Allen placed the _Stourbridge Lion_--which resembled a giant grasshopper with its mass of exterior valves, and joints--on the crude wooden track of the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen miles distant. A few days later--the ninth of August, to be exact--he ran the _Lion_, the first turning of an engine wheel upon American soil. Details of that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built of heavy hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches wide and one-half an inch thick were spiked. The engine weighed seven tons, instead of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the rails had become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad, where the track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bending trestle. Allen had been warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for passengers upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious Pennsylvania regard shown for the safety of one's neck. So, after running the engine up and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from the village around the abrupt curve and over the trembling trestle at a rate of ten miles an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine derailed, broke into resounding cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the United States had served to prove its worth.
The career of the _Stourbridge Lion_ was short lived. It hauled coal cars for a little time at Honesdale; but it was too big an engine for so slight a railroad, and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the Delaware & Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside above Carbondale. The fate of the three other imported English locomotives remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually to find their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.
Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive ranked him as a railroad engineer of the highest class, and before the year 1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina Railroad. This was an ambitious project, designed to connect the old Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles distant. It achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first operated a locomotive of American manufacture.