Atmospheric engines still fashionable in Great Britain. The rest of the world lagged the two English speaking nations. Railroads began to be proposed where canals wouldn't do, or would be too costly and with an increase in rolling stock tonnage capacity, locomotive power, and a growing confidence born of experience and new materials in less than three decades, the United States generally would discard canals as the principal design choice in favor of far more capable freight haulage technologies.
- 1825 American John Stevens (inventor), builds a test track and runs a locomotive around it in his summer home estate, Hoboken, New Jersey. This partially settles the tractive power questions, showing that on level track, metal on metal wheels can provide tractive effort and pull a load. The ability for any engine to do so on a grade is still widely doubted in the press and minds of potential investors (pubs, clubs, boardrooms, etc.), while the minds of many potential investors were well aware that most railroads in the capital poor United States would have to surmount significant grades to be useful technology. And while news from Europe was delayed 4–8 weeks, well connected Americans were aware in general of United Kingdom news coverage's and to a lesser extent, that of continental European developments. In consequence, the 1825 success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway only gradually eroded the three-way nay-sayer beliefs that the careful expensive gentle engineered grades extant in the early British railways was impracticable in most cases in America and that such grades were necessary since steel on iron rails would not provide traction on hills, were it possible to build a locomotive engine powerful enough to surmount such grades. In each case, it would take experience and success against such over at least several months before the misconceptions fell into disdain.<!--
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- 1826: The industrial animal powered Granite Railroad opens in Quincy, Massachusetts, to convey quarried granite for the Bunker Hill monument. It later becomes a common carrier railroad. <!--
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:* 1827: Taking advantage of seasonal freezing of the Lehigh Canal, and with materials prepared in advance, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) converts their 1818–19 built uniformly graded wagon road into a gravity railroad in just four months of construction.