New Jersey Railroad

The United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company (UNJ&CC) was a railroad company which began as the important Camden & Amboy Railroad (C&A), whose 1830 lineage began as one of the eight or ten earliest permanent North AmericanList of Earliest American RR's meant to be permanent: Lieper's, Granite Railroad, Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk, Delaware & Hudson, Mohawk & Hudson RR, Allegheny Portage RR, B&O RR railroads, and among the first common carrier transportation companies whose prospectus marketed an enterprise aimed (with a priority or principally) at carrying passengers fast and competing with stagecoaches between New York Harbor and Philadelphia-Trenton. Among the other earliest chartered or incorporated railroads, only the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were chartered with passenger services in mind. Later, after mergers, the UNJ&CC became a subsidiary part of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) system in New Jersey by the later merger and acquisition of several predecessor companies in 1872; these purchases also included the PRR's main line to New York City (now Amtrak's Northeast Corridor). Prior to 1872, its main lines were the Camden and Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company (C&A, below), the first railroad in New Jersey and one of the first railroads in the United States.

The Camden and Amboy was the first railroad to be conceived primarily as a passenger railroad and the first to employ steam locomotives to replace animal powered vehicles on rails. C&A first purchased and operated (what is now the oldest surviving operable steam locomotive in the world today) the ''John Bull'', imported from Great Britain in 1831. Its operations also led to the important development of the iron T-rail type rail tracks that became standard around the world. The United Company also included the Delaware and Raritan Canal, an early foe and then friend of the C&A.

The new conglomerate also included the New Jersey Rail Road and Transportation Company, the first railroad across the New Jersey Palisades.

History

The first railroad charter in the United States was issued on February 6, 1815 to the New Jersey Railroad Company. Its proprietors included the famous inventor John Stevens. Based on turnpike charters, it allowed the company to build between New Brunswick and Trenton, and became a model for railroad charters in the future. The Robert Stevens discussed below was the son of John Stevens.

 

In the early 19th century, travel between New York and Philadelphia, then America's two largest cities, was difficult and expensive. In 1800, a trip between the two cities, by horse, could take as long as eleven hours on a good day and as long as twenty on a bad one. Heavy goods went by boat, around Cape May, New Jersey. In 1829, eager to reduce the cost and difficulty of travel, New Jersey began investigating a cross-state canal and railroads. Railroads had already met with success in Britain and several American cities were planning lines of their own. The legislature, amid very aggressive lobbying, decided to build both a canal and a railroad. The canal and the railroad were to be built parallel to each other and controlled by separate companies chartered by the legislature. Each corporation was to give the state $100,000 worth of stock and pay a transit tax levied on cargo and each passenger carried. The corporation chartered to build the canal complicated this arrangement by deciding to also build a railroad. The legislature responded with a so-called "Marriage Act" to combine the two companies.

Camden and Amboy: 1830–1834

The Camden & Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company (C&A) was chartered on February 4, 1830, on the same day as the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company, after the two competing companies had come to a compromise. The C&A and D&R had the same goals — to connect the Delaware River, serving Philadelphia, with the Raritan River, for access to New York City — one by tow-path canal with some new innovations to cross the hills and the other by the untried railroad technology then emerging in Europe. Both ventures were considered risky, and both needed right-of-way grants from the legislature along the river's banks, requiring negotiations and design compromises before either could lay claim to a land rights charter.

Subsequently, the D&R was built to the west of the original C&A, leaving the Delaware at Trenton and running roughly northeast to New Brunswick along the Raritan River valley, while (from the other direction) the original C&A ran south from New York Harbor via South Amboy to Camden, thence across the breadth of New Jersey, connecting by ferry across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, both indirectly but much more rapidly linking New York and Philadelphia—at the time America's fastest growing city with its largest city and, perhaps more importantly, tying together many of its oldest industrial centers.

Robert L. Stevens was president of the C&A in the 1830s and 1840s. The C&A was organized on April 28, 1830. Surveys began on June 16. As railroads were a relatively new development in the U.S., rails and locomotives were imported from Britain. Construction began December 4, 1830, at Bordentown on the Delaware River; construction efforts were supported by horse-drawn carriages.

R. Stephenson and Company built a locomotive steam engine for the Camden and Amboy that was completed in July 1831 and shipped to Philadelphia from Liverpool on the 14th of the same month. It was received by "Edwin A. Stephens for the Camden and South Amboy R. Road & Trans Co." The locomotive engine was named ''John Bull'' in reference to its place of manufacture. As of 1986, it was the oldest operable locomotive engine. The ''John Bull'' arrived at Bordentown on September 4, 1831, and was first tested on November 12. The first section, from Stewarts Point Wharf near Bordentown north to Hightstown