原文
（1）In the early industrial era, London, like most major early industrial cities, had grown beyond its ability to harvest timber for charcoal. Deforestation drove up the price of wood, improving the economics of the alternative: coal. Ever-higher coal demand led to ever-deeper coal mines.
（2）Those deeper mines were punched below the water table, necessitating pumps to force out water. Muscle didn’t work at all to clear out the freakin’ water table, so steam engines came into being to address the problem. It worked for a bit, but the new steam engines required power and that power came from coal and that coal came from ever-deeper shafts that were filled with ever-more water, so miners hadn’t really solved their problem, but instead industrialized its scale.
（3）Faced with the cost of ever-deeper shafts and ever-more-expensive steam engines, some suppliers ventured farther afield to source coal from seams that were not directly adjacent to London. That fix required its own buildout: canals and boats to transport the black stuff back to London. Soon half of Britain’s private boats were used to move coal, generating its own inflationary price issue.
（4）Nudged to consider other options, some enterprising coal suppliers combined the newer, more powerful steam engines with the rails used for cart transport within the mines, with a metal that only coal could smelt: steel. Bam! Railways.
（5）Railroads were energy made animate. Getting man to the moon was cool and all, but humanity’s greatest trick to date is building machines to get grain from more than fifty miles inland to the water. And to do so while still making a profit! Moving stuff on water remained cheaper, but a rail line could be built to anywhere that was flat and transporting stuff via rail was“only” twice the cost to operate of a ship. Compared to the >20 times the cost for pre-rail land transport, only having to pay double as a true revolution. The most prolific agricultural lands in the world, the ones that we rely on to this day not simply to keep modern society in motion but to quite literally keep everybody alive, could now be opened for business. In Europe, the shift from carriage to rail reduced the cost of internal transport by a factor of eight, enabling the rapid massing of nouns of all kinds at economically sustainable prices, whether the nouns in question be foodstuffs, coal, iron ore, or soldiers.
参考译文
（1）在工业时代初期，英国伐木烧炭的能力已不堪重负，而这一时期的大多数工业城市都处在一样的窘境。森林砍伐推高了木材价格，从而提高了替代品煤炭的经济效益。煤炭需求越来越高导致煤矿也越挖越深。
（2）那些深矿井是通过打孔、直达地下水位之下的，必须使用水泵将水排出，仅靠人力要清除地下水是无法做到的。为了解决这个问题，蒸汽机就应运而生了。它起到了一定的作用，但这些新生产的蒸汽机需要动力，而动力来源于煤炭，煤炭又来源于钻井，而钻井里充满了水，所以矿工们并没有真正解决问题，反而加大了问题的严重性。
（3）由于挖掘深矿和使用蒸汽机的成本越来越高，一些供应商去到离伦敦更远的地方去开采煤层。但这需要扩建基础设施，即开凿运河和修建船只，以便将“黑糊糊的东西”运回遥远的伦敦。很快，英国一半的私人船都是用来运输煤炭，甚至引发了英国的通货膨胀。
（4）在这种情况促使下，一些雄心勃勃的煤炭供应商想到了其他办法，他们将更新且更强大的蒸汽发动机与矿井内用于推车运输的铁轨结合起来，更进一步把只有煤炭才能冶炼的金属——钢铁——连在了一起。于是，铁路诞生了！
（5）铁路是由能源驱动的。人类登上月球是了不起的壮举，但迄今为止，人类最伟大的发明是运输工具，能够将粮食从内陆五十多英里外的地方运送到海域。而且还能从中获利！尽管水路运输比较便宜，但铁路可以修建在任何平坦的地方，而且运输成本也只有船舶的两倍。铁路出现前，陆地运输的成本高出 20 多倍，而现在成本只需要十分之一，确实是一场进步。世界上最肥沃的土地不仅维持着现代社会的运转，实际上还维持着每个人的生命，现在也变成了商业用地。在欧洲，马车运输转向铁路运输让国内运输成本降低到了八倍，使得各种货物（食品、煤炭、铁矿石或者兵器）都能够以经济可持续的价格迅速涌入市场。