Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/180

 172 RAILROAD gauge would give greater speed, safety, and economy ; and roads of 5 ft., 5 ft. 5 in., 6 ft., and even of 7 ft. gauge were built. But the wider gauges are gradually losing favor, and have generally been abandoned for the 4 ft. 8 in. (or the 4 ft. 9 in.), now commonly called the standard gauge. It has come to be contended by many engineers, and notably by Mr. Fairlie of England, that even the standard gauge is too wide, and that gauges of 3 ft. and less are still more economical. The success of the Liver- pool and Manchester railway led to the pro- jection of new roads in England, chiefly in the northern part, connecting together its princi- pal cities ; but the capacity of the locomotive was not yet fully developed or appreciated, and upon most of the roads it was considered necessary to overcome the heavier grades by the use of stationary engines. These and also inclined planes were gradually dispensed with, and tunnels were substituted for the purpose of reducing the grades and curvature, both of which were brought to a minimum by the ex- penditure of large sums of money. As a mea- sure of safety, the most important roads in England were from the first built with double tracks ; but this practice was not followed in America till the traffic on the various lines had become so great as to render it absolutely necessary. The first railroad constructed in America was projected by Gridley Bryant, a civil engineer, in 1825, and carried through by himself and Col. T. H. Perkins in 1826. It was designed to carry granite from the quarries of Quincy, Mass., to the nearest tide water, and is known as the Quincy railroad. It is 4 m. long including branches, and its first cost was $50,000. It was laid to a 5 ft. gauge, and was constructed as follows : Stone sleepers were laid across the track 8 ft. apart ; upon these wooden rails 6 in. thick and 12 in. high were placed ; upon the top of these rails wrought-iron plates 3 in. wide and J in. thick were spiked, but at all the crossings of the public road and driftways stone rails were used, and as the wooden rails decayed they were replaced by others of stone. This road was supplied with the first turn-table ever used, which was designed by Bryant and is said to be still in good order. Bryant also invented the port- able derrick and the switch or turnout, and constructed the first eight-wheeled car ever used, by combining two four-wheeled trucks for hauling long pieces of granite intended for columns ; and although a more complete ap- plication of the principle was afterward made by Ross Winans of Baltimore in the construc- tion of eight-wheeled cars used on the Balti- more and Ohio railroad, the latter was unable to sustain his patent by law against the claims of others in Bryant's behalf. Winans began his experiments in 1830, with the view of design- ing a carriage which would easily traverse the short curves of the railroads then under con- struction, and ultimately produced the eight- wheeled or double bogie carriage, which is now in use throughout the United States and Can- ada, and is being introduced upon the Pullman carriages into Europe. The second American railroad was laid out in January, 1827, and opened in May of the same year from the coal mines of Mauch Chunk, Pa., to the Lehigh river, and with turnouts and branches was IS m. long. This was also of 6 ft. gauge, with timber sleepers and rails, strapped with flat iron. It was operated by gravity, though the length of the road was so great that mules had to be used for returning the empty cars to the mines. The Delaware and Hudson canal com- pany sent Horatio Allen to Europe in 1827 to buy three locomotives and the iron for a rail- road, which they built the next year from the coal mines at Honesdale to the terminus of their canal. One of the locomotives, built by George Stephenson at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, arrived at New York in the spring of 1829. Another, built by Foster, Rastrick and co. of Stourbridge, arrived shortly afterward, and went upon the railroad in the latter part of the summer. This was the first locomotive actually put into use in America. It had four wheels, a multi- tubular boiler, and the exhaust steam blast. In March, 1827, the legislature of Maryland granted a charter, modelled upon the old turn- pike charters, to the first railroad company in America authorized to carry on the general business of transportation; its capital stock was $500,000, with permission for its increase, and both the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore were authorized to subscribe to its' shares. In the beginning no one dreamed of using steam upon the road ; horses were to do the work, and even after the road was com- pleted to Frederick relays of horses moved the cars from place to place. From this circum- stance the Relay House, at the junction of the main line and the Washington branch, took its name. This great highway, now known as the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, was begun July 4, 1828, and was gradually extended along the valley of the Patapsco 13 m. to Ellicott's Mills, thence to the Potomac at the Point of Rocks, thence along the valley of the Potomac to the Cumberland coal region, and finally across the Blue Ridge and Alleghany mountains to the Ohio river at Wheeling, with a branch toward Parkersburg in the direction of Cincinnati. At Wheeling and Parkersburg it now connects with other railroads owned or controlled by the same company, leading to Cincinnati and St. Louis, and also to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. In 1830 a small locomotive was built in Baltimore by Peter Cooper (now of New York), who was satisfied that steam en- gines might be adapted to the curved roads which would have to be built in America. He also believed that the crank could be dispensed with in the change from a reciprocating to a rotary motion, and designed his engine to dem- onstrate both conclusions. The boiler, which stood upright, was not so large as the ordinary boiler attached to the range of a modern man-