The canal that was to link the Delaware to the Hudson was built specifically to bring anthracite from the newly discovered coal fields of Pennsylvania. Work began in 1825. It was a fascinating canal, including one remarkable structure, a suspension aqueduct over the Delaware. The workforce was a mixture of German and Irish navvies who did not get on well together, indeed the Irish lived up to their reputation for hard work, hard drinking and hard fighting. One of the engineers John B. Jervis said in an interview with a local paper, ‘No canal was ever dug through pleasanter country – no swamps, or muck to contend with – no extremes of weather. But that doesn’t mean anything to these club-swinging Irish. I don’t know what they’ve got to fight about. They don’t need a reason; they fight just for the hell of fighting.’ Nevertheless, they pushed the works ahead at a great rate and by October 1828 over a hundred miles of canal had been opened, including 22 aqueducts and 107 locks. But the last fifteen miles from Dyberry Forks to the collieries was built not as a waterway but as a railroad.
In 1828 Horatio Allen, one of the young engineers on the project, was sent to England to purchase four locomotives from Robert Stephenson. In the event, he bought just one Stephenson locomotive and three from Foster and Rastrick of Stourbridge. The latter were somewhat primitive, very little different from the old Puffing Billy design, but it was one of these, the Stourbridge Lion, that was to haul the first train over American tracks. It was a lumbering giant, weighing in at 8 tons, twice the weight the railroad engineers had allowed for when building the track. Mechanically it was primitive, its vertical cylinders working a pair of beams with connecting rods driving straight down on to the rear wheels which were linked with the front wheels in an 0-4-0 arrangement. The combination of the large weight and the ‘hammer-blow’ effect from the vertical cylinders provided a strenuous test of the simple track. The engineer who purchased it, Horatio Allen, now volunteered to put it through its paces. He set off with the sublime confidence of the young and ignorant.
I had never run a locomotive nor any other engine before. But on August 9th 1829, I ran that locomotive three miles and back to the place of starting, and being without experience and without a brakeman, I stopped the locomotive on its return at the place of starting.
The line of road was straight for about 600 feet, being parallel with the canal, then across Lackawaxen Creek on trestle-work about 30 ft. above the creek, and from the curve extending in a line nearly straight into the woods of Pennsylvania.
When the steam was of right pressure … I took my position on the platform of the locomotive alone, and with my hand on the throttle-valve, said ‘if there is any danger in this ride, it is not necessary that more than one should be subjected to it.’
The locomotive having no train behind it answered at once to the movement of the valve; soon the straight line was run over, the curve (and trestle) was reached and passed before there was time to think … and soon I was out of sight in the three miles’ ride alone in the woods of Pennsylvania.
If it all seemed very satisfactory to Allen it looked a good deal less so to the spectators who had seen the simple wooden bridge over the creek sway and heard its timbers moan as the locomotive passed across. An examination of the track showed that a number of sections of rail were cracked and broken: it was Penydarren all over again, and the result was much the same. The Stourbridge Lion had roared twice, but now it was driven off into a shed and left to rot. America’s first steam railway experiment had not been a resounding success. It was, however, no time at all before steam was again given an outing. The Baltimore and Ohio Railway was opened in 1830 using horses at first for both freight and passenger traffic, but soon turning to the locomotive. There were to be no British imports here, however; instead a local man, Peter Cooper, designed a curious little engine, aptly named Tom Thumb, a very lightweight affair with a vertical boiler, very reminiscent of Novelty, the unsuccessful finalist at Rainhill. It weighed a mere ton, and a contemporary print shows it racing against a horse-drawn rail bus, with a number of top-hatted gentlemen actually riding on the locomotive itself. It worked but it can hardly have worked well since the company went on to experiment with sails as an alternative to steam. At much the same time, Edward L. Miller was trying out another American designed and built locomotive, the Best Friend, on the South Carolina Railway. It rattled along at a very respectable speed of around 20 m.p.h. with five coaches. What is significant about these American locomotives, however, is not their performance, but the fact that they owed so little to the pioneering design technology of Britain. True, Robert Stephenson was supplying a few locomotives to American lines, but local engineers were posting notice that they were intending to go their own way in all aspects of railway construction – track, locomotives and rolling stock. The British, perhaps on the defensive, were inclined to be snooty about the American system. Daniel Gooch, the famous locomotive designer of Brunel’s Great Western, took a train from New York to Niagara Falls in 1860 and was not impressed.
Railway travelling in America is wretched; their republican notions of having only one class makes your company very mixed, and the carriages being all large open saloons with a door at each end and passage down the middle, prevents you having the slightest privacy even if you were a good large party of your own. The roads are dusty and the use of wood for fuel sends a quantity of charcoal into your carriage, mixed with the dust, so that when you have travelled all day you are as black as a sweep.
He complained that during the journey he was reading a book and the man behind not only started reading it but complained that Gooch was turning the pages too quickly. Gooch, with an air of hauteur that one can all too easily imagine, handed the book over without a word. But then, there was nothing about America that Gooch did like.
I think I was never so entirely glad of any thing as I was when I felt, on that day, that our ship’s head was turned towards England and I was quit of America.
Gooch was eyeing the American railroads in the light of his own experience, and found them wanting. He did not seem to appreciate that what suited the GWR did not necessarily suit a young country, still advancing its frontiers. The US system was to build up in a way that suited the railways of a continent, and it was to have a profound affect on all railway development in both North and South America. The surprise, in retrospect, is not that the local American experience was so crucial to development, but that anyone else got a look in at all. If there was to be a strong British influence it would logically be felt north of the 49th parallel in Canada.
A working replica of John Bull built for the 1940 New York World’s Fair. The original was built by Robert Stephenson & Co. for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1831.
Canada was both like its southern neighbour and very different. It was similar in that it was a vast territory, much of it unexplored and only a small part settled. It was dissimilar in that there had been no revolution, and the country was still tied to Europe. If these were the only differences then railway building could have gone ahead at a reasonable pace. They were not. To put the story in context needs a brief resume of the country’s history.
British and French were casting their nets off Labrador and Newfoundland as early as the sixteenth century and soon traders were making their way up the St Lawrence to deal in furs with the Indians. The peaceful trading days were short-lived as the traders pushed on aggressively into Indian territory and there were wars with the Iroquois and the Huron. In the seventeenth century the French established the Compagnie des Habitants on the St Lawrence, a base which was to develop into the city of Quebec, and from there they traded ever further west. These free ranging ‘voyageurs’ were the first to call themselves Canadians. One of the old voyageurs told of his old way of life with great enthusiasm:
I have had twelve wives in the country, and was once possessed of fifty horses and six running dogs. I beat all Indians at a race, and no white man passed me in the chase … Huzza, huzza pour le pays sauvage.
The British were
altogether more sedate, but a good deal more wide-sweeping in their claims. The Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay coolly laid claim to the whole drainage basin of Hudson Bay, a mere million and a half square miles. The static English, snubbing the native Canadian Indians, formed a marked contrast with the free-ranging French. When conflict came, however, it was precipitated by war in Europe rather than any local difficulties, although the end result was the same. Quebec fell and the French Canadians found themselves under English rule. There was a continuous move westward. On 22 July 1793, Alexander Mackenzie was able to write on a rock that he was looking down on the Pacific Ocean. Other explorers such as Fraser of Fraser Canyon and David Thompson helped establish trade routes to the west. But these still depended on rafts and canoes and pack animals. The main centres of settlement remained in the east, divided between Upper and Lower Canada. There were local elected legislatures and an imposed overruling council appointed by the Crown in London. There was a population divided among the French settlers and their descendants, English, Welsh and, increasingly, Scots and Irish – the latter driven from their old homes by poverty. Added to these was a sizeable minority who had come north after supporting the losing side in the American War of Independence. Canada was partly settled, partly wild, partly self-governing, partly controlled as a colony and its thinly spread population was a mixture of often antagonistic nationalities. It was not a recipe for getting things done in a hurry. The slow and muddled start to railway building grew out of this confused background.
In some ways, the early history of Canadian transport was very like that of the USA: navigable rivers were the key that linked the settlements together, but it was the natural wealth of the forests that drew settlers to a region in the first place. Thomas Need, writing on the Canadian economy in 1830 put it neatly:
The erection of a sawmill is the first event in the formation of a settlement in the bush. It induces others to come to the neighbourhood since it offers the facilities of building timbers. Thereafter some bold man is persuaded to erect a grist mill. A store is opened, a tavern is licensed and a village has sprung up in the heart of the forest.
Rocket, not the famous Stephenson engine, but one built for the American Reading Railroad by Braithwaite, Milner & Co. of London in 1938.
These communities created rough roads down to the nearest navigable river and a system of canals, log flumes and chutes to move the timber. Winter brought everything to a halt. Thomas Coltrim Keefer, an early protagonist for railway construction, painted a dramatic picture of the frozen land:
Old winter is once more upon us and our inland seas are ‘dreary and inhospitable wastes’ to the merchant and to the traveller. Our rivers are sealed fountains and an embargo which no human power can remove is laid on all our ports … the animation of business is suspended, the lifeblood of commerce is curdled and stagnant in the St Lawrence, the great aorta of the north.
Even in summer transport was problematical. There had been advances from the age of the canoe: the first steam boat had puffed its way down the St Lawrence in 1809, powered by a Boulton and Watt engine, to be followed by a second on the Ottawa River, a year later. The rivers were, however, not navigable throughout their lengths and there were long portages where goods had to be carried round rapids and shallows by man, pack animal or cart. River routes were also notably devious. Traffic from New York to Montreal, for example, went up the Hudson River, through Lake Champlain into the Richelieu River to the St Lawrence at Sarel, and then on a last leg of 40 miles up the St Lawrence to Montreal. Yet overland the route from the Richelieu to St Johns, opposite Montreal, was only 14½ miles – a total saving of 90 miles of river travel. Here was an obvious case for a railway, and the land was flat as could be, presenting no problems of construction. But when it came to framing the Bill for the Champlain and St Lawrence Railway, the legislators took their job very seriously. There were innumerable clauses, one of which contained a sentence of 1453 words! If written out on a strip it would have stretched nearly 50 yards down the tracks. The Canadian businessmen who had shouted loud and long for the railway had the satisfaction of seeing the Bill passed in 1832. When it came to paying for the line, however, they became rather quiet and the money was not raised until 1834 when work finally got under way.
This was an American-Canadian enterprise, and it seemed sensible to employ American engineers to construct the line. However, it was to tried-and-trusted Robert Stephenson of Newcastle that they went for the first locomotive. Here two traditions clashed. James Hodges, who left England to work on Canadian railways, described the American system of building as one where economy ruled. ‘With this object in view, timber is universally substituted for the more costly materials made use of in this country. Tressel bridges take the place of stone viaducts, and, in places in which in this country you would see a solid embankment, in America a light structure is often substituted.’ He might have added that American practice did not call for the well-levelled, well-ballasted track that was de rigeur in Britain. Stephenson sent over one of his 0-4-0 Samson class locomotives which on 21 July 1836 rocked and rolled its way down the lumpy track. The rigid frame designed for smooth British track was far from suitable for the new circumstances it was now meeting. The first steam railway in Canada was not an immediate success, and for a short while horses had to be brought in for haulage. The clash between British and American practice would occur again.
The next portage railway also featured Montreal. The city had grown up at the point where the river navigation had ended at the Lachine Rapids which dropped the river down 46 feet from Lake St Louis. They had been bypassed in the eighteenth century by a coach route and in 1825 by a canal. Now a Scots-Canadian, James Ferrier, was to promote a railway. Perhaps encouraged by lingering loyalties to the old country he brought over Alexander Miller, Chief Engineer of the Dundee & Arbroath Railway, to survey the route in 1845. He followed the line of a stream the Petit Lac St Pierre which meandered harmlessly until it spread out to form a wide area of marsh near Recollect Gate. Miller decided that spoil excavated from the nearby Lachine Canal would do admirably to fill the bog. In the event thousands of cartloads of earth and stone were needed, reinforced by extensive piling, to produce a solid strip along which track could be laid. Even so it remained a perilous place, as was dramatically illustrated in an accident of 1855. A locomotive jumped the rails, landed in the bog and slowly and inexorably vanished from sight. The line was opened in 1847 with two American locomotives, but in 1848 two new engines arrived from Scotland with 72-inch drive wheels that provided new power. Fired by patriotic pride, Miller himself took the regulator on the inaugural run and the little train dashed off to reach the terminus 7 1/2 miles away in just 11 minutes, at an average speed of 45 miles an hour. The passengers were terrified and at first demanded to be taken back by road. Miller pacified them by promising to behave himself on the return journey. They reluctantly agreed, and nine minutes later they were back at the start.
Samson the locomotive built by Timothy Hackworth for use in Nova Scotia.
The route west from Montreal was via the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers, which had involved the old canoeing voyageurs in forty-seven major portages along the way, though this number was later cut by canal building. A number of portage lines were built, and as they were seen simply as links between steamer piers, there was no need for them to be consistent, so that the Carillan and Grenville was built as a broad gauge, while the little line bypassing the Chat falls was only 3 ft. gauge. One portage line started out with pretensions to become something altogether grander. The Montreal & Bytown Railway was intended to be part of a mainline route from Montreal up the Ottawa valley to Bytown, later renamed Ottawa, 100 miles of main line, with 23 miles of tramway feeders. When work began in 1853 the contract for building went to an Englishman, James Sykes of Sheffield, who brought in the brothers William, Samuel and Charles de Bergue of Manchester to help. The sensible decision was taken to begin on a short portage sectio
n, from Carillon to Grenville, which would bring in traffic from the steamer trade as soon as it was opened. When that was successfully completed Sykes returned to England confident that he could raise the capital to fund the line. His confidence was well founded and when he boarded ship he had £50,000 in cash with him. Then disaster struck: the ship foundered and James Sykes and the funds were lost. The company back in Canada was now in debt, but when it was put up for sale it only fetched $21,200. In 1854 a single locomotive was bought to be joined by a Birkenhead locomotive in 1858. And that was to be the last purchase of locomotives, or indeed very much else, that the company was ever to make. Up and down they chugged between the two piers, until the steamers no longer ran and nobody wanted the now antiquated service. In 1910 after more than half a century of continuous use, the two veteran engines were finally retired.
The history of the portage railways was full of similar stories of lack of funds, lack of equipment or both. Even the few non-portage lines that were attempted came to grief as well. A route was planned to run south from Bytown (Ottawa) to the American border at Prescott, where it was to link with the US line, the Ogdensburgh & Lake Champlain Railroad. Work began in 1851 and the going was not difficult, though the way did lie through uncharted woodland and scrub. Rails were ordered from South Wales and shipped across the Atlantic, but in the event there was not enough of them and no cash to buy more so the line was completed using wooden rails with an iron strip tacked on the top – which would have been quite acceptable in the 1750s but was decidedly odd in the 1850s. Over this flimsy structure the first train duly ran.
There was one lonely outpost of railway building in Nova Scotia where a line was built to serve the local coal mines. This line would certainly have seemed familiar to anyone visiting Canada from the north-east of England. It was begun as a tramway running from the pits to the East River of Picton. In 1834, when trade was increasing, it was decided to establish a new wharf and build a railway to be worked by locomotives. A local man, Peter Crerar, who had come to Nova Scotia from Scotland as a schoolteacher in 1817, agreed to try a preliminary survey and the plans were duly sent off to the Railway Board in England. Back came a letter: ‘What need is there of our sending you an engineer when you have Mr Crerar in the County? Let him supervise the construction.’ And so he did. H.S.Poole of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers was later to write a report on the plans, in which he confirmed the sound quality of the survey work. The line was built in awkward hilly country, yet the steepest gradient was 1 in 360, and although a good deal of cutting was involved to achieve it, no curve was more than a 4° radius. The hypothetical English visitor would have been equally at home with the three locomotives that opened the service. They were sent from Shildon by Timothy Hackworth and were typical of his work at that time. What makes them seem so odd to modern eyes is the return-flue boiler, as used in the famous Rainhill locomotive, Sans Pareil. The rest of the manufacturers had moved over to the modern multi-tube boiler, but Hackworth still had his one giant tube bent round in a U-shape. This meant that the grate was next to the chimney, so that the driver stood on his platform at the back of the engine, while the fireman stood at the front – which can hardly have been very good for communication. The sanding system was what we would now call low-tech’. Each end of the loco had a bucket of sand and the driver would throw out a handful if the engine needed to go forward, and the fireman performed the task when going in reverse. The driver of the first engine to be used, Samson, was an Englishman who had helped to build it in Durham, George Davidson. And he stayed on driving it right up to 1882. The old engine was rescued from the scrap heap and given a place of honour at the great Chicago Exhibition of 1893.
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