The Erie canal had not long been finished when a new way of carrying men and merchandise came into use in New York. In the next year after the great celebration the legislature granted a charter to build a railroad from Albany to Schenectady. It is sometimes said that this was the first time in America that cars were drawn by means of steam. This is not true, but New York was not far behind some other states, and the De Witt Clinton train, of which a picture is shown in this chapter, looks as if it must have been one of the very earliest ones. This train made its trial trip in 1831, which was seventeen years after George Stephenson had built his first locomotive in England.

A railroad had been opened from Baltimore, a few miles to the west, the year before, and about the same time another was built in South Carolina. Two years earlier, in 1829, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company brought from England three locomotives, one of them built by Stephenson, to draw coal to their canal from their mines at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. In 1826 a railroad four miles long was built at Quincy, Massachusetts, to carry granite from the quarries to the sea. It was called a tramway, and horses were used instead of steam. If we go to England, we shall find that tramways have been used there for more than a hundred years. Thus it is not easy to say when the first railroad was built, and all writers do not tell the same story about it, but it is certain that steam cars were first used and long roads with iron tracks were first built a little less than a hundred years ago.

If we study the De Witt Clinton train, we shall learn several things. Both the engine and the coaches were small and light compared with those used now. With the great speed of to-day, all the parts of a train must be very heavy in order to cling to the track. The engine of those days had four light driving wheels, and the engineer, it would seem, had to operate his engine while facing wind and storm. The cab looks very much like a common express wagon made heavier than usual; and if we look at the passenger wagons, we shall see why passenger cars are called coaches. The first ones were coaches, and every picture of an old passenger train shows that the cars were modeled after the coaches of the stage lines of that age, except that the wheels were made with flat rims, with flanges to keep them on the track. The passengers certainly could not move about, and the high perches on the top look somewhat dangerous. One would think that the wind and the smoke of the locomotive could not have been pleasant. The men could not go into a smoking car, and if they had luncheon they must have brought it in their pockets. Nor could they tuck themselves snugly into a berth and sleep all night. These things, however, were not needed upon a railroad that was only eighteen miles long. To this day dining cars and “sleepers” are not so much used in England as in this country. Millions of people travel there, but the land is small, they go swiftly, and can usually eat and sleep at their journey’s end. They still speak of the “wagons” of the “goods train,” and English freight cars look almost like toys by the side of ours in America. This shows us how closely the railways and cars are related to common roads and vehicles.

People laughed at railroads in these early days and had about as much faith in them as we now have in flying machines. A few years ago men would have had the same sport about wireless telegraphy, or about talking between New York and Chicago with a telephone. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, who has written much about early life in New England, says that the farmers did not like railroads, for they thought that horses would soon be useless and would then be killed, and that there would be no demand for oats or hay. They were afraid, too, that the noise would frighten the hens so that they would not lay, that the sparks from the engine would burn up everything, and that the people would go crazy.

There was some excuse for not enjoying railway travel, for the roadbeds were often made of solid rock, and the cars did not always have springs. The tracks were made of strap iron spiked down to wooden stringers. These iron straps would sometimes become loose, and had an unpleasant way of curling up and piercing the floor of the coach where people were sitting.

In these days it is more comfortable and probably safer to ride in a railway train than behind a horse. The Empire State Express runs from New York to Buffalo in eight hours and twenty minutes. It makes but four stops on the way and covers more than fifty-three miles an hour. When we compare this with the packet-boat time-table of seventy-five years ago we see how much time is now saved.

To-day a man can board the Twentieth Century Limited in New York City at 2.45 in the afternoon and be set down in Chicago the next morning. He can do business nearly all of one day by the sea, and nearly all of the next day on the shore of lake Michigan. On the way he will find easy chairs, books and papers, a good bed, a fine table, a place to write, to be shaved, or to take a bath, and he may even read from time to time the prices of stocks as they are sent over the wire from New York and Chicago. But our comfortable traveler should not despise the early days. Perhaps he misses some of the good times that the great-grandfathers had in the Mohawk boats and along the Genesee road.

To go so fast and so far means that much has been done since the first small train came across the sand fields to Schenectady. Five years later the trains ran up to Utica. This was two hundred and two years after Arent Van Curler’s journey along the same river. In two years more a little road, twenty-five miles long, had been finished between Syracuse and Auburn; but it was not until 1839, when another winter had passed, that the link between Utica and Syracuse was completed. This ran much of the way through woods and swamps, and in some cases timbers or piles had to be driven deep to hold up the track.

These roads were built by different companies, with no idea of joining them all into a through line. When, in time, there was talk of this the Utica people did not like it. They thought that it would ruin the business of their town if passengers and freight need not be changed there and if trains went rushing through. But after a while all the links between New York and Buffalo were forged into one chain, or became a “trunk line,” to put it in the modern way. Of course it would cost less to haul Genesee flour or Niagara county apples to New York if they could go through in the same car in which they were first locked. This soon became so plain that there was no further question as to uniting the various roads. We shall see how they all became one.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was of Dutch descent and was born on Staten island in 1794. He grew up in the steamboat business, and by industry and foresight became the owner of various lines plying on the Hudson, along the coast, and even across the Atlantic. He had so much to do with shipping that at length he was known as “Commodore” Vanderbilt, although this was a nickname and not a real title. By and by he began to buy railroads, and by 1869 he was able to unite those of the Hudson and those west of Albany into the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. His descendants have bought or leased many other roads, which, taken together, are often called the Vanderbilt system. This reaches far westward into many states and joins other great cities to the metropolis by lines of steel.

Railways in Michigan and Ohio were tied to Vanderbilt’s road, and wheat and many other products came to Buffalo not only on cars but by ships on the Great Lakes, and were then sent to New York and across the ocean. So the canal gradually did less business and the railroad did more, for people could travel faster by rail, and some things, like meat and fruit, must be carried swiftly or they will spoil on the way. Now, instead of ten-ton boats on the Mohawk, or the slow-going craft of “Clinton’s Ditch,” great freight trains rush down the Mohawk valley, bearing nearly a hundred thousand bushels of grain behind one engine. Such a load would have fed George Washington’s armies for a long time. After a while one track was not sufficient for so many trains going east and west. Too much time was lost in waiting on sidings and there was danger of collision. For this reason a second track was put down, then a third and a fourth, and now all the way from Albany to Buffalo there are two tracks for passenger trains and two for freight. Down the Hudson there are but two tracks, because the space between the river and the uplands is so narrow. Many years ago a rival road, called the West Shore Railway, was built along the west bank of the Hudson, and then westward to Buffalo. This with its two tracks was bought by the owners of the Central road, so that now they have six tracks across the state. Even these are hardly enough, for every year the great West has more people, raises more grain to ship to eastern cities and to Europe, and requires more goods from mills and factories along the Atlantic coast.

There are many local trains that run between New York and Albany, or Albany and Syracuse, or Syracuse and Buffalo. These are convenient for the smaller towns and cities. Then there are many through trains whose destination is Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, or St. Louis. Quickly changing cars at lake Michigan or the Mississippi river, the traveler is hurried on to the Rocky mountains, the Pacific ocean, Alaska, or the lands of Asia or Australia across the sea.

The New York Central is not the only great road that runs westward through the state. The Erie road was built through the southern counties from New York to lake Erie, partly because the townships through which it runs were jealous of the privileges which the great canal gave to the people farther north. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western also comes from New York through the coal region of Pennsylvania, and runs near the Erie road to Buffalo.

The larger cities and the greater number of towns are, however, along the Central Railway. Going up the Hudson and the Mohawk, the traveler will hardly pass one busy town before he is in sight of another. When he looks across the river and sees Newburg he will remember that in a plain old house in that city General Washington had his headquarters. When he comes in sight of Albany he will see the great Capitol building standing high over all others. At Schenectady he will think of Arent Van Curler and the old boatmen and the dreadful French and Indian massacre. At Utica he will pass the ford where thousands waded the river as they went to the wilderness. At Rome he will be reminded of the famous carry of Fort Stanwix, of St. Leger, and of the heroes who drove him back to the north. At Syracuse he will ride through miles of closely built streets, and as he leaves the city on the west he will see ancient vats with low sliding roofs. In these vats countless bushels of salt have been made, as the sun has slowly drawn off the water of the brine in vapor. There were buildings, too, with chimneys and great boilers for making salt; but in the main the city has other interests now. It has mills and large stores, and is a railway center.

At Rochester our traveler crosses the Genesee, and remembers the hardy pioneer who left comfortable old Hagerstown to build a city in the swamp and forest. Colonel Rochester could have had no idea of the fine city he was starting, or of the orchards, nurseries, and wheat fields that would be around it, but he lived long enough to see the flour mills at the falls doing a thriving business. Thus wheat and flour made Rochester as salt made Syracuse, and first the canal and then the great railway took these useful things to market.

An hour or two more and the train pulls into Buffalo, the second city of New York, looking on the lake and stretching out its hands to the great world of inland sea and prairie. To Buffalo come coal and iron and meat and wheat and corn. Here great elevators receive grain from the ships and load canal boats and railway cars for the east. Here some of the New York Central trains turn north and go by Niagara through Canada to the west, while others pass off to the south and west and go to Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago. Since the day when the two kegs were filled with water from lake Erie, Buffalo has become a large city, a gateway of the East and West. And since the De Witt Clinton train crept from Albany to Schenectady, the New York Central Railway has become great also, for every day hundreds of trains of goods and men are coming and going between the Lakes and the city by the sea.