Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1882 — First Railroads. [ARTICLE]

First Railroads.

As early as the middle of the seventeenth century, wooden rails were used at the collieries near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The first iron railroad sanctioned by the English Parliament was the Surrey railway, from the Thames, nt Wandsworth, to Croyden, in . 1801. In 1802, Richard Trevithick, a Cornish miner, patented the first locomotive used in England, and placed it on the Merthyr-Tydvil railway, in 1804. But the first railway built for general traffic was the Stockton and Darlington, constructed by Edward Pease and George Stephenson, in 1825. The Liverpool and Manchester railway was finished in 1830. Gridley Bryant and Col. T. H. Perkins projected and built the first railroad in America, at Quincy, Mass., in 1826. It was two miles long, and used for carrying granite from the quandes. In the following year the Mauch Chunk railway (thirteen miles long) was laid to the Lehigh river, for the transportation of coal. In this same year, Feb. 27, 1827, the Maryland Legislature granted a charter for the Baltimore and Ohio road, which was .opened to Ellicott’s Mills, twelve miles, in 1830. A railroad was finished in 1831 from Honesdale to the terminus of the Delaware and Hudson canal. The Mohawk and Hudson railroad, chartered in 1826, was opened Sept. 12, 1831.