“The people are building what is called a railroad. This consists of iron bars laid down along the ground and made fast, so that carriages with small wheels may run upon them with facility. In this way one horse will be able to draw as much as ten horses on a common road. A part of the railroad is already done, and if you choose to take a ride upon it you can do so. You enter a car something like a stage, and then you will be drawn along by two horses at a speed of twelve miles per hour.”
The horse-car system, in its perfection, did not prevail until many years after the establishment of steam cars. It is curious to note how suddenly, in our own day, the horse cars were banished by cars run by electricity; as speedily as were stage-coaches cast aside by steam. A short time ago a little child of eight years came running to me in much excitement over an unusual sight she had seen in a visit to a small town—“a trolley car dragged by horses.”
Many strange plans were advanced for the new railways. I have seen a wood-cut of a railway-coach rigged with masts and sails gayly running on a track. I don’t know whether the inventor of this wind-car ever rigged his car-boat and tried to run it. Another much-derided suggestion was that the motive power should be a long rope or chain, and the notion was scorned, but we have lived to see many successful lines of cars run by cable.
Kites and balloons also were seriously suggested as motive powers. It was believed that in a short time any person would be permitted to run his own private car or carriage over the tracks, by paying toll, as a coach did on a turnpike.
The body of the stage-coach furnished the model for the first passenger cars on the railway. A copy is here given of an old print of a train on the Veazie Railroad, which began to run from Bangor, Maine, in 1836. The road had two locomotives of Stevenson’s make from England. They had no cabs when they arrived here, but rude ones were attached. They burned wood. The cars were also English; a box resembling a stage-coach was placed on a rude platform. Each coach carried eight people. The passengers entered the side. The train ran about twelve miles in forty minutes. The rails, like those of other railroads at the time, were of strap-iron spiked down. These spikes soon rattled loose, so each engine carried a man with a sledge hammer, who watched the track, and when he spied a spike sticking up he would reach down and drive it home. These “snake heads,” as the rolled-up ends of the strap-iron were called, sometimes were forced up through the cars and did great damage. “Snake heads” were as common in railway travel as snags in the river in early steamboating.
The Boston and Lowell, Boston and Providence, and Boston and Worcester railroads were all opened in 1835. The locomotive used on the Boston and Worcester road was called the Meteor. The cars were coach-shaped and ran on single trucks. The freight cars were short vans or wagon-bodies covered with canvas like a Conestoga wagon. A picturesque view of an old railway train is given opposite [page 288] in the picture painted by Mr. Edward Lamson Henry, called “The Arrival of the Train.” It shows a train at a way station between Harrisburg and Lancaster, in the year 1839, and a comparison between the coaches on the track and the coach and horses waiting near by will show that the same model served for both.
Accidents were many on these early roads; some were fatal, some were ridiculous. The clumsy locomotive often broke down, and horses and oxen had to be impressed to drag the cars to the nearest station and repair shop. An old print showing “Uncle Ame Morris’s” oxen serving as a locomotive on a railroad near Danbury, Connecticut, is given on [page 289]. Coaching accidents had seldom been fatal, and ancient citizens were appalled at the deaths on the rail. Never was the cry of “the good old times” so loudly heard as in the early days of the railroad. Especially were the injuries by escaping steam and by communicated fire deemed horrible and unbearable. An old-school blood thus summarized all these sentiments: “You got upset in a coach—and there you were! You get upset in a rail-car—and, damme, where are you?”
The roadbed of the track was laid thus, as shown in the words of a State Report made to the Massachusetts Legislature on January 16, 1829:—
“A continuous stone wall, laid so deep in the ground as not to be moved by the effects of the frost; and surmounted by a rail of split granite about a foot in thickness and depth, with a bar of iron on top of it of sufficient thickness for the carriage wheels to run.”