The English Influence On American Railroads*
Railway and Locomotive Historical
Society Bulletin, no. 91 (1954)
* As an original paper,
prepared by the author while at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., this article
was thoroughly documented, and its footnotes gave many pertinent sidelights to
the text. Due to space limitations of the bulletin it was necessary to omit the
documentation and footnotes. A comprehensive bibliography which accompanied the
article, is included, in the belief that it will be of infinite value to anyone
wishing to delve further into this unusual phase of American Railroad history.
The debt the United States
owes to England for our railroad system is far greater than either the average
American or Englishman realizes; greater than historians of either nation
effectively state. Most Americans at first would deny any obligation to England
for the transportation benefits we enjoy today. Under pressure they might admit
that the locomotive did develop in England and that a few came to this country
over a century ago. A biased enthusiast might retort that English inventor
Trevethick stole the locomotive from American Oliver Evans before 1800; the
locomotive is an American invention.
This paper proposes to trace
English transportation ideas across the Atlantic, and American reaction to
these ideas: to follow the surprising number of Americans, who visited England,
especially to observe the railroad and the locomotive, and the far-reaching
results of these observations; to show the American adaptation of and
improvement on the English locomotive; to enumerate some of the many
publications and republications of English-inspired books and pamphlets, which
preceded and followed the introduction of the railroad into the United States;
to relate an example of construction by English engineers with English capital,
equipment, rails and labor in America during the Civil War; and, finally, to
relate a small part of the economic and political story of British financial aid,
which accompanied the English locomotive and, especially the rail, to the
United States.
Contrary to popular opinion,
the dissemination of information on steam and rail transportation within the
United States antedates the great triumphs of George Stephenson, antedates both
the 1825 Stockton and Darlington opening and the 1829 Rainhill Locomotive
Trials on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad. English newspapers, magazines
and books exported the latest facts to the English-speaking world. Visitors to
England carried the ideas home. English commercial houses informed inquiring
American customers. American engineers went to England for training, or were
sent by organizations to learn the latest practice. Early nineteenth century
communications may have been slow and unsure, but the ideas crossed the ocean
despite obstacles.
Had George Stephenson carried
out either his 1808 or 1819 deliberations about emigration to the United
States, America might have been the scene of Stephenson's locomotive successes
rather than England.
His son, Robert Stephenson, in returning to England from
South America, made a short tour of the United States and Canada in 1827, but
left little record of where he visited, other than Niagara Falls, or of his
impressions of the United States and its transportation problems.
I. EARLY ENGLISH INFLUENCE
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
(1764-1820) studied and worked with the famous English engineer, Smeaton. In
answering Gallatin's request for information on canals and turnpikes, he
volunteered information on railroads. First, a railroad might be used as an
adjunct to canals, "a last resort," an expensive, inconvenient and
imperfect means of crossing high areas where water is scarce. Then, in a
critical analysis of the canals already built along the Susquehanna, Potomac
and James Rivers, he suggested that railroads could make the coal from the
James River Field more available to tidewater, especially by a line from
Ampthill up hall's Creek.
In a postscript, Latrobe
added a "few remarks on railroads . . . [because] public attention has
been often called to this sort of improvement, and the public mind filled with
very imperfect conceptions of its utility. " Telling that either timber or
iron rails might be used for construction and that cast iron laid on stone was
more durable, he advised that cast iron rails on beds of timber were both
durable and within the ability of this country to finance. The gauge
recommended varies from 31/2 to five feet; rails are described at 5/8"
thick and L-shaped (wheels unflanged) laid on timber rails. Cost per mile of
double track is estimated at $10,000, with the iron being nearly three-fourths
of the cost, $7,240. Capacity with a single horse is rated at eight tons in
four wagons.
The astonishing loads drawn
by a single horse on English railroads, Latrobe told, had raised hopes that
railroads would soon be built in the United States. Their utility, he repeated,
would be confined to the James River Coal Fields, or from the marble quarries
near Philadelphia, to the Schuylkill River. Finally, railroads as a means of
overcoming difficult parts or artificial navigation are termed "
invaluable and in many instances offer the means of accomplishing distant lines
of communication which might remain impractical even to our means for centuries
to come. "
Printed in two 1808 editions,
this report was reprinted twice in 1811, and four times in the next eleven
years. Latrobe's sons, John Hazelhurst and Benjamin H., and his pupils, Robert
Mills, of South Carolina, and William Strickland, of Philadelphia, built and
planned America's earliest railroads. Latrobe, however, hadn't recognized the
value of Oliver Evans' 1786 high-pressure steam carriage, a predecessor of the
locomotive. He reported to Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society that
it was impractical.
Colonel John Stevens (1750-1838)
took Latrobe's railroad recommendations, added information from the English
magazine, A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the arts, edited by W. Nicholson and advocated that New York
build a three-hundred-mile railroad, rather than a canal, from Albany to
Buffalo. Predicting speeds of a hundred miles per hour to be possible, but
holding that twenty to thirty miles would be the practice, Stevens published
his arguments as a forty-three page pamphlet, in 1812. In addition to this
magazine, Stevens had direct connection with England. John Cox Stevens,
visiting England to patent his father's multi-tubular boiler in 1805, purchased
an order of books for his father and visited Watt, in an effort to persuade the
inventor to build high-pressure steam engines. Stevens' plans to visit England
in 1810, like Stephenson's emigration, never materialized. English engineer,
Marc Isambard Brunel, who aided in the construction of Stevens' first steamboat
in 1798, and Stevens were correspondents in 1810.
Between 1815, and 1823,
Stevens secured legislative permission to construct railroads from the Delaware
to the Raritan Rivers, in New Jersey, and from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pa.
In 1820, he petitioned the Pennsylvania Legislature to build a line from
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Four years later, he patented the application of
his tubular boiler to the steam locomotive. By 1826, Stevens built and operated
a locomotive on a circular track at his Hoboken estate, the first constructed
and operated in America. Stevens' citation of the successful railroad operation
at Hetton, in England, the same year, shows that he was keeping himself
informed of progress abroad. John Stevens lived to see his predictions come
true. The work that his sons accomplished in carrying out his ideas will be
noted later.
Railroad articles in Rees'
Cyclopedia, by a Doctor Anderson,
read as a boy, inspired Philadelphian George W. Smith to visit England in 1820,
expressly to study its railroads. In the next four years Smith printed six
editions of three assays on his observations and had given away two thousand
copies. Through Smith's efforts these essays were reprinted in seventy American
papers and periodicals. Several were even reprinted in Europe. The Berks and
Schuylkill Journal, of Reading, Pa.,
the nearest city of size to Pennsylvania's Southern Anthracite Coal Field,
reprinted Smith's ideas on the superiority of railroads over canals, just as
the Schuylkill Navigation was opening in 1825.
Smith's predictions before 1824
of locomotive speeds above fifteen miles per hour, while modest compared to
those of John Stevens, brought severe criticism, especially after Wood's 1825
English edition told American purchasers that twelve miles per hour was the top
speed to be expected. Smith, in editing an 1832 American edition of Wood,
refers to six English publications for more current information than the
original work presented: three magazines, two encyclopedias, and publications of
the Highland Society. It is in this work that Smith claims the pioneer 1804
locomotive, built by Vivian and Trevethick, was copied from the plans of
Philadelphian Oliver Evans, when his agent to England displayed them to
engineers in 179495. Smith further claims that he proposed a railroad from the
Potomac to the Ohio, in 1824, but that, at the same time, he predicted a line
from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh could be built at less cost.
James Renwick (1792-1863),
Professor of Natural Sciences and Experimental Chemistry at Columbia College,
New York City, was another American who credited Doctor Anderson for rousing
his interest in railroads. Born in Liverpool, Renwick was brought to New York
by his emigrating-merchant father, who maintained trading relations with
Liverpool. The presence of Liverpool papers, letters from his father's
commercial correspondents, and English scientific magazines may be taken for
granted in a home with this background. Renwick graduated with highest honors
in his Columbia class of 1801. After working for the United States as a
topographical engineer, he became an instructor at Columbia College in 1812. In
1820, he began his career as professor, a position he held until 1853.
In addition to the influence
Professor Renwick may have had on turning the interest of engineer Horatio
Allen, a Columbia graduate of 1823, and the first man to operate an English
locomotive in the United States, toward railroad building, he contributed
information on inclined planes to an 1823 New Jersey Canal Prospectus, which
was printed in two editions. Recognition for this work came to Professor
Renwick three years later in the form of an eighteen-page pamphlet issued by
Franklin Institute. The Delaware and Hudson Canal Company employed him as a consultant
in November, 1827, on their railroad. In 1828, he edited and made additions to
an English work, Lardner's Popular Lectures on the Steam Engine. The popularity of this work caused three additional
editions, two in 1836, and the last in 1838. Renwick's own Treatise on Steam
Engines was issued in 1830 and 1838.
A work more directly linked with railroads was his 1831 comparison of costs
between the Mohawk and Hudson, New York State's pioneer railroad, and a canal.
The Charleston (S.C.) City
Gazette carried a letter proposing
the railroad as a means to gain for that city a better position in the cotton
trade, as early as Nov. 22, 1821. Although signed "H" and credited to
Senator Robert Hayne, this early stand for railroads was probably motivated by
Robert Mills (1781-1855), a pupil of Latrobe. The year before, this South
Carolinian circulated his proposals (in a hundred page pamphlet) that the
Washington, D. C.-Pacific Coast trip could be cut to sixty-five days, by a rail
or turnpike road over the Rocky Mountains, between the headwaters of the
Missouri and the Columbia. In 1821, Mills declared that the Charleston, S.
C.-Pacific Coast trip might be made via canals, rivers and a railroad over the
Rockies, in sixty-two days. This same year a model railroad was displayed in
Charleston. Speedy mail service between New Orleans and Washington was one of
the benefits promised to the Postmaster General, on a timber railroad proposed
by Mills in 1827.
Active in the pioneer South
Carolina Railroads, Mills advocated' in 1828, Stevens' pile construction, as on
the Delaware and Hudson, assumed that locomotives be used, and made a complete
estimate of the whole cost of construction, including locomotives, cars and
coaches. A Committee of Inquiry, reporting on Nov. 11, 1828, established
correspondence with England, referred to English railroads, English engineers'
advice to other American lines, and of the dispatch by other states of American
engineers to observe English practice. E. L. Miller, Charleston merchant,
elected a director at the first 1828 meeting after the incorporation of the
line, sailed to England to observe construction and expressly to see the
Liverpool and Manchester Locomotive Trials. The far-reaching results of
Miller's visit will be recounted later.
II. AMERICAN VISITS TO ENGLAND
The visits made to England to
observe the progress in the railroad, and the effect these visits had in the
United States, will be discussed in detail. Some are well known, but the
results occasioned by the lesser-known warrant exposition.
An 1824 prospectus of the
Liverpool and Manchester Railroad tells of American interest in their line.
Evan Thomas, of Baltimore, though not mentioned by name in this prospectus,
probably was the American in Liverpool gathering data for a railroad projected
between the Potomac and the Ohio. Thomas sent this information to his brother,
Phillip E. Thomas, whose interest in railroads had been aroused by accounts of
the Stockton and Darlington. William Brown, later an M.P. from Liverpool, about
this same time sent information to his brother George, of Baltimore. Together,
George Brown and Philip E. Thomas sparked the organization of the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad in 1827. Baltimore also obtained the most accurate and latest
railroad information through their relations with English commercial houses.
Moncure Robinson (1802-1891),
son of a Richmond, Va., merchant, studied engineering both at home and in
Europe. While observing the public works of England, between the years
1825-1828, he met and became well acquainted with George Stephenson. Upon his
return he worked as engineer on the Allegheny Portage Railroad of the Main Line
of Public Works of Pa., the Little Schuylkill Railroad in the Schuylkill County
Coal Fields, which purchased English locomotives by 1833, the Danville and
Pottsville, all in Pennsylvania, as well as on the Chesterfield Railroad and
the Petersburg and Roanoke in his native state. In addition to the railroads in
Pennsylvania, Robinson surveyed the " Catawissa Route, " later the
Little Schuylkill and Susquehanna Railroad, between the Upper Schuylkill, the
Lehigh and the Susquehanna Rivers, and the proposed Nescopec Canal route
between the Upper Lehigh and the Susquehanna Rivers. After locating an
extension of the Little Schuylkill Railroad to Reading, Pa., in 1833, he laid
out, during 1834-1836. the final rail link between the First Anthracite Coal
Field and Tidewater, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad.
Moncure Robinson returned to
England, in 1836, to secure an English loan to complete the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad to Mt. Carbon, in the First Anthracite Coal Field, and to
purchase eight locomotives from Braithwaite, Milner & Co., of London. These
eight-ton 0-4-0 engines, arriving in the United States between 1838 and 1841,
were the last of the early locomotives imported from England by any American
railroad. One, the "Rocket," survives at Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia. The loan came from the London bankers Gowan and Marx, who had
heavy investments in American railroads. The Philadelphia and Reading honored
these financiers by naming a Robinson-planned 4-4-0, the "Gowan and
Marx." Built by Eastwick and Harrison, of Philadelphia, this engine
established its builder's reputation by bringing 423 tons from Reading to
Tidewater. Seventeen publications on railroads, written by Robinson between
1829-1838, survive today.
The Pennsylvania Society for
the Promotion of Internal Improvements, in 1825, sent architect and engineer
William Strickland (17841854), a pupil of Latrobe, and his assistant, Samuel H.
Kneass, to gather facts on English canals and railroads. Upon his return,
Strickland recommended that Pennsylvania construct railroads rather than
canals. "Canal fever," the completion of the Schuylkill Navigation,
and the near-completion of the Union Canal, linking Philadelphia with the
Susquehanna River, caused the Pennsylvania Canal Convention of 1825 to vote
down the engineer's railroad proposals as too impractical. Strickland's trip
created the railroad sections of the Pennsylvania Public Works, the
Philadelphia and Columbia and the Allegheny Portage Railroads. Later,
Strickland engineered the Wilmington and Susquehanna Railroad, part of today's
Pennsylvania Washington-New York Line.
Kneass, Strickland's assistant
and the creator of the drawings for Strickland's Report, became the 1828
engineer for another pioneer Schuylkill County anthracite road, the Mine Hill
and Schuylkill Haven. This line fed its tonnage into the Schuylkill Canal. The
next year English experience was carried to Kentucky's pioneer line, the
Lexington and Ohio, by this engineer. Like Robinson and other early engineer
visitors to England, Kneass made a return visit in 1840, to observe the latest
improvements and methods on the English railroads. In the United States, after
his return, he practiced his profession on the Philadelphia and Trenton, the
Philadelphia and Wilmington, (sections of the Washington-New York Pennsylvania
line today) the Pennsylvania and the Northwestern Pennsylvania.
An English locomotive made a
trip over an American railroad before the 1829 Rainhill Trials on the Liverpool
and Manchester. Had the track construction equaled English standards, or the
locomotive been built nearer to their specified weights, Stephenson's success
would have occurred a month after the Honesdale trials on the Delaware and
Hudson Canal Company Railroad. Because of this occurrence, Horatio Allen's
visit to England was the most momentous of the railroad inspections made by
Americans, from 1820 to 1844.
Influenced by newspaper
accounts about the locomotives of the Stockton and Darlington, Horatio Allen
(1802-1889), American born, Columbia-trained engineer on the sixteen-mile
railroad of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, resigned his job that he might
observe English railroads. Just before he sailed, the D. & H. commissioned
him to purchase locomotives and rail for their line.
However, English influence on
the Delaware and Hudson antedates Allen's visit. Benjamin Wright (1770-1842)
recommended on May 21, 1825, before the September, 1825, opening of the
Stockman and Darlington, that a railroad rather than a road be built over the
Moosic Mountains, between the Delaware and Hudson Canal terminus and the
Susquehanna Valley. Early in his career he secured "from abroad [England]
the best books, maps and instruments" for his own instruction. Wright
boldly made this recommendation for a railroad "without a qualifying
clause for his own protection."
The Delaware and Hudson acted
on Wright's recommendation, in the spring of 1827. John B. Jervis, the new
chief engineer, began his survey on April 4, and completed it October 24, 1827.
A Pennsylvania railroad was in operation ahead of this survey, Josiah White had
opened his Mauch Chunk Railroad in the Lehigh Valley in May, 1827, a
much-publicized line, which repaid its cost in fourteen months. Jervis
recommended the use of six- or seven-ton locomotives on the eleven miles of
trackage between inclined planes. He estimated that seven locomotives would
cost $12,600, but this cost would soon be repaid by saving the company $30.50
daily, by eliminating the use of horses and by carrying coal at the rate of
.018 per ton-mile. Basing their action on Jerks' figures, the managers decided,
on January 16, 1828, to commission Allen to buy English track iron and four
locomotives, specifying that the engines should be capable of four miles per
hour, to have four or six wheels, with a gauge of 4'3". Jervis had based
his recommendations on English engineers and engineering publications. The
Jervis library at Rome, N. Y., today possesses in his personal collection three
titles of Tredgold's works, the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and Encyclopedia of
Royal Engineers, and other early publications bearing London imprints.
Jervis, while engineering on
the Saratoga and Schenectady Railroad, suggested, from experience gained with
the imported Stephenson locomotive used on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, that
a pivoting, four-wheel front truck replace the non-flexible, front pair of wheels.
This arrangement, which allowed long-wheel-base, English-type engines to
negotiate the sharp curves of American lines without derailment, was adopted by
George Stephenson on the " Davy Crockett, " the first locomotive to
operate on the Saratoga and Schenectady, on April 6, 1833.
The West Point Foundry built
the first locomotive with this improvement, in 1832, for the Mohawk and Hudson,
where it made a mile in forty-five seconds. Baldwin, Norris, and Eastwick and
Harrison quickly adopted this flexible truck to their great profit. Herapath,
in England, quotes Stevenson, in 1839, as saying that this American locomotive
improvement was ingenious.
Horatio Allen left New York on
January 24, and arrived at Liverpool on February 15, 1828. (This was before a
B. & O. group, which followed, left America.) Six days later, he met George
Stephenson "with whom he immediately established most agreeable relations;
receiving from him every kindness and all the aid he could render." Allen
visited the Liverpool and Manchester, the Stockton and Darlington, and
Newcastle, the center of locomotive and railroad matters. At Stourbridge, he
received rail bids from Foster, Rastrick and Co., and in the Welsh iron regions
from the Guest Iron Works, at Merthyr Tydvil, the scene of Trevethick's 1804
locomotive trials.
On July 19, Allen reported to
the Delaware and Hudson Company that he had contracted with Robert Stephenson
and Co., of Newcastle, for a locomotive, the "Pride of Newcastle,"
and for three with Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge. The Stephenson
engine left Newcastle on October 20, 1828, on the ship " Columbia,"
and arrived in New York on January 15, 1829, at a delivery cost of $3,633.30.
After assembly at the foundry of Abell and Dunscomb, 375 Water Street, it was
demonstrated under steam (on blocks), on May 27, to the great amusement of
crowds attracted by the novelty of a steam locomotive.
The "Stourbridge
Lion" left Stourbridge in February, 1829, Liverpool, on April 8, aboard
the "John Jay," and arrived at New York, May 13. Landed at the wharf
of the West Point Foundry at the foot of Beach Street, the "Stourbridge
Lion" was set up at this company's shop under the direction of William
Kemble. After a demonstration under steam, on June 11, 1828, which attracted
thousands, it and the "Pride of Newcastle" were sent up the Hudson,
arriving at Roundout on July 4. The "Lion" arrived at Honesdale and
the railroad before July 23.
On the morning of August 8,
1829, two months before the Rainhill Trials of the Liverpool and Manchester,
Engineer Allen and the " Stourbridge Lion" made the first trip on a
commercial railroad in the New World. A second trial of the same locomotive
followed on September 9. Engineer Allen later expressed the belief that had the
Stephenson locomotive, (the "Pride of Newcastle," modeled on
Stephenson's winner, the "Rocket") been prepared for the trials at
Honesdale, Pa., rather than the "Stourbridge Lion," the U. S. would
have had the glory of the first successful locomotive trial rather than England.
However, the light track structure was unable to carry the burden of the
overweight, operating locomotive, and as a result these four pioneer English
locomotives never hauled coal for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. D.
& H. stock dropped from $82 to $74 per share when news of the unsuccessful
trials reached Wall Street by the middle of August, 1829.
Horatio Allen had been hired by
the South Carolina Railroad as chief engineer, early in the summer of 1829, but
his duties did not begin until September. He worked for that pioneer line until
1834. After a three-year visit to Europe, Allen become engineer of the New York
and Erie Railroad. These roads, the longest in the world when projected, though
built on the pile system advocated by John Stevens. in 1811, received English
ideas from Allen. That Allen's faith in the locomotive was unshaken, even
though the Delaware and Hudson locomotives had failed, was forcibly
demonstrated when he convinced the South Carolina Railroad of the value of
locomotives, in September, 1829. Further, this recommendation was accepted by
the Board without a dissenting vote. If this adoption did take place in
September, 1829, then the South Carolina committed itself to the use of steam
before the Liverpool and Manchester Trials, as Allen and others claim. However,
the date of adoption may have been January 14, 1830. Allen's arguments were
based on Stockton and Darlington costs, and, most effective, a comparison of
the expectation of development possible in the steam engine with small chances
of improvement in the breeding of horses. One Allen recommendation, however,
that a flange rail be used on the line, was not accepted because of higher
costs. This type of rail was used only on the few curves of the road.
E. L. Miller, the Charleston
merchant, whose interest in the future of railroading drew him to Liverpool to
witness the Rainhill Trials of October 6, 1829, returned to Charleston
convinced of the value of the locomotive. Earlier, Miller exhibited a
thirty-inch-long model, with a boiler holding only a gallon of water, but
capable of pulling a man on a circular seventy-foot track, in Charleston,
during February, 1830. Backing his belief with action, he made an offer to the
Board of Directors of the South Carolina road to personally finance the
construction of a locomotive. Upon the acceptance of his proposition by the
Board, on March 1, 1830, Miller contracted with the West Point Foundry, who had
set up and demonstrated the "Stourbridge Lion" for the Delaware and
Hudson, to construct the " Best Friend of Charleston. " Designed by
C. E. Detmold, of Charleston and New York, the engine was to be capable of ten
miles per hour and pull three times it own weight. Miller supervised
construction and explained its features to visiting directors during the summer
of 1830.
Exhibited under steam at N.
Y. before shipment, in October, 1830, the "Best Friend of Charleston"
arrived at Charleston on October 22. As no machinist accompanied the shipment,
the local firm of Dotterer and Eason assembled the engine. Julius D. Petsch and
Nicholas Darrell, apprentices of Thomas Dotterer, had the "Best
Friend" ready for experimental trials before November 1. Miller and others
made the first trial trip with Darrell as engineer on the next day. The rigid
front wheels with wooden spokes, then English style, sprang sufficiently on the
curves that the engine derailed. With this weakness corrected, Miller accepted
the locomotive on December 9. On trials made on December 14 and 15 the
"Best Friend" ran at speeds from sixteen to twenty miles per hour
pulling four and five cars, each carrying ten passengers. The railroad
purchased the "Best Friend" from Miller on December 24, 1830.
Miller's influence on the
locomotive didn't end with this single purchase. He visited Baldwin shortly
after that manufacturer's first locomotive, "Old Ironsides,"
successfully operated on the Philadelphia, Germantown and Norristown Railroad,
on November 23, 1832, and suggested that Baldwin visit the Mohawk and Hudson
line in New York, to observe the operation of the unpatented, Jervis
four-wheeled, pivoting front truck. as a substitute for the pair of rigid front
wheels. Baldwin adoption of this design brought an order from Miller for
Baldwin's second locomotive, the "E. L. Miller," a 4-2-0 with
Baldwin's newly invented half-crank, a Bury boiler and brass driving wheels.
This locomotive was completed February 18, 1834.
In 1834 he patented a method
for increasing locomotive adhesion which threw part of the tender's weight on
the rear of the engine. Baldwin first paid $100 royalty per locomotive for the
use of this idea then purchased the rights for $9000, on May 6, 1839.
The "West Point,"
the second locomotive on the South Carolina Railroad, was also built by the
West Point Foundry, but on designs drawn up by Horatio Allen. English influence
was reflected in its horizontal boiler. The South Carolina eight-wheeled
locomotives, also designed by Allen and built by the same firm, were an
American innovation, but their double-valve arrangement was styled after the
practice of the Liverpool and Manchester
The Camden and Amboy
Stephenson locomotive, "John Bull, " served as a model for the South
Carolina's seventh West-Point-built locomotive, the "Hamburg," in
1833. Finally, this line, goaded by its -stockholders, imported, in the years
1834-36, fourteen English locomotives to bolster its motive power.
The wreckage of the
"Best Friend," after its boiler exploded in June, 1831, was rebuilt
by Julius Petsch in Thomas Dotterer's machine shop. Renamed " Phoenix
" and having outside connections, straight axles, and cast wheels with
wrought-iron tires, this rebuilt engine was back in road service on October 18,
1832. With this construction experience plus that gained in the original assembly
of the "Best Friend," Dotterer and Eason ventured to contract for the
building of a locomotive for the South Carolina Railroad, on Dotterer's plans,
in 1833-34. "Native," the first locomotive built in the South, was
the first American locomotive originally built with outside connections and
straight axles. Demonstrating great power on its trial trip, the four-ton
"Native," after an excruciating delay to its designer, triumphantly
returned with the cause of the delay, the disabled regular engine and its
train. Horatio Allen praised this Charleston creation for extreme simplicity of
operation, direct application of power and substantial workmanship. Costing
$4,900, the "Native" earned $187, during AprilÉ
At Charleston, between 1835 and
1837, Eason and Dotterer and Thomas Dotterer built four locomotives for the
South Carolina line. In 1838, D. H. Dotterer and Company sent two locomotives
to the same road, but, according to the Berks and Schuylkill Journal, of Reading, Pa., the "Branchville" and the
"Reading" were constructed at Reading, Pa., where the factory was
probably attracted by the increasing supply of iron in the Schuylkill Valley.
In 1840 Dotterer and Company, employing thirty journeymen and sixteen
apprentices and having an annual capacity of twelve locomotives, rebuilt three
engines and constructed six first-class locomotives. The State of Pennsylvania
purchased eight locomotives between 1839 and 1841, from this builder, six for
the State Road from Philadelphia to Columbia, and two for the Allegheny
Portage. The "Lycoming, " a 4-2-0, sold to the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad in 1842, is listed as Dotterer's ninth engine. Later this same
year, the "Reading," a 4-4-0, followed from the Reading factory, to
the same road.
The Philadelphia and Reading
Railroad created shops at Reading soon after its 1838 opening. At first this
company borrowed Dotterer's experienced workmen to help solve their engine
repair problems; as greater repair capacity was needed and more skilled workmen
required, the Philadelphia and Reading bought Dotterer's equipment. Thus,
Thomas and D. H. Dotterer lost their identity in the gulping expansion of the
Philadelphia and Reading locomotive shops, but, in doing so, became, through
Horatio Allen and E. L. Miller, an additional link of English influence on the
Philadelphia and Reading Railroad.
In 1828, the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad sent engineer Jonathan Knight, inventor Ross Winans, and two West
Point-trained engineers, William McNeil, and George W. Whistler, to examine
"minutely English track construction and locomotive development on every
line of note of consequence." The group left the United States in
November, 1828, and returned (except Winans) in May, 1829. During their visit
the engineers contacted George Stephenson and other noted English engineers of
the day and examined the operating Brunton and Shields and the Stockton and
Darlington railroads. The construction of heavy stone bridges and stone-slab
rail was the chief immediate result to the Baltimore and Ohio, while the whole
United States benefited from the English experiences of this four-man tour.
Whistler, at the conclusion
of his work on the Baltimore and Ohio, engineered the Baltimore and Susquehanna
(June, 1830), the Paterson and Hudson (1831), the Boston and Providence, and
the Providence and Stonington, and also served as consulting engineer on the
Western Railroad of Massachusetts. McNeil built the Long Island, the Taunton
and New Bedford, the Boston and Worcester, surveyed the South Carolina-sponsored,
never-built Charleston, Louisville and Cincinnati and worked with his
brother-in-law Whistler on the Providence and Stonington. Knight spent his
professional life, until 1842, as chief engineer of the B. & O., with B. H.
Latrobe as his assistant. By 1840 both Knight and McNeil had published eleven
pamphlets and reports on railroads.
Like Charlestonian E. 1.
Miller, Ross Winans was much more than a passive spectator at the Rainhill
Trials. He was the first American to contribute to English railroading; his car
axles with outside journal bearings were used on the Liverpool and Manchester
early in 1829. Unlike engineers Knight, McNeil and Whistler, Winans spent an
entire year in England investigating railroads, locomotive and car construction
and negotiating for the English use of his axle and journals.
The B. & O., after
considering the reports on English locomotives by Knight, McNeil and Whistler,
and the opinions expressed by engineers in England, had decided that these
rigid large-wheeled locomotives with long wheel base were unsuited for their
sharp-curved line. Stockholder Peter Cooper thought otherwise, as did Winans.
Active in the formation of the B. & O. since January, 1828, Winans, upon
his return to Baltimore, in addition to the construction of the first
eight-wheeled passenger car, assisted Cooper in the building and trial
operations of Cooper's "Tom Thumb." This tiny engine, weighing less
than a ton, with thirty-inch wheels and a wheel base of about five feet, or
little more than the track gauge, made a trial run in 1829. After adjustments,
the "Tom Thumb" forcefully demonstrated, on August 28, 1830, its
ability by taking the sharp curves of the Baltimore and Ohio at fifteen miles
per hour, and pulling four-and-a-half tons. Winans reported the "Tom
Thumb" results to President Thomas of the B. & O., in a letter the day
of the trial. Comparing the performance to the Rainhill Trials, (and mentioning
that he had seen them) Winans credited the "Tom Thumb," in proportion
to its cylinder capacity, with three times the power of Stephenson's
"Rocket. " This was possible because Cooper used high-pressure steam.
Further, Winans held that this trial established the practicability of the use
of locomotives on the Baltimore and Ohio.
Winans was the Baltimore and
Ohio's Assistant Engineer of Machinery at the time that line held its own
"Rainhill Trials," advertised on January 4, 1831, to take place June
1, 1831. Number four of the nine conditions specified a four-foot wheelbase to
suit short curves. Like Rainhill, only one of the four locomotives, the
"York," performed to the specifications of the contest. Built by
Phineas Davis and Israel Gardner at York, Pa., the winner was similar to the
"Tom Thumb" in that it had the short wheel-base and an upright boiler.
Steel springs were an 1832 innovation on this locomotive.
After the accidental death of
Davis, Winans with George Gillingham, a Baltimore and Ohio Superintendent of
Machinery, succeeded, in 1836, to the 1834 lease of the Mt. Clare shops to
Davis and Gardner, by the Baltimore and Ohio. (In the meantime, Winans is
credited with aiding the original firm in the construction of the locomotives,
the "Atlantic," in 1832, and the "Traveler," in 1833, at
York, Pa.) For several years Gillingham and Winans, with a hundred man labor
force, repaired B. & O. equipment on a cost-plus basis, as well as building
locomotives for other roads. However, the Baltimore and Ohio had first call on
their production, at $5000 per engine, should the need arise.
Winans patented, on July 29,
1837, an upright-boilered locomotive, with four coupled drive-wheels, propelled
by horizontal cylinders. The advantages claimed for this short-wheel-base
engine were the lower center of gravity, better rail adhesion and greater
facility to negotiate sharp curves. In about fifteen months the partners built
six of these ten-ton engines and, in 1838, two weighing over fourteen tons for
the Baltimore and Ohio. All were the patented type, best known as "crabs,
" because the cylinder-propelled spur shaft, which was geared to the
drivers, revolved in the opposite direction to the pinion shaft and the driving
wheels. The Philadelphia and Reading, being built to carry anthracite to tide,
probably because his engines burned anthracite, bought, in 1837, the
Winans-built "Delaware." This "crab"-type 0-4-0 locomotive
was the first engine to arrive at Reading, Pa., the city soon to become a
railroad and locomotive building center. Three twenty-ton 0-8-0
vertical-boilered "crabs, " built by Baldwin on Winans' design, went
to the Western Railroad of Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore and
Ohio used upright-boilered locomotives exclusively. The 1836 delivery of the
English-built "Tennessee" to the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, a
line branching off the Baltimore and Ohio at Harpers Ferry, into Virginia,
attended with recurring derailments on curves, convinced the management of the
correctness of their opinions regarding horizontal-boilered engines. Rumors
that Pennsylvania was about to discontinue the use of a hundred-thousand
dollars worth of English engines clinched the argument. This report was partly
true; Baldwin's better performing locomotives were replacing their English
rivals.
A change of great importance
in the motive power ideas of the Baltimore and Ohio occurred in 1837, under the
leadership of a new president, Louis McLane. Between 1838 and 1843, the line
purchased fifteen 4-4-0 locomotives from Eastwick and Harrison, and William
Norris. The "Philip E. Thomas," built by Norris in June, 1838, was
the first horizontal-boilered engine on the Baltimore and Ohio. More direct
English influence in design was the locomotive "Arrow, " an
inside-connected (inside cylinders and driving rods) 4-4-0, built by the
Newcastle Company of Delaware. Other far-reaching occurrences during the
presidency of Louis McLane will be related later.
All Winans' engines to this
time had vertical boilers, which permitted a very short wheel base, but now he
had to adopt the English horizontal boiler. After building three
horizontal-boilered 4-4-0s for the Baltimore and Ohio, between 1843 and 1845,
he placed a horizontal boiler on an 0-8-0 with his "crab" running
gear. This engine, nicknamed a "mud digger' " was a predecessor of
Winans' famous 0-8-0 "camels." Twelve "mud diggers" were
built between 1844 and 1846, for the Baltimore and Ohio. In 1847, the
Philadelphia and Reading, again because they desired anthracite burning
locomotives, purchased four thirty-ton Winans 0-8-0s with a short 11' 3"
wheel base. The "Baltimore" came to the P. & R. in June, 1847.
Performance is reflected by the $2000 bonus which the P. & R. gave Winans.
Forty-three sisters followed
to the Reading between 1850 and 1855. The Baltimore and Ohio purchased three of
these Winans 0-8-0s in 1848, naming the first the "Camel," because
its cab was placed on top of the boiler, not to the rear, thus naming his
new-style locomotive. Ten additional followed during 1851, and the company
built two in its Mt. Clare shops. By 1858 this line owned 119 of these powerful
Winans freight haulers. On May 9, 1854, Winans received a patent on the large
firebox and grates, features of the "Camels, " which made him a large
fortune. He retired from the locomotive business after 1860.
Philadelphia soon felt the
results of Baltimore's 1828 engineer excursion to England. While the Baltimore
and Ohio was deterred for nine years, by its sharp curves, from the purchase or
manufacture of locomotives on the English style, Colonel Stephen H. Long
(l784-l864) engineer on that pioneer line from 1827 to 1830, was sufficiently
impressed by the English experiences of Winans, Whistler, McNeil and Knight,
that he began to manufacture locomotives in 1830; the same year he co-authored
with McNeil a two-volume report on Baltimore and Ohio engineering. Colonel
Long, when he received a Pennsylvania charter for his American Steam Carriage
Co., in March, 1830, began the construction of his first locomotive, in
Philadelphia. Modeled on English design, with several improvements, (one perhaps
on his own patent of 1826) this three-and-a-half ton engine operated with
varying degrees of success on the Frenchtown and Newcastle Railroad, in
Delaware. The July 4th, 1831, trial was disappointing; a shortage of steam did
not permit a continuous two-mile run. The next day, the engine propelled two
passenger coaches, with some seventy persons, four miles, and had fifty pounds
of steam at the trip's end. Long brought the locomotive to Philadelphia, to
build a new boiler. Trials at Newcastle, on Oct. 31, 1831, were again
disappointing. Alone, the engine would travel at twenty-five miles per hour,
but it could not pull a load. Joseph Harrison, Jr., who soon after this time
worked for Long, held that this locomotive would have been successful had Long
"more faithfully copied " his English model.
Philadelphian William Norris
(1802-1867) built a steam carriage which attracted the attention of Colonel
Long. Disregarding his own failure, Long entered partnership with Norris in
1832, and, while the firm lasted only three years, the later success of Norris
and the Philadelphia locomotive builders, which developed out of this
partnership, was phenomenal. The "Black Hawk, " the firm's first
product, operated on the Philadelphia, Germantown and Norristown in 1833. An inside
connected 2-2-0, it had a novel boiler with seven-foot flues. Its single pair
of four-and-a-half foot drivers were located ahead of the boiler. Discarding
Stephenson's steam exhaust as a means of creating a firebox draft, Long
substituted a twenty-foot smoke stack, which could be retracted to clear low
bridges. Long and Norris built four duplicates of the "Black Hawk"
during 1834. In this year Norris bought out Long.
Norris, hiring skilled
mechanics to replace the mechanical and engineering know-how lost in Long's
departure, produced several mediocre-performing locomotives on designs which
had proved successful with other locomotive builders. However, Norris came up
with a winner in his 1836 "George Washington, " a 4-2-0 with
four-foot driving wheels located ahead of the firebox. On July 19, 1836, this
six-and-three-quarter ton locomotive climbed the 187-foot high Belmont Plane on
the west shore of the Schuylkill River, with two cars and fifty-three
passengers. Only two minutes and twenty-four seconds were consumed in this
half-mile climb on a grade of 369 feet to the mile, a rate of 151/2 mph.
Herapath's English Railroad
Magazine, after reporting this
accomplishment, dismissed the American feat as "utterly impossible. "
This same magazine, in reporting that Norris had sold to Austria eight-ton
locomotives capable of pulling 309 tons on level track, said sarcastically, "No engine will draw more than
twenty-eight times its own weight. [224 tons] . . . Unless, therefore, the laws
of nature be different in America to what they are in England, we venture to
say the stated performances of Philadelphia engines are impossibilities."
The 1837 purchase of seventeen Norris locomotives by the Birmingham and
Gloucester Railroad reflects Norris's reputation in England, rather than
Herapath's statements.
Harrison, the long-Norris
employee already mentioned, held that the "George Washington" was
"an heir of the earlier efforts of Colonel Long, " and explained that
this amazing performance was made possible by an adjustment of the tender draw
bar, which threw extra weight on the rear of the locomotive, thus greatly
increasing traction. With the success of the "George Washington"
Norris became famous; he successfully built locomotives for the next thirty
years. Septimus Norris, a brother, patented a ten-wheel locomotive, the 4-6-0,
in 1846.
In 1835 Garrett and Eastwick,
Philadelphia steam engine and machinery manufacturers, received an order to
build a locomotive for the Beaver Meadow Railroad, the first rail line in the
Lehigh Valley to use locomotives. Garrett, who, as a manufacturer of lathes,
had employed machinist, Joseph Harrison, Jr., during the years 1832-33, now
re-hired him as foreman of the new locomotive factory. Harrison had spent the
years away from Garrett working as a machinist for Long and Norris and Norris
and Co. In 1837, with twelve years of machinist experience behind him, Harrison
became a partner in the firm.
The company's first
locomotive, "Samuel Ingham, " was a 4-2-0 with outside cylinders; its
driving wheels were behind the firebox, and the boiler was the domed Bury type.
Eastwick used for the first time on this engine his newly patented method of
reversing a locomotive, which was easy to build and effective in operation.
Another first was the use of a covered rear platform for the protection of the
engineer and fireman. The success of this locomotive brought orders for
duplicates.
In 1836, Henry Campbell, of
Philadelphia, patented the use of four driving wheels on a locomotive, placing
one pair before and the other behind the firebox. Using this patent, Garrett
and Eastwick built a fifteen ton 4-4-0, "Hercules," in 1836-37, for
the Beaver Meadow Railroad. Eastwick also applied to this engine his patented
center pivoting frame, an improvement which allowed the four driving wheels to
adjust themselves easily to the inequalities of the light track of that day.
The Beaver Meadow track structure from Parryville, on the Lehigh Canal, to
Beaver Meadow, consisted of 5" x 7" wooden rails, capped with 2-1/4"
x 5/8" iron: ties were three feet apart where the wooden rail consisted of
5" x 7" timbers, and four feet center-to-center under 5" x
8" rail. An underlying mudsill of 2-1/2'' thickness and a width of
10" or 12" was beneath the ties and under the rails. With its weight
so well distributed, this track supported the (nearly) four ton per axle of the
"Hercules." Another Eastwick patent, an improved firebox, was noted
in England by Herapath, in 1839.
Harrison, a junior partner in 1838, patented, that year, an
improvement on Eastwick's frame, an equalizing lever, which supported the
driving wheels, which was simpler, lighter and cheaper to build. In a very
short time all locomotive builders were paying Harrison royalty on this
improvement.
This was the stage of
locomotive development when Moncure Robinson ordered the "Gowan and
Marx" from Eastwick and Harrison. To meet the specification that this
locomotive carry nine of its eleven tons on its drivers, Eastwick &
Harrison moved the rear axle to a point just in front of the center line of the
firebox. With a five-foot firebox, a Bury boiler, 2"x5' flues and 42"
diameter drivers, this engine handled 423 tons, forty times its own weight, on
Feb. 20, 1840, from Reading to Philadelphia at nearly ten miles per hour. The
Philadelphia and Reading immediately ordered ten duplicates from the Locks and
Canals Company, of Lowell, Mass. The successful performance of the "Gowan
and Marx " attracted the attention of Russian engineers inspecting American
railroads for their government. Upon their offer, Harrison visited Russia, in
1843, and, with Thomas Winans, a son of Ross Winans, contracted, as Harrison,
Winans and Eastwick, to build locomotives for the Russian government, in
Russia. Eastwick and Harrison closed their Philadelphia plant in 1844.
Visits to England, which were
of great importance to the United States, continued after the Rainhill Trials.
The Stevens-backed Delaware and Raritan River, for which New Jersey legislative
approval had been secured on February 6, 1815, was revived as the Camden and
Amboy R. R., within six months after the L. & M. success. Robert L.
Stevens, the Colonel's son, visited England, met and established friendly
relations with George Stephenson, attended the trial of his new-type locomotive,
the "Planet," on December 4, 1830. Designed as a freight engine, the
"Planet" carried the first freight, fifty-one tons, between Liverpool
and Manchester. In this lading were 135 bags and bales of American cotton. Two
days later, Stevens ordered a reproduction of this engine, the important and
famous "John Bull," which made its first run on the Camden and Amboy,
on November 12, 1831. Of equal or greater importance was the incentive the
"John Bull" presented to American mechanics. Robert Stevens also
purchased English-made rails for the Camden and Amboy while on this trip. Made
on his own design, this rail, 39 pounds to the yard, was the beginning of the
American "T" rail, which, unlike the English, was laid directly on
the ties, thus saving the cost of chairs.
Solomon White Roberts
(1811-1882) was present at the birth of the railroad in Pennsylvania, having
assisted his uncle, Josiah White, in building the 1827 Mauch Chunk Railroad.
After locating the Portage Railroad of the Pennsylvania Main Line of Public
Works across the Alleghenies, Roberts visited Welsh and English iron districts
to inspect rail being rolled for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. In
addition to English railroad practice, Roberts brought information about the
new Welsh hot-blast iron reduction using anthracite coal. The Thomas Iron
Company was instituted in the Lehigh Valley, in 1839, as a direct result. As
the Lehigh Coal and Navigation helped finance this furnace to increase its
freight income, so the Lehigh Valley R. R. interests later aided in the
construction of the blast furnace of the Bethlehem Iron Company. To credit the
presence of Bethlehem Steel in the Lehigh Valley today to Roberts' visit is not
outside the realm of potentiality.
Through Roberts' visits
English influence reached several railroads. He worked on the Little Schuylkill
and Susquehanna as chief engineer, in 1838-39. This pioneer line attempted to
link the Schuylkill, Lehigh and Susquehanna Valleys, and is today divided into
the Reading Company's Catawissa Branch and part of the Lehigh Valley's Quakake
line. In 1848 Roberts surveyed an extension of the 1828 Mine Hill and
Schuylkill Haven Railroad to Ashland, in the second Anthracite Field, and,
finally, he built and managed the Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad, now the
Pittsburgh-Crestline, Ohio, portion of the Pennsylvania Main Line to Chicago.
One of the last visits to
England by early American railroad men was that of politician, financier, and
diplomat Louis McLane. McLane became president of the Baltimore and Ohio in
1837, and directed expansion westward and financial operations for a decade,
and, as already mentioned, adopted English-style locomotives, thus forcing Ross
Winans to drop his use of the upright boiler. McLane had been Minister to
England, (1829-1831) served in Jackson's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury
(1831-1834) until the president's dispute with the Bank of the United States,
when he was shifted to the State Department. Upon his retirement from public
service in 1834, he became president of the Morris Canal and Banking Company of
New Jersey.
McLane brought added
transportation and financial know-how gained in this combination banking house
and transportation company, which, with the Biddle Pennsylvania-chartered Bank
of the United States, controlled a paper canal and railroad route extending
from New York, via the Lehigh River, through the Susquehanna Valley, into
Western New York, and from Philadelphia, via the building Philadelphia and
Reading and the completed Little Schuylkill Railroads. After building and
operating an anthracite-carrying canal from Newark to the Lehigh River's
junction with the Delaware, at Phillipsburg, N. J., these companies financed
railroad construction from the Lehigh, via the Beaver Meadow and the Little
Schuylkill Railroads, to Catawissa on the North Branch, and Williamsport on the
West Branch of the Susquehanna, through today's Carbon and Schuylkill counties.
The Williamsport and Erie Railroad was to extend this line towards Erie Canal
and the projected New York and Erie Railroad. In the financial smashup
following the Panic of 1837 and the crash in 1841, funds of Indiana and
Michigan, whose bonds the Morris Canal and Banking Company had purchased on
credit and marketed, were so involved in the partly constructed Little
Schuylkill that both states were forced to default their interest payments and
refinance their state obligations largely owned in England.
McLane in an initial effort to extend the Baltimore and Ohio
from Harpers Ferry to the revenue producing Cumberland Coal Fields ordered
engineers Knight and Latrobe to make a survey of locomotive operation and track
construction of American railroads. This resulted in the adoption of the
horizontal, English style locomotive by the Baltimore and Ohio, as already
related. As president of the Baltimore and Ohio, McLane twice visited England.
In 1840 he arranged with Baring Brothers a special issue of 6 percent bonds
(issued June, 1842) to finance the rails necessary to reach the coal field. Seven
shiploads of fifty-four pound English rail enabled the line to reach Cumberland
by November 5, 1842. Thus, McLane and Barings enabled the Baltimore and Ohio to
increase its income, not only to meet interest on these special rail bonds, but
also to pay dividends on stock owned by Maryland and Baltimore. These dividends
in turn aided Maryland to resume interest on her bonded debt largely held in
England. The Baltimore and Ohio was one of the few state-sponsored enterprises
at this time able to meet its interest out of its own revenues. McLane returned
to England in a dual role in 1844. In addition to unsuccessful efforts to
secure more financial aid to the Baltimore and Ohio, he served as U. S.
Minister for the settlement of the Oregon Question. A detailed study of English
railroads, made by him at this time, resulted in a management plan for the B.
& O., which lasted for years.
III. THE PRESENCE OF ENGLISH LOCOMOTIVES IN AMERICA
English-built locomotives
were a direct and indirect influence on American railroad activities. Not only
did they eventually prove their own practicability, but their very presence
became a challenge to American ingenuity. The building of locomotives by the
West Point Foundry, after that company's experience in setting up the "Stourbridge
Lion," has been recounted, as has Jervis' invention of the four-wheeled,
pivoting truck, which enabled locomotives to manipulate the sharp curves of
most lines.
Matthias Baldwin, founder of
the Baldwin Locomotive Works, builders of locomotives today near Philadelphia,
began his career as an apprentice jeweler and opened a shop of his own, in
1819. As the demand for jewelry fell off, he shifted into machinist work in
partnership with David Mason. Unsatisfied with the operation of a steam engine
purchased to power their shop, Baldwin built an engine on a very compact
design. Occupying only a space five feet square, it was natural that orders for
similar engines followed.
To capitalize on the great
public interest of the time in locomotives and railroads, Franklin Peale,
proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum, requested Baldwin to construct a model
locomotive. Relying only on the descriptions and sketches of the Rainhill Trial
locomotives as a guide, the machinists completed the model capable of drawing
four persons, and had it operating on a circular track in the museum, on April
25, 1831. This demonstration of constructive skill brought Baldwin an order for
a full-scale locomotive from the Philadelphia, Germantown and Norristown
Railroad. About this same time the Newcastle and Frenchtown Railroad, the line
linking the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays hired Baldwin to assemble two
Stephenson locomotives. On this assembly job Baldwin gained experience through
handling parts of English locomotives in the latest design and of the best
workmanship. Further, as a skilled mechanic, he had the opportunity of making
accurate measurements and drawings. In addition, the Philadelphian visited
Bordentown, N. J., to inspect the unassembled "John Bull," modeled on
Stephenson's "Planet." The Frenchtown and Newcastle experiences and a
memoranda of principal dimensions of the "John Bull" served Baldwin
well in the construction of "Old Ironsides." A close copy of the
Frenchtown and Newcastle English engines, Baldwin's locomotive performed
successfully, making about twenty-eight miles per hour, on November 23, 1832,
and later thirty with its usual train. Baldwin had introduced at least one
improvement of his own on his initial engine; the reverse gear was not copied from
the English models. However, Baldwin's second locomotive, the already discussed
"E. L. Miller, " had a "Bury" or haystack boiler, an
English design used on all Baldwin locomotives until 1850.
One of the five locomotives
completed by Baldwin, in 1834, was the "Lancaster," a 4-2-0 duplicate
of the "E. L. Miller." The ability of this engine to handle nineteen
loaded cars across the grades of the State Railroad between Philadelphia and
Columbia, on the Susquehanna, convinced the Pennsylvania State Legislature to
adopt steam power. Two duplicates began work on this railroad later this same
year.
Four Baldwin improvements,
patented in 1834, were applied to that year's production: a half-crank drive
which employed the wheel itself as the other half, making crank construction
much simpler; a new method of constructing wheels; ground joints for steam
pipes, which replaced the canvas and red-lead used on English engines of this
time, enabled Baldwin to use 120 pounds of pressure compared to the English
sixty; and an easy-to-clean feedwater pump which was built into the piston-rod
guide. These improvements gave Baldwin's locomotives such a degree of
efficiency that the Stephenson engines on the State Railroad were either laid
aside or sold. The "Blackhawk," one of the fourteen engines built in
1835, was the first Baldwin locomotive to have outside connected drivers, as
well as the first upon which Miller's patent for increasing track adhesion was
used. Baldwin began the standardization of parts, the great feature of the
American machine age, on his 1839 locomotives. The outside frame was discarded
on his hundred and thirty-sixth engine, and the eight-wheeled tender was first
used this year. Baldwin's 1842 invention of the flexible-beam driving truck,
which enabled a heavier six-coupled driving-wheel locomotive, (an 0-6-0) to
safely negotiate sharp curves, and pull a greater load, brought him financial
success at a time when he verged on failure. As Eastwick and Harrison had done,
Baldwin bought patents of others. E. L. Miller's has been mentioned several
times. In addition, he purchased, in 1845, the rights to Campbell's
eight-wheeled engine and Eastwick and Harrison's equalizing beam. Thus
equipped, he built his first eight wheeled locomotive in 1845.
Beginning with number one,
" Old Ironsides, " Baldwin saw his production reach a thousand in
1861. His company was well on its way for the second thousand, achieved in
1869, when its founder died in 1866.
The career of George W.
Whistler has been traced through his engineering life in the United States
except for one facet, that as a locomotive builder. While managing the
Proprietors of the Locks and Canals, of Lowell, in 1834, Whistler reproduced a
British locomotive, which the Boston and Lowell Railroad had imported.
Whistler, as the Baltimore and Ohio had sent himself nearly a decade before,
sent an employee, Burt, to England to observe Stephenson's latest operations.
Whistler having contracted to construct railroads in Russia, left the Lowell
locomotive plant in 1837.
English influence in several
forms enters the story of the New Jersey Rogers Locomotive Works. Starting a
chain of reaction was the first locomotive to be operated on the
Whistler-engineered Paterson and Hudson Railroad, the English-built "McNeill."
As the West Point Foundry adapted from the pioneer Delaware and Hudson
locomotives, Baldwin from the "John Bull," and Whistler from the
English locomotives of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, so Engineer Swinburne,
with the aid of English-trained mechanical draftsman Hodge, drew from the
"McNeil!." Both men were employees of the manufacturing firm of
Rogers, Ketchum and Grosvenor of Paterson, N. J., whose sole railroad
experience, until this 1835 incident, had been the construction of a hundred
sets of wheels for the South Carolina Railroad, on a contract from Horatio
Allen.
Sixteen months later number
one of this firm emerged as the
Sandusky," and became, when sold, the first locomotive owned by the
Ohio pioneer line, (other than the Michigan-built Kalamazoo and Erie) the Mad
River and Lake Erie. When the "Sandusky" arrived at Sandusky, Ohio,
November 17, 1837, aboard the schooner "Sandusky," there was no track
built; its gauge, 4' 10", set the standard for the owning line and the
State of Ohio. Rogers' notable improvement on this locomotive over the
"McNeill" was the first use of counterbalanced driving wheels. Rogers
built seven additional locomotives in 1837. Englishman Hodges, while visiting
his homeland in 1847, sent the Rogers Company a drawing of Robert Stephenson's
unpatented 1842 link-motion valve control, which became a standard on Rogers
locomotives. This transmittal, however, was not the movement of an English
practice across the Atlantic, but the return of American innovation first used
by William T. James, of New York, in 1832. Rogers' locomotive
"Stockbridge," this same year, pioneered with outside cylinders.
William S. Hudson was even a
closer link between Rogers and England. After working as an apprentice and
working for Stephenson, in Newcastle, Hudson emigrated to America. From the
position of Master Mechanic with
the Attica and Buffalo Railroad, he moved to Paterson as superintendent of the
Rogers Locomotive Works, In 1864 Hudson patented a method of equalizing the
springs of the front pair of locomotive driving wheels with those of a
two-wheeled leading truck, thus securing a three-point suspension for the
engine. Both Rogers and Baldwin used this device. It is fitting to add that
Engineer Swinburne, who helped initiate Rogers and Paterson, N. J. into the
locomotive business, Alger-like, became the proprietor and operator of his own
locomotive works. It is sad to relate that he lost most of his fortune in the
railroad-inspired depression of 1857.
IV. ENGLISH RAILROAD MATERIAL REPUBLISHED IN THE
UNITED STATES
In addition to the several
English publications already mentioned, London newspapers and magazines carried
the latest railroad information to United States subscribers. George W. Smith's
English-inspired articles appeared in seventy American papers. A steady stream
of reprints of English materials, sponsored by the Federal and State
governments, societies, cities, and railroad companies, flowed from the press
before and after the 1829 Rainhill Trials.
Two 1825 treatises on
railroads came across the Atlantic in quantities too small for the demand. An
American edition of Tredgold's work was reprinted in New York the same year as
it appeared in London, while Carey and Lea, Philadelphia publishers of many
railroad pamphlets during this period, reissued Wood's book in 1832. Editor
George W. Smith, in bringing this work up to date by his own comments from
current English sources and chapters on American railroads, criticized the
canal policy of Pennsylvania and predicted the absolute necessity of linking
and extending the state-owned railroads to Pittsburgh, even before the hybrid
canal-rail system began operations. In 1826 Carey and Lea reproduced the
two-volume work of English Civil Engineer John Nicholson. A revised American edition
followed within five years.
The hunger of the American
public for the most recent information from England is reflected by the two
editions of Strickland's single letter and a September, 1825, Liverpool and
Birmingham Railroad Report which his Society issued in the same year. Three
editions, within two months, of a railroad pamphlet, based on material from an
essay by the Highland Society of Edinburgh, further illustrates this desire.
Carey and Lea published Strickland's 1826 Report of fifty pages, and
accompanied it with a six-page resume.
There was no sectional monopoly
in this progressive work; the 1825 Virginia House of Delegates ordered
Grahame's London edition on railroads and canals to be republished in Richmond.
The pre-incorporation organization of the Baltimore and Ohio reported, on Feb.
19, 1827, that 2000 miles of completed and building English railroads had
convinced many Englishmen and Americans that railroads would supersede canals,
as the canals had replaced turnpikes in England. The spokesman for American
canal interests, the Chesapeake and Ohio, whose route paralleled that of the
Baltimore and Ohio up the Potomac Valley, and a competitor for Maryland
financial backing, issued and circulated adverse facts on the English lines.
These often were printed in the same volume as the pro-railroad facts. House of
Representatives Document No. 101 is an example. The canal side accused the
Baltimore and Ohio of gathering its 1827 arguments from Thomas Gray's Observations
on a General Iron Railroad. Though
this work warranted five English editions by 1825, seemingly it was overlooked
by American publishers. Columbia Professor Renwick's four editions of Lardner's
work, from 1828 to 1838, needs to be recalled in this classification. Apparently,
shortly before Rainhill, the Baltimore and Ohio, in a probable effort to
justify its calls for city, state, and national aid, publicized, in 1829, the
results of English railroad experiments, without mention of the Trials.
Stephenson's success at Rainhill,
in October, 1829, which the United States was "anticipating . . . with
eager hope," found this country "ripe to accept the results."
Though the locomotive was now generally accepted in the United States, the
Liverpool and Manchester results, magic words, were called to the attention of
the American public for another decade.
Josiah White, the builder of
the 1827 Mauch Chunk railroad in the Lehigh Valley, in a letter of May 18,
1830, referred to an article on Liverpool and Manchester locomotive operating
costs, which appeared in the London Mechanics Magazine of October, 1829. Part
of White's letter and the reference to the Liverpool and Manchester were
reprinted in a congressional document.
Massachusetts described the
Liverpool and Manchester locomotive success story in an 1830 Internal
Improvement Report, and, the same year, Paterson, N. J., reproduced an accurate
description of it in a thirty-page pamphlet, as an argument for the success of
their proposed railroad to the Hudson River. John Stevens' son, Edwin, made
reference to a Liverpool and Manchester Report in Mar. 1830. To satisfy a
public demand, Carey and Lea, in 1831, included a description and additional L.
& M. facts in a 206-page book. The next year Congress republished accounts
of the Liverpool and Manchester dating from both before and after Rainhill, in
Document 101. Two years later the same body cited Liverpool and Manchester
costs in a pamphlet favoring the construction of the Illinois and Michigan
Canal.
Not all accounts were favorable.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and its friends seized upon both the locomotive
upkeep costs and track damages reported by the Liverpool and Manchester as
arguments for building canals. The South Carolina Railroad recorded in their
motive power investigations English accounts of 1831, which told of the great
repair expense for Liverpool and Manchester locomotives, and that usually only
one-third, six or seven of twenty-four owned, were fit for use. Horatio Allen
made a comparison with the locomotive weights of the L. & M. in determining
the one-and-a-half ton axle weight limits for the South Carolina line. A South
Carolina report two years later told that six months' repair and maintenance of
the L. & M. locomotives cost $52,910, which, including track repairs made
the yearly cost $175,000. Working and repair cost of locomotives was $4000 per
mile a year. However, in spite of the very high costs, the dividend paid was
twice the usual rate of interest. Despite these startling figures, the South
Carolina Railroad continued to order additional American-built locomotives,
and, from 1834 to 1836, imported fourteen British locomotives for their road.
The 280 per cent advance in the Liverpool and Manchester shares was used, in
1835, to promote the sale of the proposed Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston
Railroad.
A description of the L. &
M. and other writings of Nicholas Wood and George Stephenson came to America,
via France in an 1833 translation printed in Boston. One of the last English
items to cross the Atlantic for reprinting was the twenty-page 1835 Report of
the Grand Junction Railroad, which linked Liverpool with Birmingham. While the
Thomson list of 2671 surviving American publications continues through 1840,
this citation is the last mentioning the Liverpool and Manchester or English
railroads. From the great frequency of their use, the words Liverpool and
Manchester really were magic to the American publisher and reader of railroad
information.
English recognition of
American railroad progress came in the 1838 London publication of David
Stevenson's Sketch of Civil Engineering in North America. A member of a famous engineering family, David
Stevenson had worked on the Liverpool and Manchester, while his uncle was of
sufficient repute in English engineering circles, in 1825, to be quoted four
times by Wood. Written after a professional tour of the U. S. and Canada, this
work of 320 pages, fourteen plates, and a map warranted a five-page review in
Herapath.
V. BRITAINS AND BRITISH CONSTRUCTION IN THE UNITED
STATES
The railroad caused a movement
of men from its inception; Irish laborers helped build the 1828-29 Liverpool
and Manchester and the early lines of Scotland. Horatio Allen had been
authorized to engage two English locomotive engineers to superintend Delaware
and Hudson locomotive operation, but there is no record that Englishmen came to
America with either the Stephenson or the Foster and Rastrick locomotives.
Englishman N. Cummings, who had eighteen months locomotive experience with Stephenson's
four-wheeled Liverpool and Manchester engines, accompanied the famous
Stephenson engine, "John Bull, " to the Camden and Amboy Railroad. In
addition to working on this New Jersey pioneer line, Cummings ran a six-wheeled
engine on the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad, before moving on to the South
Carolina Railroad by 1833. Engineer Wm. Robinson, (or Robertson) long
experienced with the L. & M. four-wheel locomotives and backed with a
Liverpool and Manchester recommendation, likewise came to America with a
Stephenson engine, and was working for the South Carolina Railroad in 1833. Of
the two English engineers, who accompanied the Bury-built locomotives,
purchased by the Little Schuylkill Railroad in 1832-3, one returned to England
shortly after the locomotives were placed in operation. George Mann never
returned to England, but worked many years on the Little Schuylkill between
Port Clinton and Tamaqua, Pa. William Hudson, apprentice and workman at
Stephenson's Newcastle factory, has been mentioned in connection with the
Rogers Locomotive Works.
The most notable movement of
men into the United States, occasioned by boom-time railroad construction and
the labor shortage during the Civil War, is an illustration of the boom-time
railroad operations by the great English railroad contractors, employing as
many as 30,000 men. Sir Morton Peto, often, as other great contractors did,
built railroads, and, after construction ended, ran the railroad until
companies he organized bought the line. Peto, with other British contractors
and financiers, brought his engineering and financial skills to the United
States, to build the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, today's main line of
the Erie Railroad from Salamanca, N. Y., to Marion, Ohio.
James McHenry, a former
Philadelphia merchant, who became a British-American railroad financier, used
money-control of the English Railroad News to "hysterically promote"
the Atlantic and Great Western. Publicized as a six-foot gauge link between New
York City and St. Louis, and between the Erie and the Ohio and Mississippi
Railroads, both well known and partially owned in England, McHenry built the
road without investment of his own funds; on paper he made ten million dollars.
By pledging stock to London banks for ninety-day bills, as publicity created
their demand, he began his campaign. A million dollars worth of 7 per cent
bonds, issued at eighty, sold well because the Bank of London guaranteed
payment of the first four coupons. Other bonds, issued at fifty cents on the
dollar, paid for 55,000 tons of English rail.
Spanish financier and
politician, Don Jose Salamanca, added prestige and credit to the line by taking
the first building contract. Banks in Liverpool and London turned Salamanca
promises into cash. Under McHenry's direction British engineers began work; Sir
Morton Peto moved on to the job. In spite of the Civil War shortage of labor,
fifteen thousand laborers, one-third of them English, completed the road. By
late 1864 trains ran between Salamanca, N. Y., and Dayton, Ohio. A third rail
on the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railroad, Dayton to Cincinnati,
completed the connection between New York and St. Louis, by a six-foot gauge
line. This amazing construction had cost McHenry 50 per cent in London and these
debts cost 10 percent. However, he lost no money on his contracts. With a
capitalization of sixty millions, bonds at fifty per cent brought McHenrY
thirty millions, while the road cost twenty. He could make ten millions,
providing he could unload the new line quickly. In 1865, Sir Morton Peto and a
group of British capitalists visited the United States in an effort to dispose
of the Atlantic and Great Western. The bankrupt Erie, resisting threatened
competition, refused to purchase. The Baltimore and Ohio, which already
connected with the Ohio and Mississippi, declined to buy a duplicating
connection. Unable to earn its interest, the Atlantic and Great Western had to
be supported by its bankers. Its 1866 failure revealed stock manipulations
similar to 1928 operations in the U. S.
Leases and contracts for
lines in eastern and central Pennsylvania, one through Bethlehem, made before
the Atlantic and Great Western failed, show that Sir Morton Peto attempted to
secure a New York outlet for the line. The Morris and Essex Railroad from N.
Y., to Phillipsburg, N. J., and the Catawissa, Williamsport and Erie, (today's
Reading line from near Tamaqua to Williamsport, and the Little Schuylkill )
were leased. A railroad was to be constructed by the Philadelphia and
Reading-controlled East Pennsylvania Railroad, from Phillipsburg, through
Easton and Bethlehem, to its own line at Allentown. The Philadelphia and
Reading, then financed by English bankers McCalmonts, was to finish the
nearly-completed Allentown Railroad to t he Philadelphia and Reading, at Port
Clinton, from the East Pennsylvania line. Two railroads through central
Pennsylvania, the Western Central and the Lewisburg Centre and Spruce
Railroads, were to be constructed by the Atlantic and Great Western, between
the Catawissa terminus, at Williamsport, and Oil City, Pa.
The Philadelphia and Reading
actually began work on the Allentown Railroad, completing the road to Kutztown,
Pa., but the Atlantic and Great Western failure ended construction. The partially
graded right-of-way and an uncompleted tunnel may still be seen and easily
traced in southern Lehigh and northern Berks Counties. The corporation of this
line existed until War II, when it was merged into the Reading Company. English
financial control of the Philadelphia and Reading lasted almost to the
twentieth century; another English influence ended on May 12, 1890, when
left-hand operation on double-track line ceased.
Upon the failure of the
Atlantic and Great Western, a London family bank, Bishoffsheim and Goldschmidt,
reorganized the road for McHenry. Later, this same bank cleaned up the Erie
Railroad by ending Jay Gould's management. Other casualties of this American
railroad venture by English capital, were the London Joint Stock Bank and Overend,
Gurney and Co., known as the bankers' bank, as early as 1807. Thomas
Richardson, backer of the great firm of Overend, Gurney and Co., had financed
railroads before 1824. Then he furnished his cousin, Pease, with capital to
complete the Stockton and Darlington, and, in 1824, he and Pease furnished part
of Stephenson's capital to begin the Newcastle Locomotive Works.
VI. ENGLISH RAIL AND FINANCE IN THE UNITED STATES
"Rails and capital . . .
the United States could not fully provide for itself." When the financial
demands of the railroad rose after 1829, the United States turned to England
for capital as she had for decades. Shares and bonds flowed across the ocean in
greater amount than ever before, to pay for English rail, locomotives and
trans-Atlantic freight charges. Money in the period 1828-32 being cheap, 11/2
per cent in London, the 5 to 10 percent American state securities, financing
banks, canals, and railroads, were quite attractive to British investors.
However, some slave-hating purchasers refused to buy bonds of the Slave States
despite the high interest. Scare-buying came from fearful Tories, who converted
English investments into American bonds during the Reform Bill discussions, as
protection against the coming wrecking of England. Moreover, these English
investments in the United States were made while there was a great demand for
capital in England's own railroads; the success of the Liverpool and Manchester
influenced Parliament to authorize $190,000,000 capital, between 1830 and 1837.
Baring Brothers and Company,
one of the dozen big British merchant-banking firms competing for the purchase
of American cotton and grain, as well as American securities, sold $27,000,000
of state bonds at home by 1830. In 1832 Barings purchased Pennsylvania, Ohio,
and New York bonds, and, reflecting their faith in certain states, publicly
linked their name with the securities of Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland,
and Massachusetts. South Carolina borrowed $2,000,000, in 1838, for its
Southwestern Railroad Bank, a pre-Civil War southern banking stronghold, which
controlled, at this time, the pioneer South Carolina Canal and Railroad
Company, and which was proposing a railroad to Cincinnati. Barings, in
financing half this loan, sent $500,000 specie to South Carolina. Once Barings
publicly connected their reputation with a state, they went to considerable
lengths to protect that reputation. To keep control of Maryland bonds, this
firm bid 117 for a 6 percent loan in 1835. Other costly efforts to keep their
shield untarnished will be told later.
Active competition existed
among the British financial houses. Barings lost the purchase of Pennsylvania
State bonds financing rail purchases, by a 1/2 percent bid of an English
competitor, but won the Massachusetts bonds and rail sales for the Boston and
Providence, the Boston and Lowell and the Western Railroads. However, the
biggest competitor to all foreign houses was Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the
United States. Biddle information gave a large Pennsylvania issue to Gowan and
Marx, later the English financiers of the Philadelphia and Reading. This Biddle
competition was partly possible because Barings, while the agent in England for
the Bank of the United States, had recommended and sold 80,000 bank shares to their
own customers, and, in 1836, lent it $5,000,000. However, Barings refused to
invest in the Morris Canal and Banking Company, later a Biddle associate.
Securities of private companies
as well as state bonds attracted English investment very early. Stevens' Camden
and Amboy, the Harrisburg and Lancaster, the Philadelphia and Reading, (hauling
coal to the sea as did the money-making Stockton and Darlington) as well as the
early lines in the Lehigh Valley, the Hazleton Coal and the Lehigh Coal and
Navigation companies, were particularly owned in England, in the late 1830's.
The Baltimore and Ohio claimed to have marketed the first American railroad
loan in England, $500,000, sent to Brown, Shipley & Co., of Liverpool.
The advent of the railroad brought
a heavy demand for iron rail on both sides of the Atlantic. W. and I. Sparrow,
of Wolverhampton, England, rolled the Delaware and Hudson 21/4" x
1/2" iron to Allen's' specifications and shipped much rail of his design
to other railroads in the United States. The Delaware and Hudson had sufficient
rail by November 5, 1828, to loan the Baltimore and Ohio five tons. The
Baltimore and Ohio wrought-iron rail cost $58 a ton delivered, compared to
American bids of $92. The state of Pennsylvania, before 1832, purchased ten
miles of strap rail, 21/4" x 5/8" x 15', which was laid on stone
rail, (as the Baltimore and Ohio) and 76-1/2 miles of rolled edge rail, 41
pounds to the yard. This edge rail, similar to T-rail, costing $50.50 a ton at
Philadelphia, was mounted in chairs, as the English use today, on stone blocks
or wood ties. The Philadelphia, Germantown and Norristown purchased a
Clarence-type rail, also chair-mounted, 36 pounds to the yard. Stevens' T-rail,
16' long and 39 pounds to the yard, cost about $40 a ton in England.
State aid to the construction
of railroads, as by Maryland and Ohio, or outright state construction and
ownership, as in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana, was taken for granted in
the 1830's. Hopefully, both the undeveloped new states and the older coastal
states expected that internal improvements would not only be able to pay the
interest on funds borrowed to construct them, but also to earn a surplus income
which could be applied to ordinary government costs. Though Federal aid had
been sought and denied, requests for tariff rebates on imported rail were
frequent. The Delaware and Hudson and the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Co.
presented petitions to Congress on April 7, 1838. The latter effort saved $17 a
ton on their rails, through a reduction from a flat $30-a-ton charge to 25
percent ad valorem. Based on this rate, the South Carolina company paid $22,000
duty out of the $109,453 cost delivered at Charleston.
Five 1828 petitions to
Congress about English rail illustrate the bitter trade rivalry between
Baltimore and Philadelphia. The latter port countered within the month
Baltimore's four petitions; Congress refused to remit rail duty for Baltimore.
Seven years later, Pennsylvania requested this same relief, as did the city of
New Orleans, the New York and Harlem, the Newcastle and Frenchtown, and the
Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroads. The petition of the Alabama, Florida and
Georgia Railroad for the same aid in 1838 being denied, that company issued
bonds to cover this unanticipated expense. The P. & R. was among the 1838
beneficiaries of such reductions. The total tariff refund on imported rail
(England was the sole source), in the decade 1831-41, was $4,800,000. If the
rate of collection were steady at the South Carolina payment of 1838, the
English exports would be 369,245 tons, at a cost to America of $19,200,000.
In England, home and American
railroad demand increased the price of iron 85 percent, from June, 1835, to
February, 1836. The actual, orders from abroad were nearly 450,000 tons,
180,000 a year for five years "to supply the demands of a new trade, or 26
percent of that made. The needs of the United States, just to double track the
existing 3000 miles, were held to be 714,000 tons, a demand, which without a
mile of new construction, would bring in the next seven years $250,00O,000 to
England. Another estimate declared that the 750,000 tons of rail needed in the
United States could only be procured in England. David Stevenson's 1837 survey
of American railroads concurred that the rails must come from England even
though the United States had the necessary ironworks to manufacture them. In
one week's rail order for June, 1838, America placed 10,000 of the 12,000 tons
sold. By 1840, the United States was the most important purchaser of England's
fastest growing export, which had doubled in the decade 1829-1839. In this last
year America bought 68,000 tons of the 131,000 exported; another decade later,
324,000 of the 554,000 tons exported came across the Atlantic.
American demand for iron
climbed with the introduction of railroads; the coal and iron business boomed.
The iron business concentrated in Pennsylvania near the anthracite fields;
plants quadrupled and output doubled. By 1847, twenty-nine iron companies had
erected forty-one hot blast furnaces, with an annual capacity of 125,800 tons,
in the Lehigh, Schuylkill and Susquehanna Valleys.
The time was ripe for the
American manufacture of rails. The South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company
replacement, in 1838, of their 1829 strap-rail with heavier flange-rail from
England, at a cost of $440,000 mirrors the potential demand of the existing
railroads alone. The Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, Va., claim to have rolled
the first American rail in 1837, and to have furnished the Richmond,
Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad demand in 1838. In 1842, the Great Western
Iron Company, on the Allegheny above Pittsburgh, lost money selling rail to an
Indiana railroad at $50 a ton. Two years later, British capital set up the Mt.
Savage Iron Works, nine miles from Cumberland on the Baltimore and Ohio,
expressly to supply the American rail demand. This project, capitalized at
$1,600,000 and with 4000 employees, mostly imported, failed by 1847, and
brought only $200,000 at a sheriff's sale. Bradshaw's Railroad Gazette of England reported, in October, 1845, the Montour
Rail Works at Danville, Pa., a Biddle-Morris Canal and Banking Company project,
operating around the clock except Sundays. In 1844 these three rail mills had
an annual capacity of only 24,000 tons, while the whole annual capacity of the
U. S. was 119,000 tons, or only rail sufficient to replace, or build, 1200
miles of railroad.
The dependence of the United
States on England for locomotives never equaled that for rail. By 1838
twenty-seven American builders had constructed 238 locomotives, while only 103
English locomotives had been imported. Seven plants in Pennsylvania had built
144 of these 238. This same year, Pennsylvania's railroads operated 130
locomotives on 1913 miles of track.
An 1845 valuation of American
railroads ($125,000,000) estimates $26,000,000 had been spent on English rails,
and that 250,000 tons of T-rail were needed just to replace the light strap
rail then in use. Two years later, twenty New York and New England lines,
partly fulfilling this prediction, did import 66,000 tons of English rail
expressly to replace strap rail.
After this long excursion
into early American rail importation and production it is necessary to return
to the financial conditions of 1830. While the prices of all American stocks
were inflated during 1833-34, the 1835 rise in wheat prices brought new faith
and a flood of railroad bonds. After being bullish up to 1832, Barings are
credited with "relative caution and a restraining infiuence" on the
expansion of English-American trade from 1832 to 1836. In the latter year
America owed England a trade balance of $20,000,000; English-American trade had
doubled. In the same period American state debts rocketed to $66,000,000 by
1835, and to $124,000,000 by 1837. Fuel to the expansion flames was the
promised distribution of the Federal surplus among the states during 1837. Of
the $42,000,000 surplus, $37,000,000 was to be given out. Actually only
$28,000,000 was distributed. Some states, North Carolina in particular, now
entered into state-finance of internal improvement on account of this
distribution. In addition to over-expansion of banking and transportation
facilities, there was heavy speculation in land and cotton. Southern lines paid
for English rails with cotton at this time.
When cotton fell 25 percent
in February and March, 1837, the financial crisis set off by Jackson's Specie
Circular and the war on the Bank of the United States, plunged the U. S. into a
panic. Every bank in the nation suspended specie payment by May. But, to
England, this was only a financial crisis in the American Trade, involving, by
June, the suspension of seven American-British banking houses. The demand for
American securities ceased.
In England the railroad boom
moved upward. While the United States suffered deflation, the Stockton and
Darlington dividends rose from $55 on a $500 share to $90, in 1838, and the
value of a share more than doubled to $1300. Fearing overproduction and low prices
in 1839, Staffordshire iron makers cooperated to cut production 20 percent for
six months, but renewed English and, later, American demands made the cut
unnecessary.
With the revival of American
business, state debts climbed to $175,500,000, by the end of 1839. New
securities and refunding issues to pay interest on older bond issues cascaded
on the American and British money markets, passing chiefly into English hands.
To protect their customers to whom they had sold Bank of the United States
stock and to bolster this bank, in 1840, Barings made a six-month million
dollar loan, taking as security $2,250,000 in 5 percent Mississippi and over a
million 6 percent Michigan bonds, received by the Bank from the Morris Canal
and Banking Company. Biddle had out-bid his American and British rivals, in
1838, for Alabama and Michigan issues.
As Barings had bolstered Biddle's Bank, now they maintained
their own good reputation and Pennsylvania's credit by paying the January,
1840, interest on that state's bonds. When the Bank of the United States
collapsed in February, 1841, American bonds fell to their lowest figures.
However, Barings endeavored to market Massachusetts, Ohio, and Alabama bonds
until July, 1842, when Pennsylvania and Maryland gave notice that interest
payments would not be made.
Maryland had been paying the
interest on her European-held bonds since April, 1840, through Barings. The
bank paid the January, 1842, interest out of their own funds but refused to act
as props after the July interest was defaulted. August, 1842, was the greatest
depth of this depression; American securities sold only at very low prices.*
Having complete control of Massachusetts, Ohio, South Carolina, and Maryland
bonds, Barings kept these issues off the market to prevent greater damage to
the credit of these states and to protect their own reputation.
To the English investor,
after the interest default by nine states, the whole United States was a nation
of swindlers. Shrewd English investors, willing to pick up good securities at
bargain prices, circulated rumors that all American states would repudiate.
British merchants sent these low-cost American securities across the Atlantic
in payment for cotton and grain during the next five years. An attempted
financial boycott, the refusal of a loan to the debt-free Federal government,
by English capital, in 1842, failed because reviving American trade enabled New
York bankers to furnish the funds. Proposals by both English and American
banking houses that the debt-free Federal Government take over the state debts
were disregarded, because of hostility to the source of the suggestion and the
campaign of 1840.
Efforts to collect the
defaulted interest and to ensure future payment began immediately after the
default. When questioned about Federal liability, the U. S. Senate stated that
the debt-free Federal Government had no responsibility for the state debts.
When Barings asked Daniel Webster about the legality of these bonds, he
answered that the individual state had the legal and constitutional power,
through the state legislature, to create loans at home and abroad. This
opinion, published in England by Barings, had a stabilizing effect on the price
of American securities. Other opinions secured by Barings, but not published,
held that Pennsylvania would resume payments, and, perhaps Indiana, but little
hope was held for the other seven states.
English financiers, Barings in
particular, now began to exert direct and indirect pressure on the nine
defaulting states to induce them to resume their interest payments. Nicholas
Biddle and Daniel Webster were retained by Barrings to influence Pennsylvania
to pay her two millions annual interest. New York banker Ward, another of Barings
American agents, brought pressure on Governor Porter as part of his activities
in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, and Louisiana. Boston, New York, New
Orleans, and Baltimore newspapers received $10, or more, for reprinting
articles urging resumption. Even the clergy were employed. In the fall of 1844,
Webster made a series of speeches in Pennsylvania. After paying the February,
1845; interest, half in cash and half in depreciated bank-notes, Pennsylvania
began full payment in 1847.
* Baldwin's locomotive production well pictures the
up-and-down financial condition of both the railroads and the United States in
this period:
1835
- 14 1839
- 26 1843
- 12
1836
- 40 1840
- 9 1844
- 22
1837- 40 1841
- 8 1845
- 27
1838
- 23 1842
- 14
J. H. B. Latrobe, of the
Baltimore and Ohio legal staff, brother of the chief engineer, and the leader
of the Maryland Whigs, became Barings' special agent in Maryland. It has been
mentioned that this state's bonds had been linked directly with the bank's
reputation in Europe. Barings were the official agents for both the state and
the Baltimore and Ohio, and held bonds both on their own account and as
collateral for loans. It was to keep complete control of Maryland's bonds, that
the firm had been forced to bid 117.4 per 100 for an 1835 issue. Likewise, the
1840 visits to England of President McLane, of the Baltimore and Ohio, which
enabled the railroad to reach the Cumberland Coal Field and thus pay dividends
on the railroad stock held by the state, should be recalled at this point. In
spite of repeated calls for resumption by the Baltimore papers, between 1843
and 1845, and the introduction of Latrobe bills in the legislature, Maryland
delayed resumption.
The next year, English money
aided Governor Pratt to restore Maryland's credit; part of $4500 from Barings
talked in the election of the legislature. In a resumption bill, which was
passed in March, 1847, the state funded her unpaid interest in 3 percent bonds.
By this time, Maryland had borrowed at 5 and 6 percent $6,800,000 to finance
railroads and $8,100,000 for canal construction. The Maryland efforts cost
Barings $15,000, while costs in Pennsylvania were less than half of that
amount. Webster received $100 and a canceled 1843 note for $2410, a very small
fee when compared to the annual two millions of interest which Pennsylvania
paid. As Secretary of State, Webster gave the United States Fiscal Agency, held
by Rothschilds, to Barrings, who retained the post until 1867.
The other repudiating states
received little direct pressure for resumption, other than the eastern
newspaper articles published during 1843-47 campaign in Pennsylvania and
Maryland. A memorial from Barings to the Louisiana Legislature brought interest
payments in 1843. Mississippi paid neither interest nor principal. Florida and Arkansas
received little attention.
Because Illinois refused to levy
a tax to enable resumption, the Illinois Central and the Michigan Central
Railroads, even though they favored the tax, lost Barings' favor temporarily.
Barings protested to the legislature also when compensation was not provided
for the Barings-bonded Illinois and Michigan Canal, as the paralleling Rock
Island and La Salle Railroad was incorporated. Ten years later, Barings, with
four other English Banking Houses, protested that Wabash and Erie Canal bonds
had degenerated in value because Indiana Legislature had chartered paralleling
railroads. England required her railroads to either buy or compensate by paying
a certain sum, the canal company whose territory a railroad invaded.
When Michigan sold her
railroad lines and issued refunding bonds in 1846 and 1848, Barings received
$255,000 for its Michigan bond holdings. As a part of the Morris Canal and
Banking Company financial tangle, through which Michigan funds were invested in
the Little Schuylkill and Susquehanna Railroad, Michigan temporily owned part
of that railroad's anthracite coal lands near Linder's Gap, between Tamaqua and
Hazleton, Pa., in Rush Township, upper Schuylkill County. Indiana, who also
sold her bonds to the Morris Canal and Banking Company on credit, found
herself, through this mismanagement holding a $1,250,000 mortgage on the canal
of the Morris Canal and Banking Company, 13,600 shares of the Little Schuylkill
and Susquehanna railroad stock, par value $230,000 but then worthless, and
$100,000 stock in the Beaver Meadow Railroad. The most potentially valuable
holding of the lot (except New York real estate) was 75,100 shares of the
Baltimore and Ohio, then valued at .27 to the dollar Indiana, by selling her internal
railroads, refinanced her debt through Barings and other English bankers.
However accomplished,
Barings' six-year program to influence resumption of interest payments enabled
the slow-paying states to rescue their good name, and, just as important, to
borrow funds from abroad by 1848. One result of this repudiation, a Council of
Foreign Bondholders, created in England, survived into the twentieth century.
The 1847 blowup of the
speculative English railroad bubble, inflating since 1835, made the average
English investor wary of all railroad securities. With diminishing home demand
English iron manufacturers felt hard times. Rail prices fell; Welsh rails sold,
in 1850, at $27.50 a ton FOB. The memories of the U. S. repudiations of 1842
were revived and reinforced until the 1848 Revolution closed Europe as an
investment field. Again, money became cheap, while high American interest
rates, 16 percent discount by October, 1851, quickly pushed the bad memories
aside. New American construction financed by state, county and city bonds,
began in the United States. As security prices recovered in America after 1848,
railroad and state bonds were sold back to Americans. Barings held their
collateral Baltimore and Ohio and Massachusetts bonds until maturity, while
other issues were resold at higher prices. Losses on most American securities
were recovered This recovery ends the story of the Panic of 1837 with its
English finance and American-railroad involvements.
Recovery and low English rail
prices attracted large American orders. By 1852 demand forced a 75 percent rise
in prices. This year, in spite of the English merchant and banker resales to
America, saw $220,000,000 of American securities held abroad. The United States
Treasury estimated that $35,500,000 of the $52,000,000 of railroad bonds issued
in 1854 were spent for rail. Another spree of expansion, greater than that of
the 1830's, had been set off. As Barings had tapered off purchases in that
early inflationary period, the firm again bought cautiously during 1852-1855.
In carrying out this policy they allowed their name to be linked only with the
few railroads in whose managers they felt great confidence, and favored always
the east-west trunk lines and especially avoided roads built in advance of
settlement.
The Baltimore and Ohio had
met all these specifications, and Barings had given that line the financial aid
which enabled it to reach the Ohio River by 1853, an 1849 purchase of 200,000
first mortgage bonds and a shipment of 22,000 tons of rail, partly paid by
six-to-ten year bonds. However, the bankers weren't satisfied with the
light-track construction to Wheeling, on the Ohio; the Cumberland-to-Baltimore
coal rate was too low; while Garrett & Co., who handled Baltimore and Ohio
securities, were more expansive and speculative than the bankers desired. In
addition, Barings' American advisors foresaw and feared severe Baltimore and
Ohio competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad west of the Ohio. All these
reasons, as well as friendship with Erastus Corning, of the N. Y. Central, and
John Murray Forbes, one of Barings' financial advisors on American railroads,
led the bankers to shift financial support from the Baltimore and Ohio to the
New York Central.
Erastus Corning, of the
original Albany-Buffalo New York Central, warranted Barings' confidence to the
extent of a half-million dollar rail credit, in 1853. However, business wasn't
forgotten; Barings made 21/2 percent on rail purchases, while the interest on
the loan was 6 percent. Barings' dependence on American advisors is mentioned
in the loss of financial support by the Baltimore and Ohio. In addition to John
Murray Forbes, the company at this time received advice from W. H. Aspinwall,
William Appleton, William Sturgis, Robert Bennet Forbes, D. A. Neal, W. W.
Corcoran and W. S. Wilmore. These men made recommendations on American
railroads which enabled the firm to secure bonds safe to offer their customers
and which brought credit to them. W. H. Swift, ex-Army Engineer, later
president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (Pa. Main Line
Philadelphia to Washington today) and president of the Western Railroad of
Massachusetts, by 1850, became a Baring advisor in 1852. Besides American
lines, Swift was consulted by Barings on Canadian and Russian roads.
Their fear of a depression
having passed, in 1855, these bankers began investments in Forbes' lines, the
Central Military Tract, Chicago and Aurora, Joliet and Northern Indiana, and
the Hannibal and St. Joseph, the core of today's Burlington System in Illinois
and Missouri. These investments were the last Barings made in American
railroads. Sales of rails and purchases of bonds were allowed to pass to
competitors. Barings, in addition to attempting to apply the English idea of compensation
to canals whose territory was invaded by a railroad, exerted pressure to
introduce sound financial methods to their client railroads. In 1858, they
refused to purchase Michigan Central bonds, because that company had
disregarded Baring advice to create sinking funds for interest and retirement.
By 1857, England had $400,000,000 invested in American
Railroads The panic of that year, as its predecessor twenty years before, was
parented by land speculation and over-expansion of railroads. Beginning with a
fifteen-dollar-a-share drop in Michigan Southern stock on August 13,
speculative securities slid into panic-selling by the 24th. That day, the Ohio
Life Insurance and Trust Company, heavily involved in railroad finance,
suspended. Within six months discount rose to 24 percent. In the depth of this
depression, as in 1837 and 1841, many British buyers purchased depressed
American railroad stocks and bonds.
Recovery from the 1857
depression was slow. Railroad loans were only 75 percent of par three years
later. In the year Grant took office, 1868, 300,000 tons of English rail came
to the United States, and foreign investors, mostly English, despite
$12,000,000 lost in the Confederate States, owned one-and-a-half billion
dollars of United States railroad securities. In these days of billions, this
sum needs comparison with the United States debt following the Civil War to
realize its true position. That debt, the astounding sum in its day, of
$2,453,000,000 was only 66% more than the foreign railroad investment.
Another English railroad
improvement, the steel rail, introduced into the United States during the Civil
War, began anew an importation of rail which continued to flow heavily into the
United States until 1880. In 1864, two years after the first use of the steel
rail in England, the Lehigh Valley Railroad placed steel rail on its Beaver
Meadow Division. Naturally, when the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company decided
to extend its Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad from Mauch Chunk to Easton, after
the disastrous flood of 1863, that company utilized the experience of the
Lehigh Valley Railroad and ordered English steel rail for the whole distance,
though the cost was double that of iron. However, a $5,000,000 bond sale
attempted in England near this time, failed to materialize.
Average earnings through
dividends and increased market value on English-held railroad securities in the
decade 1870-80 demonstrate that American railroads, however financed, built,
managed and operated, were the most profitable, paying 9.3 percent to British
investors, while Indian lines paid only 6.3 percent and Canadian 2.1 percent.
American expansion drew
heavily on England for rail, in 1880, for the last time, when 294,000 tons
crossed the Atlantic. Imports fell to only 1800 tons during 1884. The growth of
American steel production, especially that of Andrew Carnegie, was responsible
for the reversal of this trend. By 1899, Carnegie had so well integrated his
holdings of steel plants, coal and ore lands with the cheapest transportation
possible, that he was able to deliver steel rail in England at $19 a ton, the
English manufacturer's cost, and yet make a profit of three dollars a ton.
British investment in American
railroads didn't terminate because heavy rail shipments ended in the 1880's. On
the contrary, of the five billions England had invested in the United States in
1914, probably half was in railroad stocks and bonds. A more recent estimate
held the total 1914 British investment in the United States at $3,646,340,000,
eighty percent of which, $3,090,000,000, was in railroads. The total valuation
of American Railroads at this time was between sixteen and seventeen billion
dollars. Hence England was furnishing between one-sixth and one-fifth of the
capital of American lines at the outbreak of World War I.
We have observed that the
influence of England has been an ever constant factor in the development of
American railroads. English ideas brought across the Atlantic by English
newspapers, encyclopedias, magazines and scientific papers stimulated Latrobe
(his sons and pupils) Stevens and Renwick, the pioneers, advocates and
builders. This same whirlpool of publicity drew Philadelphian George W. Smith,
Charlestonian E. L. Miller, Baltimoreans Evan Thomas and Ross Winans and
engineer Horatio Allen into its vortex to satisfy their curiosity.
Through George W. Smith's
efforts seventy American papers broadcast his convictions across the whole
land. Today such publicity seems almost sheer waste, but, as in England,
American railroad proponents had to overcome canal propaganda. However, the
bitterness between the two groups was of greater intensity in the United States
because the two modes of transportation, separated by half a century in
England, were almost contemporary on this continent. The numerous American
reproductions of English railroad statistics, especially those of the Liverpool
and Manchester, bolstered the home arguments in this formative period like a
footnote citation does a history paper.
The visit of South Carolinan,
E. L. Miller to the Rainhill Trials and his later work and personal investments
in locomotives produced the first American-built locomotive, and initiated
locomotive construction at Charleston, in his own state, and at Reading, Pa. The
excursions of many American engineers to England carried English ideas into the
whole land and began an importation of English money and rail which flowed into
the United States for half a century. While the importing of locomotives from
England ended around 1841, their presence was seed in the fertile garden of
American ingenuity. Baldwin, Rogers and Norris not only adapted from but also
quickly improved on the import. Ross Winans was forced to adopt the English
boiler and long wheel base, but his efforts to obtain greater tractive force by
keeping engine weight on driving wheels are reflected in today's diesels.
Actual construction by
English firms, bankers and men seldom occurred except during the Civil War
manpower shortage. Financial aid, as administered by bankers Barings, carried
to America the English idea of the sinking fund to retire a bond issue, a
feature adopted by the most progressive roads. Attempts to introduce the
compensation principle to the railroads competing with the Baring-bonded, state-owned
canals in Indiana and Illinois failed, but both New York State and Pennsylvania
adopted this idea to protect their canal investment.
All of us recognize the
Declaration of Independence as the point in history when the United States
declared its political independence from England, the mother country. Even
though the American railroads have been practically independent since the
beginning of World War I, England, because of the flow of ideas, men, materials
and, the longest lasting influence, financial aid, can truly be regarded as the
mother of American railroads.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Manuscript Materials
and Correspondence.
Loeser Papers, Correspondence received by Schuylkill County lawyer
from 1811 on. Historical Society Schuylkill Co., Pottsville, Pa.
Baldwin, Letter from Mr. Paul T. Warner, ax-librarian Baldwin
Locomotive Co., Philadelphia, Pa. December 9, 1952.
Jervis. Letter from Miss Helen Salzman, Librarian, Jervis
Memorial Library, Rome, N. Y., January 14, 1953.
Whistler. Letter from Mr. Charles E. Fisher, President,
Railroad and Locomotive Historical Society, Harvard Business School, Cambridge,
Mass.
11. Government and Company
Reports.
American State Papers,
Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States,
from the First to the Second Session of the Tenth Congress, Inclusive:
Commencing March 3, 1789 and Ending March 3, 1809, Miscellaneous 1. Washington, 1834.
Leases and Contracts between
the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading
Railroad. 1868. Railroad Pamphlets,
Lehigh University Library.
Memorial of the Holders of
Certificates of Stock of the Wabash and Erie Canal of the State of Indiana to
the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, March, 1857, London, Washington, New York.
Report of the Board of
Directors of the Lehigh Valley Railroad to Stockholders, Philadelphia, Pa.
Report of the Board of
Managers of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, Philadelphia, Pa.
Report of the Directors of
the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company to the stockholders, May 6, 1834, Charleston.
Report of the Fund
Commissioners, to His Excellency, Samuel Biggers, Indianapolis (?), 184.
Report of Steam Carriages by
a Select Committee of the House of Commons of Great Britain. Reprinted by order
of the House of Representatives, Document 101, Philadelphia, 1832.
Schuylkill County Grantor
Deed Book 23, Pottsville, Pa.
111. Newspapers,
Magazines, and Scrap Books.
Annual Register, London, 1805.
Berks and Schuylkill Journal, Historical Society of Berks County, Reading, Pa.
Mansfield Gazette and
Richland Farmer, Public Library,
Mansfield, Ohio. 28 June 1827.
Philadelphia National Gazette,
Philadelphia, 1827.
Readinger Adler, H. S. of B.
Co., Reading, Pa.
Bradshaw's Railroad Gazette,
London, 1845.
Herapath's Railway Magazine and
Annals of Science, London, 1837-1842.
Journal of Banking from July
1841 to July 1842, Philadelphia.
Locomotive Engineer, New York,
1888.
Merchant's Magazine and
Commercial Review, N. Y., 1836-50.
Jones Scrap Books, Historical
Society of Berks Co., Reading, Pa.
Richard's Scrap Book, Reading,
Pa.
IV. Reference Works.
British Museum Catalog of
Printed Books, 58 V. Ann Arbor, 1881-1900.
Dictionary of American
Biography, 20 V. N. Y., 1928-37.
Dictionary of American History,
5 V. N. Y., 1940.
Dictionary of National
Biography, 21 V. London 1908-09.
History for Ready Reference,
Springfield, Mass. 7 V. Springfield, Mass., 1895-1910.
National Cyclopedia of American
Biography, 37 V. N. Y. 1898-1951.
World Almanac, New York, 1915,
1916.
V. Periodicals.
G. H. Gaskell, "The Origin
of Locomotive Class Names," Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Bulletin
87, October, 1952.
George M. Hart, "The
History of the Locomotives of the Reading Company," R. & L. H. S., Bulletin
67, May, 1946.
Albert H. Imlak, "British
Balance of Payments and Exports of Capital, 1816-1913," Economic
History Review 2nd Series, London,
1952.
John B. Spears, "John
Bloomfield Jervis," R. & L. H. S., Bulletin 30, Feb. 1933.
Paul T. Warner, "Some Early
Locomotive Patents," R. & L. H. S. Bulletin 87, October, 1952.
Vl. Secondary
Publications.
History of the Baldwin
Locomotive Works, 1831-1920,
Philadelphia, nd.
History of the Delavuare and
Hudson, A Century of Progress,
Albany, 1925.
Horatio Allen, The Railroad
Era, The First Five Years of Its Development, N. Y., 1884.
J. Snowden Bell, The Early
Motive Power of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, N. Y., 1912.
Cecil K. Brown, A State
Movement in Railroad Development, The Story of North Carolina's First Eflort to
Establish an East and West Trunk Line Railroad, Chapel Hill, 1928.
R. W. Brown, Some Aspects of Early Railroad Transportation
in Pennsylvania, An Address to the Pennsylvania Historical Association, Carlisle, 1949.
William H. Brown, The History
of the First Locomotive in America from Original Documents and the Testimony of
Living Witnesses, Revised Edition, N.
Y., 1874.
J. H. Clapham, A New Economic
History of Modern Britain, 3 V,
Cambridge, 1926.
Samuel M. Derrick, Centennial
History of the South Carolina Railroad,
Columbia, 1930.
H. W. Dickinson and Arthur
Titley, Richard Trevethick, The Engineer and the Man, Cambridge, Eng., 1934.
Joseph Harrison, Jr., The
Locomotive Engine and Philadelphia's Share in Its Early Development, Revised Edition, Philadelphia, 1872.
Ralph W. Hidy, The House of
Baring in American Trade and Finance, English Merchant Bankers at Work,
1763-1861, Cambridge, 1949.
M. S. Henry, History of the
Lehigh Valley. (Easton, 1860).
Edward Hungerford, The Story
of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 2
V, N. Y., 1928.
Leland H. Jenks, The
Migration of British Capital to 1875,
N. Y., 1927.
S. M. McCool, "History of
Schuylkill County, Pa." Shenandoah, Pa., Herald 1874-75, Photostat of collected columns, Public
Library, Pottsville, Pa.
Reginald C. McGrane, The
Panic of 1837, Some Financial Problems of the Jackson Era, Chicago, 1924.
John B. McMasters, A History
of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, 7 V. N. Y., 1900.
Henry V. Poor, A History of
the Railroads and Canals of the United States, N. Y., 1860.
I. Daniel Rupp, History of
Berks and Lebanon Counties,
Lancaster, 1844.
Wm. Shultz and M. R. Caine, Financial
Development of the United States, N.
Y., 1937.
Henry Simpson, Eminent
Philadelphians, Philadelphia, 1859.
Samuel Smiles, Lives of the
Engineers, The Locomotive, George and Robert Stephenson, London, 1877.
Smith (?), A History and
Description of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, Baltimore, 1853.
Charles B. Stuart, Lives and
Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, N. Y., 1871.
Fred A. Talbot, Cassell's
Railways of the World, 2 V. N. Y.,
nd.
Thomas R. Thomson, Check List
of Publications on American Railroads Before 1841, N. Y., 1942.
Richard Trevethick, Life of
Richard Trevethick With an Account of His Inventions, N. Y., 1872.
L. R. Trumbull, A History of
Industrial Paterson, Paterson, 1882.
A. C. Turnbull, John Stevens, An
American Record, N. Y., 1882.
George L. Vose, A Sketch of
the Life and Works of George W. Whistler,
Boston,
John K. Winkler, The
Incredible Carnegie, The Life of Andrew Carnegie, 1831-1919 N. Y., 1931.
Stephen N. Winslow, Biographies
of Successful Philadelphia Merchants,
Philadelphia,
Francis Wishaw, Railways of
Great Britain and Ireland, London,
1840.
Nicholas Wood, A Practical
Treatise on Railroads and Interior Communications in general. Containing an
Account of the Performance of the Different Locomotives at and Subsequent to
the Liverpool Contests: Upwards of Two Hundred and Sixty Experiments With
Tables of Comparative Values of Canals and Railroads and the Power of Present
Locomotives, First American from Second English Edition George W. Smith, Ed., Philadelphia, 1832.
Back
to the Steam Engine Development Page
About
The Hopkin Thomas Project
Rev. April 2010