There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America's mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a passenger carrier.
Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive _DeWitt Clinton_, when the railroad fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of '37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality.
Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent draymen, 'bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there.