21. The Portage Railroad 



The Pennsylvania Portage, connecting the eastern 

 and western division canals of the great Pennsyl- 

 vania works, extended 37 miles from Hollidays- 

 burg, on the eastern slope of the Allegheny ridge, 

 to Johnstown on the western slope. A total of 10 

 inclined planes, from 1,500 to more than 3,000 

 feet in length, connected by graded railways, 

 overcame a rise of 1,400 feet in 10 miles from 

 Hollidaysburg to the summit, and descended 1,175 

 feet in the remaining 27 miles to Johnstown. 

 The cars were dragged up and let down each 

 plane by ropes running over winding drums 

 driven by stationary steam engines in the head 

 house. The locating engineers were careful to 

 point out to squeamish commissioners and legis- 

 lators that the maximum gradient of the planes 

 (10 percent), was less than that of some hills on 

 the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh turnpike road, 

 which crossed the mountains hard by the 

 Portage. 192 



Boldly conceived and ably designed and con- 

 structed, the Portage Railroad was favorably 

 viewed by many visiting engineers, native and 



foreign. For example, David Stevenson, the 

 Scottish engineer, uncle of Robert Louis Steven- 

 son, wrote of this "mountain railway, which, in 

 boldness of design and difficulty of execution, I 

 can compare to no modern works I have ever seen, 

 excepting, perhaps, the passes of the Simplon, 

 and Mont Cenis in Sardinia; but even these 

 remarkable passes, viewed as engineering works, 

 did not strike me as being more wonderful than 

 the Allegheny Railway in the United States." m 

 George Escol Sellers was more intimately 

 concerned with the Philadelphia and Columbia 

 Railroad, for which he and his brother Charles 

 built two locomotives, but he knew the Pennsyl- 

 vania Portage at first hand. His boyhood school- 

 mates and companions William Milnor Roberts 

 and Solomon White Roberts were principal 

 assistant engineers to the chief engineer, Sylvester 

 Welch. Sellers's account of the Portage Railroad 

 is substantially accurate in all details, and it is 

 valuable as a background against which his loco- 

 motive work can be more clearly seen and better 

 appreciated. 



iliARLY in the vear 1 834 the entire line of the 

 Pennsylvania mongrel improvements, part canal 

 and part railroad, between Philadelphia and Pitts- 

 burgh, was opened for freight and passengers, and 

 worked, with the exception of steam on its inclined 

 planes, by horse or mule-power. The small four- 

 wheel freight cars, limited as to capacity and load, 

 not to exceed three tons per car, were mostly owned 

 by individuals or firms who also owned the canal- 



192 The references cited in note 177, above, are useful for in. 

 formation on the Portage. 



193 David Stevenson, Sketch of the Civil Engineering of Xorth 

 America (London, 1838), pp. 185-186. 



boats and horses. The road was built for and used 

 as a public highway, charging toll. 



It was not long before breaking bulk at Columbia, 

 reloading from the cars into the canal-boats, and 

 again at Hollidaysburg from the canal-boats on to 

 cars, and, after passing over the portage, or Mountain 

 Railroad, division to Johnstown, again transferring 

 to canal-boats, with the damage from handling 

 certain kinds of freight, and greatly increased cost 

 of transportation on all classes of freight, was a 

 state of things that called mechanical ingenuity 

 into play. The first success was in making the box 

 or car body independent of the trucks, so arranged 



153 



