Building the Harlem Railroad’s first suburb and branch: New Village and the Morrisania Branch Railroad
The earliest days of the New York and Harlem Railroad were ones fraught with hardship. As one of the earliest railroads in the United States, it was a guinea pig of sorts, a case study in the feasibility of roads of rails to be laid for the carrying passengers and goods. There was a technological learning curve to determine what worked, and what didn’t—from the type of rails (granite and wood were both early attempts), all the way to the techniques used to build it—including how to bore a tunnel before the invention of dynamite. This “figure it out as...
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