Every one was talking now of railways, but few thought that rails could be laid across the Berkshires. It was even said in a Boston paper that such a road could never be built to Albany; that it would cost as much to do it as all Massachusetts would sell for; and that if it should be finished, everybody with common sense knew it would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon. We need not be too hard on this writer, for it was five years later when the De Witt Clinton train climbed the hill from Albany and carried its handful of passengers to Schenectady. One of the friends of the railway scheme was Abner Phelps. When he was a senior at Williams College, in 1806, he had thought of it, for he had heard about the tram cars in the English coal regions. In 1826 he became a member of the legislature of Massachusetts, and the second day he was there he proposed that the road should be built. In time the project went through, but at first it was planned to pull the cars with horses, and on the down grades to take the horses on the cars and let them ride. We do not know how it was intended that the cars should be held back, for it was long before the invention of air brakes. The line was built to its western end on the Hudson in 1842, and thus Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and Albany were bound together by iron rails. There was only a single track and the grades were heavy. The road brought little trade to Boston, and most of the goods from the West still went by way of the Hudson to New York. It was, however, a beginning, and it showed that the mountain wall could be crossed. The subject of a Hoosac tunnel now came up again. It would take a long time to tell how the tunnel was made; indeed, it was a long time in making. It was begun in 1850 or soon afterwards, and the work went slowly, with many stops and misfortunes, so that the hole through the mountain was not finished until November 27, 1873. On that day the last blast was set off, which made the opening from the east to the west side; and the first regular passenger train ran through July 8, 1875, fifty years after it had been planned to make a canal under the mountain. In order to help on the work the engineers sunk a shaft a thousand feet deep from the top of the mountain to the level of the tunnel, and from the bottom worked east and west. This gave them four faces, or “headings,” on which to work, instead of two, and hastened the finishing. The whole cost was about fourteen million dollars. [Illustration: FIG. 4. EASTERN PORTAL OF THE HOOSAC TUNNEL, BOSTON AND MAINE RAILROAD]