Train, George Francis

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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b. 24 March 1829 Boston, Massachusetts, USA d. 1904

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American entrepreneur who introduced tramways to the streets of London.

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He was the son of a merchant, Oliver Train, who had settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. His mother and sister died in a yellow fever epidemic and he was sent to live on his grandmother's farm at Waltham, Massachusetts, where he went to the district school. He left in 1843 and was apprenticed in a grocery store in nearby Cambridge, where, one day, a relative named Enoch Train called to see him. George Train left and went to join his relative's shipping office across the river in Boston; Enoch Train, among other enterprises, ran a packet line to Liverpool and, in 1850, sent George to England to manage his Liverpool office. Three years later, George Train went to Melbourne, Australia, and established his own shipping firm; he is said to have earned £95,000 in his first year there. In 1855 he left Australia to travel in Europe and the Levant where he made many contacts. In the late 1850s and early 1860s he was in England seeking capital for American railroads and promoting the construction of street railways or trams in Liverpool, London and Staffordshire. In 1862 he was back in Boston, where he was put in jail for disturbing a public meeting; in 1870, he achieved momentary fame for travelling around the world in eighty days.

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Further Reading

D.Malone (ed.), 1932–3, Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 5, New York: Charles Scribner.

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