Railroad electrification in the United States

The history of railroad electrification falls into three phases that we might designate the primitive, the pioneer, and the mature. The first was the period of preliminary experiment covering the mid-Nineteenth Century. The second, concentrated in the decade of 1895- 1905, was marked by the first successful installations in Europe and the United States. The third, the age of technological maturity, grew directly out of the previous period.