Leiper Railroad

The Leiper Railroad was a 'family business built' horse drawn railroad of three quarters of a mile constructed in 1810 after the quarry owner, Thomas Leiper, failed to obtain a charter with legal rights-of-way to instead build his desired canal along Crum Creek. The quarry man's 'make-do' railroad solution was the continent's first chartered railway, first operational non-temporary railway, first well documented railroad, and first constructed railroad also meant to be permanent.

The credit of constructing the first permanent tramway in America may therefore be rightly given to Thomas Leiper. He was the owner of a fine quarry not far from Philadelphia, and was much concerned to find an easy mode of carrying stone to tide-water. That a railway would accomplish this end he seem to have had no doubt. To test the matter, and at the same time afford a public exhibition of the merits of tramways, he built a temporary track in the yard of the Bull's Head Tavern in Philadelphia. The tramway was some sixty feet long, had a grade of one inch and a half to the yard, and up it, to the amazement of the spectators, one horse used to draw a four-wheeled wagon loaded with a weight of ten thousand pounds. This was the summer of 1809. Before autumn laborers were at work building a railway from the quarry to the nearest landing, a distance of three quarters of a mile. In the spring of 1810 the road began to be used and continued in using during eighteen years.
by John Bach McMaster, page 494, A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War

Scotts-born patriot, a quarry owner, Thomas Leiper was a Pennsylvania Militia officer who served during several campaign years, first failing to obtain allowance to build a canal connecting his quarry near Crum Creek to Ridley Creek, reaching flood-waters on the estuary of the Delaware Valley tidewater in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. First he commissioned a short experimental horse-powered railway in 1809 which proved a horse-drawn heavy wagon heavily loaded could advance successfully against a stiff gradient a bit over 4%. The track, with a 4 feet (1.2 m) gauge, had a grade of 1-1/2 inch to the yard (1 : 24 or about 4%) over its total length of 60 yards (54.9 m) and proves satisfactory when tested with a loaded car. The test track had created quite a scene, so it and the railway begun that year was both studied by nearby Penn students and professors, and was much covered in the press — When the permanent railroad began operations, it was on every-day operational display in the nation's largest, and most industrialized city.

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