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ROM PHILADELPHIA TO PITTSBURG 



Figure 64. — Portable iron boats, 1839. A Reliance Transportation Co. 

 advertisement in 1839 stated that "those boats are built of rolled iron, in 

 sections susceptible of being connected when on Canal, so as to form a boat, 

 and separated when on Rail Road to answer as car-bodies, resting on cradles 

 made to fit the curves of the boat and placed on eight-wheel cars, which when 

 connected are passed into canal by inclined planes or lift locks, no hoisting 

 machinery being required, as the water floats the boat from the cars. . . . 

 The improvements in transportation between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh 

 within the last 50 years have advanced with rapid strides. Our drawing repre- 

 sents the first Pack Horse prostrate beneath a burden of some three hundred 

 pounds weight, next the saving of horse power on Canal, on which one horse 

 is capable of doing the work of 500 pack-horses, and next represents a Locomo- 

 tive propelled by steam moving heavy cars burdened with freighted boats, 

 bounding up the towering heights of the Alleghanies, startling the deer from 

 its lair, and striking with awe the Indian Hunter as the fiery meteor with its 

 lengthened train flits across his path." Photo from copy of broadside in division 

 of transportation, Smithsonian Institution; text quoted from advertisement in 

 .4. M'Elroy's Philadelphia Directory for 1839. (A review of the history of Penn- 

 sylvania sectional canal boats is contained in Jessee L. Hartman, "John 

 Daugherty and the Rise of the Section Boat System," Pennsylvania Magazine 0/ 

 History and Biography (October 1945), vol. 59, pp. 294-314.) 



158 



