Retell the text in brief оr make your own project on the text. Supplementary tasks:

Supplementary tasks:

Text: The First Railways in Europe(I)

1.Read and memorize new words and expressions on the text:

steam locomotion

head-and-shoulders start

steam-worked railway

a great deal from practice

to lay out the main lines

to pioneer railways

to develop and expand trains

head-and-shoulders start in world

the first public steam-worked railway

learnt a great deal from Stephenson's practice

early Continental railways were also built by English engineers.

2.Read and translate the text

The experiments with steam locomotion in England did not go unnoticed on the Continent, although given Britain's head-and-shoulders start in world industrialisation it was several years before much development took place elsewhere.

The first public steam-worked railway in France was the Lyon & St Etienne, a 38-mile line opened in 1828 which took delivery of its first two engines the following year. They were built by Marc Seguin, a French engineer who had visited England and learnt a great deal from Stephenson's practice. His design solved a number of the problems, which had been vexing the Stockton & Darlington, without producing answers as satisfactory as Stephenson came to for the Liverpool & Manchester. Consequently the second and subsequent early French railways, such as the Paris-St Germain (1837) and the two competing lines from Paris to Versailles (1839/40), obtained their earliest locomotives from the Stephenson works at Newcastle. It was some time before native products displaced the imports, partly because so many of the early Continental railways were also built by English engineers.