America's First Technological Titan that Changed the Course of History

25. The Allegheny Portage Railroad was always controversial

In 1838 an American publisher wrote of the Allegheny Portage that the United States, “…now numbers among its many wonderful artificial lines of communication, a mountain railway, which, in boldness of design, and difficulty of execution, I can compare to no modern work I have ever seen”. Less than 5 years later, historian and surveyor Sherman Day wrote of the railroad, “The trip of a boat over the mountain is now no novel sight”. A decade later Eli Bowen referred to the railroad as “miserable” and claimed, “The traveler who has crossed the mountain over it, will not regret to leave it”. Such was the story of the Allegheny Portage. It went from technological marvel, to travel inconvenience, to obsolescence in the span of two decades.

The railroads which replaced it grew to near obsolescence themselves, as passengers eventually grew to prefer private conveyances on the ground, or air travel over rail. The teamsters, long opponents of the Main Line and the Allegheny took on more and more of the freight business in the United States. Railroads learned to tunnel through mountains rather than ascend them. Taxpayers grew ever more leery of public transportation systems funded through their hard-earned dollars. Though it never turned a profit and operated but twenty years, the Allegheny Portage Railroad was an initiative which left a lasting impact on the development of the United States in the years before the Civil War. It was one of the first projects to which the term “American ingenuity” was applied.