New Castle and Frenchtown Turnpike and Railroad Company
An NC&F ticket office sits in a park in New Castle, Delaware.
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| Locale | Delaware and eastern Maryland |
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| Dates of operation | 1831–1877 |
| Successor | Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
The New Castle and Frenchtown Turnpike and Rail Road (NC&F), opened in 1831, was the first railroad in Delaware and one of the first in the United States. About half of the route was abandoned in 1859; the rest became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) route into the Delmarva Peninsula and is still used by Norfolk Southern Railway. The abandoned segment from Porter, Delaware, to Frenchtown, Maryland, the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad Right-of-Way, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
When construction began in 1804 on the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, which would connect the Delaware River to the Chesapeake Bay, merchants and other businessmen of New Castle, Delaware, perceived a threat to their interests and proposed a railroad to connect their own city to the bay. The New-Castle and Frenchtown Turnpike Company was chartered in Delaware on January 24, 1809, and in Maryland on January 6, 1810. It opened in 1815 and 1816, providing a turnpike from New Castle in a west-southwest direction to Old Frenchtown Wharf, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. The easternmost section of the road, east of Clark's Corner (under 3 miles), had been built in 1812 by the New Castle Turnpike Company, chartered January 30, 1811.
In 1828, the Maryland General Assembly authorized the company to replace the turnpike with a railroad and change its name to the New-Castle and French Town Turnpike and Rail Road Company. Similar laws did the same for the two companies in Delaware, renaming the New Castle Turnpike Company to the New Castle Turnpike and Railroad Company. The companies merged on March 31, 1830, to form the New Castle and Frenchtown Turnpike and Rail Road Company – with no dash in New Castle – and the new railroad opened in 1831, using horses for about a year before switching to steam locomotives. The chief engineer for the construction of the railroad was John Randel Jr..
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