Even when the track was finished no decision had been made as to how the cars were to be moved. Mr. Hulbert, in one of his stories of historic highways, tells of several experiments which were made. Some one invented a locomotive in which a horse was to tread an endless belt and thus make the machine go, carrying with it the horse and dragging the cars. On one trip, when several newspaper men were present to report the trial, the train ran into a cow and they were all tipped out and tumbled down a bank. The method did not have much praise in the papers. Sails were also tried, and one car which was thus moved by wind was called _Æolus_. This car, with its mast and other ship-like rigging, made much talk, but that was all. And no one could quite see how it would ever be possible to draw a car on a curved track. This meant much, for it was out of the question to build a railway through the mountains without many curves, and some of them rather short ones. But there were those who thought that if a curved road were possible, it would be a good thing because the engineer could occasionally look back along the line and see how his train was coming on. [Illustration: FIG. 41. LOOKING DOWN THE POTOMAC FROM HARPERS FERRY Maryland on the left; West Virginia on right and in foreground; Virginia in the distance; Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Chesapeake and Ohio canal at the left; Shenandoah river enters under bridge on the right ] But steam was to win the day. Mr. Peter Cooper had a locomotive, called _Tom Thumb_, built in 1829, and an old picture shows an exciting race between this little engine and a horse car. The steam car won the race, and it is now to be seen whether or not electricity will drive steam out of business on the railways. By 1833 the road was laid as far as Harpers Ferry, a place made lively by armies and guns in the Civil War. It is a rugged old town, built near the spot where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac, and both together have cut a fine gorge through the Blue Ridge. To-day as one stands in the upper part of the village and looks down through the great gorge, he sees the bridge and tracks and trains of the Baltimore and Ohio, and the channel of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal (Fig. 41). The railway outstripped the canal, for the road was finished to Cumberland in 1842, nine years before canal boats floated into that place; and in 1853 the first train rolled into Wheeling, on the Ohio river.