Railroad
Delivery of the manufactured iron was a problem at Lonaconing. After experimenting with a horse-powered tram road, the company realized that a rail line, built down the Georges Creek Valley toward the Potomac River at Westernport, would be the answer to the transportation issue. As a result, the Georges Creek Railroad was completed in 1853.
The rail line was unfortunately too late to provide the needed market access for the Lonaconing Iron Furnace. The furnace was abandoned in 1855. Coal, not iron, became the most important commodity shipped out of the region, as better grades of iron ore were discovered in Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes region.
Read more about this topic: Georges Creek Coal And Iron Company
Famous quotes containing the word railroad:
“Though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)