The Granite Railway
On 7 October 1826, the first railroad in America started operation. This was the horse-operated Granite Railway, built to transport the stones for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarry in Quincy down to the Neponset River, a distance of nearly three miles. The track and cars of the railroad had been designed and built by a young engineer of 28, Gridley Bryant, whose Granite Railway project started him on a long career of achievement in the invention of equipment that played a major part in the rapid and successful development of the American railroad system.
Ample precedent for the Granite Railway existed in England, where, since the reign of Charles II, wooden tracks, sometimes armored with iron plates, had been used as runways for coal cars from the pits to the nearest waterway. Within five years of the start of the Granite Railway, similar systems are recorded in the states of Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, and Maryland. At first, the motive power for these lines was supplied by gravity, stationary engines, or horses, but soon tiny steam locomotives were tried. Thus, in the year 1829, Peter Cooper built the famous Tom Thumb, a successful locomotive which used rifle barrels for flues. In the same year the Stourbridge Lion, “the first locomotive that ever turned a driving wheel on a railroad on the Western Continent,”7 was brought by sailing vessel from England and started operation in Pennsylvania. The American steam railroad system was thus well under way by the time the lower courses of the monument were being raised.
Bryant later described his railroad as having stone sleepers laid across the track, 8 feet apart. Upon these, were placed wooden rails, 6 inches thick and 12 inches high (replaced by stone within a few years). Spiked on top of these were iron plates, 3 inches wide by ¼ inch thick. However, at road crossings, stone rails were used, with 4-inch by ½-inch iron plates bolted on top. This “permanent” construction was also used on the double-track, inclined plane at the quarry. (Well-preserved vestiges of this “permanent” construction are visible today at the rise to the Bunker Hill Quarry.) Here, an endless chain allowed the loaded, descending cars to pull up the empty ascending ones.
The standard gauge of American railroads is now 4 feet, 8½ inches, measured between railheads, a standard adopted after many years of confusion before the present gauge dimension was adopted. Although Bryant described his track gauge as 5 feet, this dimension was measured between the “bearing points” of the wheels on the tracks. If the bearing points are assumed to be the center of the treads of the wheels, his gauge is found to match closely the present standard gauge. This track gauge agrees with that adopted by the famous English railroad engineer, George Stephenson, at about the same time, after he had measured scores of carts used by his farmer neighbors. Possibly, both Stephenson and Bryant knew that their selected gauge had a very early beginning; for some historians suggest that the English carts were originally made to fit the ruts cut in the roads of Britain by the Roman chariots, many centuries earlier, during the Roman occupation of Britain.
On the day when the railroad started operation, 16 tons of granite from the Bunker Hill Quarry, and loaded on three “wagons,” were easily pulled by one horse, once started. Bryant’s first car had flanged wheels, 6½ feet in diameter, from the axles of which a platform was hung to carry the granite. This platform was lowered to receive the load and then raised by an ingenious gearing device.
Naturally, Bryant based the design of his early railroad cars upon the construction of the horse-drawn wagons of his day. Like the wagons, his cars had to be flexible if they were to keep on the track when passing over the two curves of the otherwise straight Granite Railway. In his description of another of his cars appear the road wagon terms—bolsters, truck, and center kingpin, to allow a swiveling motion. Rigidly bolted to cross timbers beneath the truck were two iron axletrees, on which revolved cast-iron wheels. (Some time would elapse in railroad progress before the wheels would be fixed to, and revolve with, the axles in journals.)
In early American railroad development Bryant is credited with the invention of the eight-wheel car, the turntable, switch, turnout, and many other improvements. In 1832, he had invented and used in the building of the United States Bank at Boston, his portable derrick, “used in every city and village in the country wherever there was a stone building to erect.” Others profited from Bryant’s amazing ingenuity. Although the Supreme Court of the United States decided in his favor in his most important invention, the eight-wheeled car, he did not collect, and he died poor.8
In the fine saga of the Bunker Hill Monument, the Granite Railway plays a prominent part. The demand of the monument for granite definitely inspired Bryant to conceive the idea of America’s first railroad, and to design pioneer equipment that contributed hugely to the subsequent progress of America’s great railroad system. The accurate account of the building of the monument, however, has to record the fact that the railroad was not so great a benefit as anticipated. In the short distance of 12 miles there was too much loading and unloading. Willard freely expressed his annoyance at these hindrances. That he took action is indicated in the following quotation from an apparently authentic source: “The stone used for the foundation and for the first forty feet of the structure (the monument) was transported from the quarry on a railroad to the wharf in Quincy (actually located in Milton) where it was put into flat-bottomed boats, towed by steam-power to the wharf in Charlestown, and then raised to the Hill by teams moving upon an inclined plane. The repeated transfer of the stones, necessary in this mode of conveyance, being attended with delay, liability to accident, and a defacing of the blocks, was abandoned after the fortieth foot was laid, and the materials were transported by teams directly from the quarry to the hill.”9 This account fails to tell how the teams got up and down the steep hill at the quarry: the 84-foot rise at an angle of 15 degrees. Clever Bryant must have used his endless chain to drag the empty teams up, and to brake the loaded ones down.
Notes
7 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1889.
8 For more data on the Granite Railway and Gridley Bryant, see: Charles B. Stuart, Civil and Military Engineers of America (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1871); and The First Railroad in America (Boston: Privately printed for Granite Railway Company, 1926).
9 George E. Ellis, History of the Battle of Bunker’s (Breed’s) Hill (Boston: Lockwood, Brooks and Company, 1875).