r rails than upon common
roads, and with how much greater ease and less expense ordinary weights
could be carried. The same had been demonstrated in England before.
Locomotives were not yet used in either country, but only horse-power.
The conviction spread rapidly that not only highway transportation but
even that by canals would soon be, for all large burdens, either quite
superseded or of secondary importance. In 1827 the Maryland Legislature
chartered a railroad from Baltimore to Wheeling. The projectors, though
regarding it a bold act, promised an average rate between the two cities
of at least four miles per hour. Subscriptions were offered for more
than twice the amount of the stock. The Massachusetts Legislature the
same year appointed commissioners to look out a railway route between
Boston and Hudson River. Also in this year a railway was completed at
Mauch Chunk, Pa., for transporting coal to the landing on the Lehigh.
The descent was by gravity, mules being used to haul back the cars.

In most country parts, the new railway projects encountered great
hostility. Engineers were not infrequently clubbed from the fields as
they sought to survey. Learned articles appeared in the papers arguing
against the need of railways and exhibiting the perils attending them.
When steam came to be used, these scruples were re-enforced by the
alleged danger that the new system of travel would do away with the
market for oats and for horses, and that stage-drivers would seek wages
in vain.

The first trip by a locomotive was in 1828, over the Carbondale and
Honesdale route in Pennsylvania. The engine was of English make, and run
by Mr. Horatio Allen, who had had it built. This was a year before the
first steam railroad was opened in England. July 4, 1828, construction
upon the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was begun. It, like the other early
roads, was built of stone cross-ties, with wooden rails topped with
heavy straps of iron. Such ties were soon replaced by wooden ones, as
less likely to be split by frost, but the wooden rail with its iron
strap might be seen on branch lines, for instance, between Monocacy
Bridge and Frederick City, Md., so late as the Civil War.

[Illustration: Horizontal and verical view of a articulated locaomotive.]
The "South Carolina," 1831, and plan of its running gear.

The first railroad for passengers in this country went into operation
between Charleston and Hamburg, S. C., in 1830. The locomo