If steam locomotives arrived a century later

How would transport develop if the steam locomotive were delayed by eighty to one hundred years?

Canals would expand and alternative rail systems would persist, although delaying steam would also slow some of the industrial improvements that made canals efficient.

A delay of eighty to one hundred years in practical steam locomotives would likely produce a much larger canal network. The change is not a simple substitution, because canals themselves benefited from coal, engines and the wider industrial system created around steam power. Rail transport could still develop through inclined planes, ropes, pulleys and other non-locomotive methods. A speculative transcontinental American canal shows how infrastructure choices might diverge when railways lose their historical timing advantage.