Pros and Cons of Fast Traveling in the 1850s

Editor's note: The following excerpts are from the "Jamestown (NY) Journal" 1858-1859.. Thank you to Contributing Scholar George A. Thompson for finding, cataloging and transcribing this article. The language, spelling and grammar of the article reflects the time period when it was written.

Currier & Ives, "The Express Train," lithograph, 1870. https://huntington.org/exhibition/visions-empire-quest-railroad-across-america-1840-1880

How we smile now at the bungling expedient for rapid traveling that prevailed
twenty years ago. By canal boats from Troy through the nine locks at a cent and a half
a mile, and board yourself. By packet from Schenectady west, drawn by three horses,
on a slow trot, and three days to Buffalo. And up and down yonder hill crept the first
railroad, with cars hung on thoroughbraces, and seats for nine inside, and some
outside, which were dragged up an inclined place one hundred and eight feet to the half
mile, by a stationary engine, and then over the sand plains to the head of State street in
Albany. And this was then such a triumph of engineering. What a change! where our
fathers crept we fly. The mountains they climb, we tunnel. The hills they toiled up, we
level, or divide by a deep cut, thrown arches over ravines at them impassible. . . .
Jamestown Journal (Jamestown, N. Y.), July 16, 1858, p. 2

Correspondence of the Journal. VACATION LETTERS, . . . NO. 4.
To New York over the Erie Rail Road -- Sleeping Cars -- New York to New Haven . . . .
*** On arriving at Dunkirk, we boarded the Night Express, and took our seats in
the luxuriously furnished sleeping car, determining to try the virtue of this boasted
institution. Lodgings were furnished at 50 cents a man. My little girl who accompanied
me was stowed in without extra charge. There were 40 berths in the car, four in each
tier, one double birth at the bottom and two above. The upper berths were cane seated
frames, the ends of which were fixed into sockets, while the bottoms of the lower were
of wood. All were covered with nice hair mattresses, and pillows enclosed by damask
curtains, making a very handsome appearance. About nine o'clock the chambermaid
who was a buxom, round faced laddie [sic], made up the berths and we turned in. There
were about thirty sleepers in the car. ***
Think of sleeping in a car, rushing at the rate of thirty miles an hour, along the
brink of lofty precipices, leaping black ravines, threading deep cuts, mounting lofty
viaducts, and careering through some of the most splendid scenery in the world. **
Jamestown Journal (Jamestown, N. Y.), September 2, 1859, p. 2

[Editor's Note: He remembers the Green Mountains of his childhood] Yet when I visit that place it is all changed. The old forest is gone, the speckled trout have forsaken the pools; the streams are dried up, or flow in straight spade-cut channels, the roaring branch is
trained through sluices, or broken over water-wheels. ***
Jamestown Journal (Jamestown, N. Y.), July 16, 1858, p. 2

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