With the viability of steam-powered locomotives proven, the race was on to build other, larger locomotives.

The thirteen-mile trip was made from Baltimore to Ellicot's Hill in Maryland. Peter Cooper rose to the challenge and on 28 August 1830 drove his diminutive Tom Thumb locomotive at speeds approaching fifteen miles per hour while towing a car filled with thirty people. By 1828, railroad track was being laid not only by the Delaware & Hudson, but also by the Baltimore & Ohio and the South Carolina Railroads. Undeterred, railroad companies continued to seek a viable steam-powered locomotive. One, Stourbridge Lion, was tested on 8 August 1829, but proved to be too heavy for the tracks that had been constructed and was subsequently retired. Horatio Allen, working for the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, purchased four of these early steam locomotives and brought them to the United States. The English had been experimenting with steam-powered locomotives since the late eighteenth century and had developed a prototype by 1828. The first locomotive for use on railways was imported from England in 1829. In 1827, quarry and mine operators in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, constructed the first full-size railways. The earliest railways in the United States were short, wooden railways built by quarries and mines along which horses pulled loads to nearby water ways.

Beginning in the nineteenth century in the United States, a vast system of railroads was developed that moved goods and people across great distances, facilitated the settlement of large portions of the country, created towns and cities, and unified a nation.Įarly railways were a far cry from the great system of railroads that were built in the nineteenth century and that continue to be used today.

Dupe away abandoned tracks