Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
promontories, while upon the other side you look down upon the
Delaware, foaming and roaring below you, at the foot of an immense
wall or embankment which supports the canal. Altogether, it is one of
the most daring undertakings I have ever witnessed, to carry an
artificial river over rocky mountains, and up the most savage and
almost impracticable defiles. For upward of ninety miles I went
through a constant succession of scenery that would have been famous
had it existed in any part of Europe."
From Honesdale a gravity railroad crosses the Moosic Mountain into the
Lackawanna Valley at Carbondale. This was originally used to bring the
coal out for the canal, but has been abandoned for this purpose, being
now confined to passenger service. It has twenty-eight inclined
planes, and crosses the summit at Far View, at an elevation of nearly
two thousand feet. The first locomotive brought to America, built at
Stourbridge, England, in 1828, the "Stourbridge Lion," was used on the
levels of this railroad, the face of a lion adorning the front of the
boiler giving it the name. When brought out in 1829 the triumphant
claim was made that it "would run four miles an hour." The road passes
over extended mountain tops, giving far-seeing views; and among these
sombre rounded ridges in the wilderness of Wayne are the sources of
the Lackawaxen. Carbondale, built on the coal measures of the upper
Lackawanna Valley, has about eighteen thousand population; but all its
coal now goes to market by other railway routes, the gravity road and
the canal being found too expensive carriers in the fierce competition
of the anthracite industry.
THE HEADWATERS OF THE DELAWARE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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