In a message dated 5/12/2006 10:14:42 PM Mountain Standard Time, KarenHob@aol.com writes: Common folk walked or had a card drawn by a cow or ox or maybe a horse. That typo makes a funny picture! Should be "cart". That was usually a high-sided two wheeler. A few farmers had wagons with four wheels that they used as hay wagons and to bring in crops during harvest. I don't know if they used them for a longer trip on the road unless they had a pair of oxen or horses to pull them. A wagon could get pretty heavy if loaded with household goods and there were not generally paved roads on which to make your way to the nearest river where you might catch a river raft for the next leg of your journey. There may also have been limits on the amount of weight the river transports carried making carts more apt to be accepted and cheaper to transport by raft. The RR were the first public transport that made distance travel feasible for the common folk. In Bohemia there were very few of them in 1850. Development was slow but steady after that. There are some maps of RR lines in Bohemia in my 1895 Putzger's Schule Atlas. This historic atlas has a lot of very useful and rare maps. Putzgers dated later are cheaper to buy but they also lack a lot of the maps found in the older editions -- they concentrate on modern history. You have to get one made after 1918 to get the new map of Europe at the end of WW II and one made after 1945 for the end of WW II maps. I also have one from the 1950s that has all those maps. I suggest that list members check what they might be able to buy in an old Putzger's at Alibris or other used book stores on the Internet. There may be a number of them listed at the ZVAB website. I used Putzger as a searchword and got a lot of hits. I scrolled down looking for the oldest publication date. A 1908 edition was EUR 20. 1899 is EUR 34.10. The 1961 Jubilee edition appears to have some "extra" stuff in it, is only $16 or so at Alibris. Amazon.de also has some hits with the search: Putzger. Karen