1795: A wooden railway on Beacon Hill in Boston carries excavations down the hill to clear the land for the State House.
1799: Boston developers begin to reduce the height of Mount Vernon before building streets and homes. Silas Whitney constructs a gravity railroad to move excavated material down the hill to fill marshy areas to create new land from the Back Bay.[3]
1809: In September, an experimental railroad is built next to a Philadelphia tavern by a millwright named Somerville. The track, built for Thomas Leiper, has a grade of 1-1/2 inch to the yard (1 : 24 or about 4%) over its total length of 60 yards (54.9 m) and proves satisfactory when tested with a loaded car.[4]
1811: George Magers designs and builds a 1-mile (1.6 km) wooden gravity railroad between a gunpowder mill and its powder storage bunker at Falling's Creek, Virginia.[5]
1815: New Jersey grants a charter on February 6, 1815, for a company to "erect a rail-road from the river Delaware near Trenton, to the river Raritan, at or near New Brunswick", as proposed by John Stevens (1749-1838). This New Jersey Railroad Company is the first railroad chartered in the United States, but fails to attract investors and is never built.
1826 Apr 9: The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was incorporated as the first railroad chartered in New York State[8] (marker pictured), and the first railroad in the United States designed to be powered by a locomotive engine as opposed to horse-drawn or gravity railroads. It opened on August 9, 1831 using steam locomotivedeWitt Clinton.
1827: The Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad, initially a 9 miles (14 km) gravity railroad with animal powered return of cars, is built between Summit Hill[9] and Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), Pennsylvania when rails are laid on top of the existing mule-haul road graded to be nearly uniform in grade from its establishment in 1819-20. The road carried cargo as a common carrier back up to Summit Hill almost from the start, but by 1829 the new railed road was carrying passengers flocking out from Philadelphia to enjoy its attractions. It was built to haul anthracite coal from the mines to the Lehigh River and was the first railroad of this type.
1830: The Union Canal Company Railroad was a 3.5-mile (5.6 km) railroad constructed by the Union Canal (Pennsylvania) Company and was chartered on March 3, 1826. The company was in the canal business, but due to the topography, they could not extend their canal to the coal fields north of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. Their solution was to build this short coal hauling railroad which was completed in 1830.[10]
1830: The Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad and Coal Company was chartered on February 28, 1826. The LSRR operated between Tamaqua, Pennsylvania and Port Clinton beginning in 1831 using horse-drawn cars. Two steam locomotives were acquired by the railroad in 1833, but the wooden tracks did not support the engines. Iron "T" rails replaced the wooden ones in 1845, and the locomotives were then returned to regular service. It completed a junction with the Catawissa Railroad at Tamanend (also called Little Schuylkill Junction) in 1854. In 1857 the LSRR built a roundhouse in Tamaqua, housing 21 locomotives and a turntable. In 1863 the company was leased by the Reading Railroad for 93 years. It formally merged with the Reading in 1952.
1839: Albion Railway serving coal mines around Stellarton, Nova Scotia, first railway in Canada is use iron rails and run year-round, home of Samson, the oldest surviving locomotive in Canada.
^Railroads and Canals of the United States of America by Henry V. Poor (New York: John H. Schultz & Co, 1860), page 462 [7]
^Railroads and Canals of the United States of America by Henry V. Poor (New York: John H. Schultz & Co, 1860), page 460 [8]
^ abDevelopment of Early Transportation Systems in the United States by J.L. Ringwalt (Philadelphia: Railway World Office, 1888), (RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION FROM 1830 TO 1840)[9]
