On August 8, 1865, Samuel Calthrop received U.S. Patent No. 49,227 on a Railway Car:
Calthrop recognized the problem of “resistance occasioned by the passage of the train through the atmosphere.” and largely solved it using “the principles so successfully applied to ship building.”
Calthrop must have suffered the frustrations that many inventors endure suffer be so far ahead of his time. The first streamlined rail vehicle was an experimental e German experimental Schienenzeppelin (Rail Zeppelin) designed 65 years later in 1929, and built in 1930 by aircraft engineer Franz Kruckenberg, It featured an airplane-like body and a giant rear pusher propeller that could reach 143 mph, but it was not successful because of, well, the giant rear pusher propeller. The first practical streamlined trains were the Union Pacific M-10000 aka “The Zip” and the Burlington Pioneer Zephyr, which debuted in February and April 1934, respectively.
The Rev. Dr. Samuel R. Calthrop was a Unitarian minister and amateur scientist born in Lincolnshire, England. He was educated at Cambridge emigrated to the United States in 1853, and became a Unitarian minister in 1859. He was living in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1865 when he patented his “air-resisting train.” In 1868 he became Pastor of May Memorial Church in Syracuse, New York where he served as a pastor for more than 42, when he became Pastor Emeritus. He died in 1917 at the age of 87, and never got to see his invention implemented.