In the days of the old colonial stagecoach, if a traveler wished to go from Boston to New York, he would have to be ready to begin the journey at three o'clock in the morning. The stage had no glass windows, no door or step, and passengers were obliged to climb in at the front. One pair of horses pulled the stage eighteen miles, and then they were relieved by another pair. At about ten o'clock in the evening, after a day's journey of forty miles, the stage drew up at an inn for the night. At three o'clock the next morning, after dressing by the light of a horn lantern, the traveler must resume his journey. If the roads were bad, he might have to alight from the stage and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Rivers were crossed on clumsy flat-boats. When the streams were swollen with rains or filled with floating ice, the passage across was often dangerous. The trip from Boston to Philadelphia, which would have taken eight days of Washington's time, can easily be made now by train in as many hours. In these days of the modern railroad, San Francisco is nearer in time to New York than Washington was scarcely a hundred years ago. The first railway in America was built in 1826. It connected a granite quarry at Quincy, Massachusetts, with the town of Milton in the same state. It was only two or three miles long, and was operated with horses. In May, 1829, three English locomotives--the first ever seen in America--were unloaded at New York City. On August 9 of the same year, one of these engines was tried at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This was the first time that a locomotive ever turned a wheel on a railway in America. A canal which the business men of Philadelphia proposed to construct from their city to Pittsburg, in order to give them access to the trade centers of the West, threatened the commercial prosperity of Baltimore. To offset the advantages which this canal would give Philadelphia, at a great public meeting in Baltimore it was decided to build a railway from Baltimore to some point on the Ohio River. The road was named the Baltimore and Ohio. In 1830 it was finished from Baltimore as far as Ellicott's Mills, a distance of fifteen miles. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first railroad in the United States built for the express purpose of carrying passengers and freight. The original intention was to pull cars over this road with horses. But Peter Cooper persuaded the railroad officials to try his engine "Tom Thumb," which he had built in 1829. The trial was successful, for "Tom Thumb" drew a car-load of passengers at the rate of fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. This engine was the first locomotive built in America, and its trial was the first trip ever made by an American locomotive.