Road Versus Rails

Road Versus Rails. The Rivalry Begins. , Ellicott City’s Main Street is the National Pike, part of the road system that moved Americans west. Only two decades after the road was constructed, a new transportation rival appeared. In 1831, America’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, introduced steam engines to the Patapsco River Valley. The rivalry between the road and the railroad came together here., Noisy, dirty, and at first, unreliable, the railroad soon gained the upper hand. By 1840, a stage coach trip to Cumberland on the National Pike cost $9 and took twenty hours. The same trip on the B and O cost $7 and took ten. John H. B. Latrobe summed it up best when he wrote, “That solitary horseman who comes down [the National Road] at a trot that dislocates half the bones in his body, and sends his saddle bags with grievous flapping is one of the few who still prefers its glow and dust to the shade and velocity of travel on the iron avenue to the west.” While it was so important for the first decades of the 1800s, the National Road was doomed. , [Caption:] , An 1832 traveler observed that “Ellicott’s Mills is at the intersection of rail and turnpike roads; the two great thoroughfares to the west. We have the pleasure of observing the slow paced vehicles passing below us and the rapid easy movement of the railcars.”