2-995-768 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Arrival of the first train of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad at James Town from New York, 1860. '...the line just opened [supplies] an immediate connected highway from the chief emporium of the United States to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and all the vast regions watered by those giant streams...It is needed as the high road from east to west; it is required for the settlers who already throng the whole breadth of territory which it serves..."No part of the globe presents such an extent of uniform fertility"...By the formation of the Atlantic and Great Western...which runs from the flourishing town of Salamanca, on the New York and Erie, to Dayton in Ohio, the whole line from New York to the Missouri, twelve hundred miles in length, is at once completed with a uniform broad gauge...One extraordinary feature of this traffic is the weekly transport of above 500 tons (nearly 100 tons daily) of native coal oil, which actually rises from the earth in the vicinity of some stations in columns like the fountains of Trafalgar-square, and in a state almost ready for consumption! These oil-springs are only of recent discovery'. From "Illustrated London News", 1860.