;.^ 





Afr^LJ^-T j3 



for building cheap railways into the remote and unsettled areas of 

 the country, notably the West, which might otherwise have to wait 

 many years for a convenient connection to other parts of the country. 

 The idea for light railways was carried to its extreme in a scheme 

 Sellers came to call his Pioneer System. (It is discussed at length 

 in his pamphlet Improvements in Locomotive Engines and Railways, 

 published in Cincinnati in 184.01.'^) The locomotive intended for 

 the Pioneer System and illustrated in figure 28 depended entirely 

 on the center rail for propulsion. The wheels were merely idlers 

 to carry and guide the engines. 



The Pioneer System, inspired by the plank-road craze, was a 

 cheap form of the center-rail plan in which wooden rails were used 

 with the lightest equipment possible. All three rails were to be of 

 wood, which eliminated the necessity of importing English iron. 

 The author of Observations "'^ claimed the country was being drained 

 of its gold to pay for imported rail. Building all new roads on the 

 Pioneer System would end this injustice, permitting the new gold 



''^ An anonymous pamphlet on this subject, Observations on Rail Roads in the Western 

 & Southern States, and of the Introduction of the Pioneer System for their Construction, with 

 Remarks on the Importation of Foreign Iron, was reprinted in 1850 from the Cincinnati Chron- 

 icle and Atlas. The author may have been Sellers or one of his associates interested in 

 promoting the invention. Of two copies known by me to exist, one is in the Li- 

 brary of Congress, in a group of pamphlets entitled General Technology, vol. 30, 

 and the other is at the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Cincinnati. 



"^ See preceding footnote. 



57 



