for the Austrian Government, in speaking of this 

 first engine as the "Long" engine, and the vast 

 strides that had been made in locomotives since it 

 was built, he appealed to me to vouch as one who 

 was present at its first trial for the truth of what he 

 was about to state. 



The trial was on the Columbia Railroad. I will 

 use his own words as nearly as I can recollect them: 

 "Gentlemen, I can, on my honor, assure you that 

 we ran four miles and a-half in seven hours and a 

 quarter, and running all the time at that." The 

 engine was not so bad as he made it appear. It was 

 deficient in its steaming, and primed badly. The 

 great trouble came from not allowing play on the 

 rails between the flanges of the wheels, between the 

 cast iron chairs which were rigidly secured to stone 

 blocks. The light T rails would spring so as to allow 

 the tire to rest on the rail, but in passing the chairs 

 the flanges would jam. cften so much as to raise the 

 face cf the wheels from the rail, and the entire four 

 and a-half miles were run by the almost constant 

 use of the pinch bar. After this fault was corrected, 

 and the priming partially prevented by the use of a 

 wove wire diaphragm, the engine did pretty fair 

 service. 



From 1837 to 1844 Col. Long was chief engineer of 

 the Western & Atlantic Railroad, of Georgia. It was 

 when on this work that he displayed not only great 

 engineering skill, but mechanical ingenuity in accom- 

 plishing a work with the limited means that were 

 available. He crossed great ravines on trestle-work; 

 in some cases series of bents or trestles one above the 

 other, narrowing from the base to the road track, 

 every timber so arranged as to be taken out and re- 

 placed in case of decay or any defect without inter- 

 fering with the traffic on the road. Short spans were 

 successfully crossed on his simple and cheap lattice 

 bridges. 1 ' 32 After he was recalled from his work in 



Figure 82. — Stephen Harriman Long (1784- 

 1864). Portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 

 1 81 9. Photo courtesy of Independence Na- 

 tional Historical Park Collection. 



Georgia, he, for many years, had charge of snag re- 

 moval and improvements of the Mississippi and Ohio 

 rivers. He designed and had built the efficient snag 

 boats, substantially as used at the present time. 253 He 

 was then located at Louisville, Ky., and during that 

 time my intercourse with him was frequent and of a 

 most pleasing character. His leisure was employed 

 on an elaborate series of experiments with models of 

 wooden railroad bridges. It was a wooden inverted 

 suspension arch, in one of these, I have been told, that 

 set Remington off on his wooden suspension bridge, 

 that for a time attracted considerable attention. 



It was about the second year of the civil war that 

 business called me to Washington. Learning Col. 

 Long had succeeded Col. Abert, 254 and was then the 



252 The Long truss, patented March 6, 1830. A specification 

 and a restored patent drawing are in the National Archives. 



253 He shared with Henry M. Shreve and others the credit for 

 the snag boat. See Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western 

 Rivers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), pp. 



'93-195- 



2ii A sketch of John J. Abert (1788-1863) appears in the first 

 supplementary volume of Dictionary of American Biography. 



191 



