The first five years of experience showed marked progress in the practical operation of railway trains, but even after locomotives had demonstrated their capabilities and each improved engine had shown an encouraging increase in velocity, the wildest flights of fancy never pictured the speed attained in later years. [Illustration: One of the Earliest Passenger Cars Built in this Country; used on the Western Railroad of Massachusetts (now the Boston & Albany).] When the roads forming the line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pa., were chartered in 1835, and town meetings were held to discuss their practicability, the Honorable Simon Cameron, while making a speech in advocacy of the measure, was so far carried away by his enthusiasm as to make the rash prediction that there were persons within the sound of his voice who would live to see a passenger take his breakfast in Harrisburg and his supper in Philadelphia on the same day. A friend of his on the platform said to him after he had finished: "That's all very well, Simon, to tell to the boys, but you and I are no such infernal fools as to believe it." They both lived to travel the distance in a little over two hours. [Illustration: Bogie Truck.] The people were far from being unanimous in their advocacy of the railway system, and charters were not obtained without severe struggles. The topic was the universal subject of discussion in all popular assemblages. Colonel Blank, a well-known politician in Pennsylvania, had been loud in his opposition to the new means of transportation. When one of the first trains was running over the Harrisburg & Lancaster road, a famous Durham bull belonging to a Mr. Schultz became seized with the enterprising spirit of Don Quixote, put his head down and tail up, and made a desperate charge at the on-coming locomotive, but his steam-breathing opponent proved the better butter of the two and the bull was ignominiously defeated. At a public banquet held soon after in that part of the State, the toast-master proposed a toast to "Colonel Blank and Schultz's bull--both opposed to railroad trains." The joke was widely circulated and had much to do with completing the discomfiture of the opposition in the following elections. [Illustration: Rail and Coach Travel in the White Mountains.]