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RAILWAY PASSENGER TRAVEL.

By Horace Porter.

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ROM the time when Puck was supposed to utter his boast to put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes to the time when Jules Verne's itinerant hero accomplished the task in twice that number of days, the restless ingenuity and energy of man have been unceasingly taxed to increase the speed, comfort, and safety of passenger travel. The first railway on which passengers were carried was the "Stockton and Darlington," of England, the distance being 12 miles. It was opened September 27, 1825, with a freight train, or, as it is called in England, a "goods" train, but which also carried a number of excursionists. An engine which was the result of many years of labor and experiment on the part of George Stephenson was used on this train. Stephenson mounted it and acted as driver; his bump of caution was evidently largely developed, for, to guard against accidents from the recklessness of the speed, he arranged to have a signalman on horseback ride in advance of the engine to warn the luckless trespasser of the fate which awaited him if he should get in the way of a train moving with such a startling velocity. The next month, October, it was decided that it would be worth while to attempt the carrying of passengers, and a daily "coach," modelled after the stage-coach and called the "Experiment," was put on, Monday, October 10th, 1825, which carried six passengers inside and from fifteen to twenty outside. The engine with this light load made the trip in about two hours. The fare from Stockton to Darlington was one shilling, and each passenger was allowed fourteen pounds of baggage. The limited amount of baggage will appear to the ladies of the present day as niggardly in the extreme, but they must recollect that the

band-box was then the popular form of portmanteau for women, the Saratoga trunk had not been invented, and the muscular baggage-smasher of modern times had not yet set out upon his career of destruction.

The advertisement which was published in the newspapers of the day is here given, and is of peculiar interest as announcing the first successful attempt to carry passengers by rail.

Stockton & Darlington

Railway

The Company's COACH>

CALLED THE

EXPERIMENT.

The Liverpool and Manchester road was opened in 1829. The first train was hauled by an improved engine called the "Rocket," which attained a speed of 25 miles an hour, and some records put it as high as 35 miles. This speed naturally attracted marked attention in the mechanical world, and first demonstrated the superior advantages of railways for passenger travel. Only four years before, so eminent a writer upon railways as Wood had said: "Nothing can do more harm to the adoption of railways than the promulgation of such nonsense as that we shall see locomotives travelling at the rate of 12 miles an hour."

America was quick to adopt the railway system which had had its origin in England. In 1827 a crude railway was opened between Quincy and Boston, but it was only for the purpose of transporting granite for the Bunker Hill Monument. It was not until August, 1829, that a locomotive engine was used upon an American railroad suitable for carry

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ing passengers. This road was constructed by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, and the experiment was made near Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The engine was imported from England and called the "Stourbridge Lion." In May, 1830, the first division of the Baltimore and Ohio road was opened. It extended from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills, a distance of 15 miles. There being a scarcity of cars, the regular passenger business did not begin till the 5th of July following, and then only horse-power was employed, which continued to be used till the road was finished to Frederick, in 1832. The term Relay House, the name of a well-known station, originated in the fact that the horses were changed at that place.

The following notice, which appeared in the Baltimore newspapers, was the first time-table for passenger railway trains published in this country.

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licott's Mills at 6 and 8 o'clock A. M., and at 12 and 6 P. M.

tickets at the office of the Company in BaltiWay passengers will provide themselves with more, or at the depots at Pratt St. and Ellicott's Mills, or at the Relay House, near Elk Ridge Landing.

continue to leave the depot, Pratt St., at 6 The evening way car for Ellicott's Mills will o'clock P. M. as usual.

N. B. Positive orders have been issued to the drivers to receive no passengers into any of the cars without tickets.

the day can be accommodated after July 5th.

P. S. Parties desiring to engage a car for

It will be seen that the word train was not used, but instead the schedule spoke of a "brigade of cars."

The South Carolina Railroad was begun about the same time as the Baltimore and Ohio, and ran from Charleston to Hamburg, opposite Savannah. When the first division had been constructed, it was opened November 2d, 1830.

Peter Cooper, of New York, had before this constructed a locomotive and made a trial trip with it on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on the 28th of August, 1830, but not meeting the requirements of the company, it was not put into service. This trip incidentally brought out a demonstration of the Marylander's belief in the advantages of horse-flesh over all other means of locomotion, and to prove the superiority of this favorite animal, a gray roadster

was brought out and entered for a contest of speed with the boasted steampower, and it is asserted that he beat the locomotive in a break-neck race which became as famous at the time as the ride of the renowned John Gilpin.

Mohawk and Hudson Train.

A passenger train of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad which was put on in October, 1831, between Albany and Schenectady, attracted much attention. It was hauled by an English engine named the "John Bull," and driven by an English engineer named John Hampson. This is generally regarded as the first fully equipped passenger train hauled by a steam-power engine which ran in regular service in America. During 1832 it carried an average of 387 passengers daily. The accompanying engraving is from a sketch made at the time.

It was said

by an advocate of mechanical evolution that the modern steam fireengine was evolved from the ancient

leathern firebucket; it might be said with greater truth that the modern railway car has been evolved from the old-fashioned English stagecoach.

The engineer is called the driver, the conductor the guard, the ticket office is the booking office, the cars are the carriages, and a rustic traveller may still be heard occasionally to object to sitting with his back to the horses. The ear

lier locomotives, like horses, were given proper names, such as Lion, North Star, Fiery, and Rocket; the compartments in the roundhouses for sheltering locomotives are termed the stalls, and the keeper of the round-house is called the hostler. The last two are the only items of equine classification which the American railway system has permanently adopted.

America, at an early day, departed not only from the nomenclature of the turnpike, but from the stage-coach architecture, and adopted a long car in one compartment and containing a middle aisle which admitted of communication throughout the train. The car was carried on two trucks, or bogies, and was well adapted to the sharp curvature which prevailed upon our railways.

The first five years of experience showed marked progress in the prac

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English Railway Carriage, Midland Road. First and Third Class and Luggage Compartments.

England still retains the railway carriage divided into compartments that bear a close resemblance inside and outside to stage-coach bodies with the middle seat omitted. In fact the nomenclature of the stage-coach is in large measure still preserved in England.

tical operation of railway trains, but even after locomotives had demonstrated their capabilities and each improved engine had shown an encouraging increase in velocity, the wildest flights of fancy never pictured the speed attained in later years.

When the roads forming the line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were chartered in 1835,

and town meetings were held to discuss the on-coming locomotive, but his their practicability, the Honorable Si- steam-breathing opponent proved the mon Cameron, while

making a speech in advocacy of the measure, was so far carried away by his enthusiasm as to make the rash prediction that there were persons within the sound of his voice who would live to see a passenger take his breakfast in Harrisburg and his supper in Philadelphia on the same day. A friend of his on the platform said to him after he had finished, "That's all very well, Simon, to tell to the boys, but you and I are no such infernal fools as to believe it." They have both lived to travel the distance in a little over two hours.

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One of the Earliest Passenger Cars Built in this Country; used on the Western Railroad of Massachusetts (now the Boston & Albany).

The people were far from being unanimous in their advocacy of the railway system, and charters were not obtained without severe struggles. The topic was the universal subject of discussion in all popular assemblages. Colonel Blank, a well-known politician in Pennsylvania, had been loud in his opposition to the new means of transportation. When one of the first trains was running over the Harrisburg and

Bogie Truck.

Lancaster road, a famous Durham bull belonging to a Mr. Schultz became seized with the enterprising spirit of Don Quixote, put his head down and tail up, and made a desperate charge at

better butter of the two and the bull was ignominiously defeated. At a public banquet held soon after in that part of the State, the toast-master proposed a toast to "Colonel Blank and Schultz's bull-both opposed to railroad trains." The joke was widely circulated and had much to do with completing the discomfiture of the opposition in the following elections.

The railroad was a decided step in advance, compared with the stage-coach and canal-boat, but when we picture the surroundings of the traveller upon railways during the first ten or fifteen years of their existence, we find his journey

was not one to be envied. He was jammed into a narrow seat with a stiff back, the deck of the car was low and flat, and ventilation in winter impossible. A stove at each end did little more than generate carbonic oxide. The passenger roasted if he sat at the end of the car, and froze if he sat in the middle. Tallow candles furnished a "dim religious light," but the accompanying odor did not savor of cathedral incense. The dust was suffocating in dry weather; there were no adequate spark-arresters on the engine, or screens at the windows, and the begrimed passenger at the end of his

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journey looked as if he had spent the day in a blacksmith shop. Recent experiments in obtaining a spectrum analysis of the component parts of a quantity of dust collected in a railway car show that minute particles of iron form a large

ble matter is not especially recommended by medical practitioners, the sanitary surroundings of the primitive railway car cannot be commended. There were no double tracks, and no telegraph to facilitate the safe despatching of trains. The springs of the car were hard, the jolting intolerable, the windows rattled like those of the modern omnibus, and conversation was a luxury that could be indulged in only by those of recognized superiority in lung power. The brakes were clumsy and of little service. The ends of the flat-bar rails were cut diagonally, so that when laid down they would lap and form a smoother joint. Occasionally they became sprung; the spikes would not hold, and the end of the rail with its sharp point rose high enough for the wheel to run under it, rip it loose, and send the pointed end through the floor of the car. This was called a "snake's head," and the unlucky being sitting over it was likely to be impaled against the roof. So that the traveller of that day, in addition to his other miseries, was in momentary apprehension of being spitted like a Christmas turkey.

Baggage-checks and coupon-tickets were unknown. Long trips had to be

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Rail and Coach Travel in the White Mountains.

proportion, and under the microscope present the appearance of a collection of tenpenny nails. As iron administered to the human system through the respiratory organs in the form of tenpenny nails mixed with other undesira

made over lines composed of a number of short independent railways; and at the terminus of each the bedevilled passenger had to transfer, purchase another ticket, personally pick out his baggage, perhaps on an uncovered platform in a

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