Pontchartrain Railroad

Pontchartrain Rail-Road was the first railway in New Orleans, Louisiana. Chartered in 1830, the railroad began carrying people and goods between the Mississippi River front and Lake Pontchartrain on 23 April 1831. It closed more than 100 years later.

The 6-mile (10 km) long 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm) gauge line connected the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans along the riverfront with the town of Milneburg on the Lakefront. When built, the majority of the distance of the route between neighborhoods at either end of the route was a mixture of farmland, woods, and swamp. The route of the railway ran down the center of Elysian Fields Avenue.

Meetings discussing building a railway between the river and lake began in 1828. The Pontchartrain Rail-Road was chartered on 20 January 1830. The right-of-way was approved by the New Orleans City Council on 15 March, and construction began immediately, with a pair of parallel railroad tracks. Some of the route included swampland that required up to 4 feet of fill to create a sufficient road bed. A 150 foot wide bed was constructed along the entire route, with the rail line laid with red cypress timbers and English rolled iron rails. Construction of the line was completed on April 14, 1831, and it officially opened on the 23rd, with horse drawn railway carriages. The first steam locomotive, "the Shields", arrived on 15 June 1832. This first locomotive proved unreliable; a second locomotive "the Pontchartrain" supplied from England by Rothwell, Hick & Co. proved better, allowing the line to advertise regular steam service of 7 round trips per day (9 on Sundays) starting on 27 September 1832. "The Shields" was canibalized, the boiler used to run equipment at the railroad's machine shop.

At first, the passenger fare was 75 cents round trip. For some years both steam power and horse-drawn traffic ran on the line, with steam only gradually becoming dominant with the acquisition of more reliable locomotives. One horse-drawn car was kept on the line as late as 1861, although the line at the time also had five working locomotives.

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