I then went to the Potteries in Staffordshire, and there, after renewing the same kind of fighting that I had had in London, in every new town I undertook to lay railways in, I succeeded in building seven miles of track through the crockery-making country. Those tracks are there to-day.
My failure in London, which was to have been expected, must be set off by these successes in Birkenhead and in Staffordshire. I am entitled to the credit of laying the first street-railways in England, having to overcome the most formidable of all the enemies of progress--British prejudice. I afterward went to Darlington, where Stephenson had built his first railway, from Stockton to Darlington, in '29, the year of my birth, and I constructed a tramway there to connect the two steam railways through that town.
My life, therefore, spans the entire railway building of the world. The first railway was built the year I was born, and since that time, in a space of seventy-three years, more than 200,000 miles of railway have been constructed in the United States alone. In much of this great work I have had some share. I suggested the railway that connects Melbourne with its port, and mapped out the present railway system in Australia thirty-nine years ago; I organized the line that connects the Eastern States with the great Middle West--the Atlantic and Great Western Railway; and I organized and built the first railway that pierced the great American desert, and brought the Atlantic and Pacific coasts into close touch and led to the development of the far West.
I may mention here, also, that I built a street-railway in Geneva, Switzerland, which is still in use; and one in Copenhagen, which proved that there was at least something sound in "the state of Denmark." Other railways, as in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, suggested by me, have been changed from horse to trolley lines. I also suggested the road in Bombay, India, which was the first railway in all Asia, now extended.
It may be of interest to record that when I began building street-railways, I sent to the United States and got the plans of the Philadelphia roads and of the New York Third Avenue line. It was therefore upon the models of American roads that these foreign railways were constructed.