The Old World and the New

American railroad progress is compared with the adoption of the technology in England.

"While to England undoubtedly belongs the honor of having originated the railway, yet the idea vegetated there for more than a century before it fairly awoke to life and movement. And when at length the cautious experiments, still unacknowledged and incomplete, made noise enough to wake an echo in the West, the first response was the adoption of the grandest and most audacious scheme for purposes of internal commerce which has yet been conceived and executed, and in thirty years thereafter our maps are streaked over with black lines representing thirty thousand miles of railroad."
Part of the article "Artists' Excursion Over The Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road."

About this Document

  • Source: Harper's New Monthly Magazine
  • Publisher: Harper and Brothers, Publishers
  • Date: 1859