Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/181

RAILROAD 173 sion ; the cylinder was 3 in. in diameter, and connected with the wheels by a system of gear- ing. The whole engine could not have weighed over a ton, but with it he drew an open car filled with the directors of the road and some friends, at a speed which reached 18 m. an hour, from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills. This was the first locomotive for railroad purposes ever built in America, and the first one nsed in the transportation of passengers on this side of the Atlantic. This railroad was originally built with stone and wooden cross ties, and wooden rails strapped with flat bars of iron ^ and in. thick, and from 2 to 4J in. wide. The bars were fastened down by spikes, the heads of which were countersunk into the iron. This method was generally adopted upon the early American railroads, but was soon found to be defective and dangerous. The oscillation and balloting of the engines and cars caused the ends of the rails to work loose, thus making what came to be known as " snake heads," and these were caught up by the wheels and thrust upward through the bottom of the cars. The successful use of locomotives in Europe and America gave an extraordinary impulse to the construction of new lines of railroad upon the principal routes of intercommunication. Char- ters for railroads were obtained in Massachu- setts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other states. Operations were begun in South Carolina in 1829 upon a rail- road designed to connect Charleston with the Savannah river, six miles of which were com- pleted and opened in the same year. The com- pany having this work in charge, under the advice of their engineer, Horatio Allen, who had gone to England to examine the railways of that country, determined to operate their road by the exclusive use of locomotives, and offered a premium of $500 for the best plan of horse locomotive. This was awarded to C. E. Detmold, civil engineer (now of New York), who designed and constructed an engine run by a horse walking on an endless platform, which carried passengers at the rate of 12 m. an hour. The same gentleman in the winter of 1829-'30 made the drawings of the steam loco- motive Best Friend, designed by E. L. Miller of Charleston, which was built by the Kembles of New York and placed on the Charleston railroad late in the summer of 1835. This railroad was the first to use the important ar- rangement of two four-wheeled trucks or bo- gies for engines and passenger cars. As be- fore stated, this arrangement was practically wrought out by Bryant on the Quincy railroad in hauling large masses of granite, and was experimented upon and finally in 1834 patented by Ross Winans, but seems to have been first put into efficient use in accordance with de- signs made by Horatio Allen in 1830. The eight-wheeled double bogie carriage was first used upon the Baltimore and Ohio road in 1834, and was built from the designs of Wi- nans. In August, 1830, the Mohawk and Hud- son railroad, from Albany to Schenectady, was begun; in October, 1831, it was carrying 387 passengers a day; and in 1832 a locomotive with a load of eight tons travelled on it at the rate of 30 m. an hour. Various railroads in the Pennsylvania coal region and the Balti- more and Susquehanna railroad were begun in 1830. The railroad from Richmond to the coal mines, 13 m. distant, was finished in 1831 ; and on April 16 of the same year the New Orleans and Pontchartrain railroad, 44- m. long, was opened. From this time forth railroads were multiplied with great rapidity. In 1832 it is stated that 67 were in opera- tion in Pennsylvania alone ; and in that year several of the most important railroads in Massachusetts and New Jersey were begun. Indeed, so great was the enterprise through- out the United States from 1832 to 1837 in the projection and construction of railroads, that at the end of that period the completed lines exceeded in number and aggregate length those of any other country. Since then, with occasional interruptions arising from financial crises and the civil war, the multiplication of railroads has kept pace with the extraordinary increase of population and wealth; and now the mileage of railroads in this country is more than four times as great as in Great Britain, and far in excess of that of all the rest of the world. The American railroads have how- ever grown up under the requirements of the various regions, and have been planned, con- structed, and fostered in a great measure inde- pendently of each other and without regard to any great or national system. The charters in nearly every instance were granted by the re- spective states for the roads in their own terri- tory, so that most of the through lines con- necting the great cities and widely separated regions of the country grew up by the con- solidation of various short sections of road into continuous lines under one management, or by the longer and more prosperous roads leasing the shorter and poorer ones, and only occa- sionally by agreement of connecting roads to cooperate with each other in the arrangement of their trains. To the absence of national control over the construction of railroads is due the fact that no uniform gauge for the American system was adopted. Every state, and in fact nearly every company, was left free to fix its own gauge and decide upon the character of its own roads. The gauge of 4 ft. 8^ in. first used in English locomotives was generally continued for the sake of conveni- ence even after the locomotives came to be exclusively built in this country, but indepen- dent gauges were also introduced. The Ohio and New Jersey railroads generally adopted 4 ft. 10 in., which in connecting with the roads of the standard gauge necessitated the use of cars with the trucks adjusted to the narrower gauge, but having wheels sufficiently wide to run upon the wider gauge. These were called "broad tread" wheels, and the cars "compro-