Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 13).djvu/218

 entire original cost of the canal proper $8,403,775.56. The total original cost of the Allegheny Portage Railway to January, 1837, including laying the second track and building the Conemaugh viaduct was $1,634,357.69¾, making the total cost of the "Pennsylvania Canal" $10,038,133.25¾—half a million dollars more than the Erie Canal, which it also exceeded in length by thirty-one miles. Yet the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, of only one hundred and eighty-five miles in length, cost a million dollars more than the Pennsylvania Canal.

The later history of the Pennsylvania Canal well illustrates the restlessness of human hearts, and the mighty conquests over nature which restless ambition has made possible. One success, such as the Portage Railway, only suggested a greater one, a railway over the mountain. The road was only in fairly good working order when, in 1836, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a resolution ordering the canal commissioners to have a survey made of the Alleghenies to determine whether the inclined planes could not be dispensed with! Within the next decade a New