The first horse-drawn railway carriage in the world appeared in 1801 to transport goods from the Thames to the southern parts of London.
However, as a form of public transport, the horse-drawn railway was first used in the United States almost thirty years later.
In Russian Empire, the first passenger horse-drawn railway carriages appeared in the second half of the 19th century, and by the 1890s, such railways existed in all major cities.
Anton Chekhov, describing the novelty, remarked that the speed of this new transport was “equal to a negative value, occasionally zero, and on special occasions two versts per hour” (around 2.13 km/h).
Despite the invention of the locomotive in 1804, horse-drawn railways continued to be used worldwide until the early XX century: in London, the last horse-drawn carriage was retired in 1915, in Petrograd and New York horse-drawn railway carriages remained in operation until 1917, and in Minsk until 1929.