Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.

Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period

Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history.

The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship

In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government