Figure 5.—Early drawing of America, built by Stephenson in England in 1828.
Figure 6.—Drawing of Stourbridge Lion of 1829 appearing in Renwick’s “Treatise on the Steam Engine,” published in 1830 (notice that crank rings are not shown). The track shown is not the type upon which the locomotive ran at Honesdale, Pa.
Later in July the two locomotives were sent up the Delaware and Hudson Canal from Eddyville, N. Y., to Honesdale, Pa., where the Stourbridge Lion was subsequently tried out on the newly laid railroad tracks of the Canal company. The tests on August 8, and again on September 9, with Horatio Allen at the controls, showed that although the performance of the locomotive was satisfactory, the track was not sufficiently stable to withstand the weight of the relatively large machine. As a result of this failure, horses and steam- or water-powered stationary engines (see [figure 7]) constituted the motive power of this railroad until 1860.
The Stourbridge Lion, nevertheless, had earned the distinction of being the first locomotive to operate in America on a railroad built expressly for commercial traffic.
No record exists to show that the America was ever used, and its subsequent history as a locomotive is unknown. Two other locomotives were built by Foster, Rastrick and Co. for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Co. As these were not delivered to Rondout until after the Lion had demonstrated the inadequacy of the track at Honesdale, they were not sent there, but were instead stored at Rondout, where all trace of them has been lost. It is thought they were destroyed by fire while in storage.
Figure 7.—Combining different methods of transportation was common practice in the early days of railroading. The Delaware and Hudson as late as 1866, for example, carried coal by rail from the mines of Scranton and Carbondale, Pa., to its canal at Honesdale, Pa., and thence on barges by way of Port Jervis, Ellenville, and Rondout, N. Y., to New York City. On some early railroads, horses drew the cars on level stretches, but in hilly country where grades were very steep, gravity roads with switchbacks and inclined planes were often used. The inclined plane consisted of a set of rails over which units of the train could be raised or lowered by mechanical means. Horses, water power, or a stationary steam engine, often located at the top of the slope, were among the sources of power.