No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark. Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden sleepers.
But the track was the least of the company's problems. It had gone ahead to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance. The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.
Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of motive-power.
That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York, bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car--not larger than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief problem of the B. & O. His little engine--the _Tom Thumb_--was a primitive enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.
Two years after the beginning of the work, "brigades" of horse-cars were in regular service to Ellicott's Mills; by the first of December, 1831, trains--steam-drawn--ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to a day, they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great enough to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was raised to defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held back two years, until it could buy a compromise.