The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in course of time its elaborate system of planes disappeared, as they disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.
An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the Philadelphia & Columbia—the name of the road had been reversed—and in 1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People’s line, the other the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines, which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America’s mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a passenger carrier.
Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive DeWitt Clinton, when the railroad fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of ’37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality.
Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent draymen, ’bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there.
But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because of the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a great bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the close of the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the railroad that had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New York & Harlem, and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That system spread itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to Rochester, another from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it consolidated; gradually it sent its tentacles over the entire imperial strength of New York State.
CHAPTER II
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD