New Castle was the eastern terminus for one of America's earliest railroads, among the half dozen or so lines begun in 1828–1832 at the dawn of railroading (starting with the famous Baltimore and Ohio). As with earlier cross-peninsula turnpikes, the railroad was meant to speed travel between steamship lines on the two bays. New York engineer John Randel Jr. surveyed the sixteen-and-one-half mile route in spring 1830, as he had done for the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal six years earlier.
About 1,100 men were at work within a year. They affixed Georgia pine rails to tens of thousands of stone blocks, as was typical of the earliest railroads. The blocks were quarried at Port Deposit, Maryland, and Robinson and Carr's quarry in Pennsylvania and were brought here by boat. (Delays in delivery of the blocks led to part of the railroad being built with innovative white oak sleepers instead.) The wooden rails were capped with steel strips imported from Britain. The first horse-drawn passenger train ran across the completed line in one hour and twenty minutes on February 28, 1832; that fall, the locomotives Delaware and Pennsylvania, built by famed designer Robert Stevenson of Newcastle, England, came into use, traveling at a speed of fifteen miles an hour—alarming to some travelers.
In 1837, a second track was added, but that same year saw rival railroads connect Baltimore, Wilmington, and Philadelphia, leading to the obsolescence of the western portions of the line in 1856, one of the first railroad abandonments in the country. The distinctive stone blocks with paired drill holes were recycled for pavers or foundation material throughout New Castle. The eastern portion of the route (with modernized tracks, of course) is still used by Conrail today.
The railroad's ticket office (c. 1832; 1953 restored, Albert Kruse) in Battery Park is the second-oldest station extant in the United States, after the B&O station at Ellicott Mills, Maryland (1831). It resembles one built by the B&O in Baltimore in early 1830 (demolished). In later years, it was used as a farm shed until repaired in 1908 as a crossing watchman's box for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1946, its use was discontinued, and a Philadelphia museum nearly removed it. Instead, it was stored until re-erected here in New Castle.
Writing Credits
Data
Citation
W. Barksdale Maynard, "NEW CASTLE AND FRENCHTOWN RAILROAD", SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/essays/DE-01-ART162.
Print Source
Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 162-162.
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