%318.  Public Railroads.%—­In 1825 John Stevens, who for ten years past had been advocating steam railroads, built a circular road at Hoboken to demonstrate the possibility of using such means of locomotion.  In 1823 Pennsylvania chartered a company to build a railroad from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna.  But it was not till 1827, when the East was earnestly seeking for a rapid and cheap means of transportation to the West, that railroads of great length and for public use were undertaken.  In that year the people of Massachusetts were so excited over the opening of the Erie Canal that the legislature appointed a commission and an engineer to select a line for a railroad to join Boston and Albany.

At this time there was no such thing as a steam locomotive in use in the United States.  The first ever used here for practical purposes was built in England and brought to New York city in 1829, and in August of that year made a trial trip on the rails of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company.  The experiment was a failure; and for several years horses were the only motive power in use on the railroads.  In 1830, however, the South Carolina Railroad having finished six miles of its road, had a locomotive built in New York city, and in January, 1831, placed it on the tracks at Charleston.  Another followed in February, and the era of locomotive railroading in our country began.

%319.  The Portage Railroad.%—­As yet the locomotive was a rude machine.  It could not go faster than fifteen miles an hour, nor climb a steep hill.  Where such an obstacle was met with, either the road went around it, or the locomotive was taken off and the cars were let down or pulled up the hill on an inclined plane by means of a rope and stationary engine.[1] When Pennsylvania began her railroad over the Alleghany Mountains, therefore, she used the inclined-plane system on a great scale, so that in its time the Portage Railroad, as it was called, was the most remarkable piece of railroading in the world.

[Footnote 1:  Such an inclined plane existed at Albany, where passengers were pulled up to the top of the hill.  Another was at Belmont on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, and another on the Paterson and Hudson road near Paterson.]

The Pennsylvania line to the West consisted of a horse railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna River; of a canal out the Juniata valley to Hollidaysburg on the eastern slope of the Alleghany Mountains, where the Portage Railroad began, and the cars were raised to the summit of the mountains by a series of inclined planes and levels, and then by the same means let down the western slope to Johnstown; and then of another canal from Johnstown to Pittsburg.

[Illustration:  Inclined plane at Belmont in 1835]