The Cumberland Road was not to Indiana and Illinois what it was to Ohio, for somewhat similar reasons that it was less to Ohio than to Pennsylvania, for the further west it was built the older the century grew, and the newer the means of transportation which were coming rapidly to the front. This was true, even, from the very beginning. The road was hardly a decade old in Pennsylvania, when two canals and a railroad over the portage, offered a rival means of transportation across the state from Harrisburg to Pittsburg.[14] When the road reached Wheeling, Ohio River travel was very much improved, and a large proportion of traffic went down the river by packet. When the road entered Indiana, new plans for internal improvements were under way beside which a turnpike was almost a relic. In 1835-36, Indiana passed an internal improvement bill, authorizing three great canals and a railway.[15] The proposed railway, from the village of Madison on the Ohio River northward to Indianapolis, is a pregnant suggestion of the amount of traffic to Indiana from the east which passed down the Ohio from Wheeling, instead of going overland through Ohio.[16] This was, undoubtedly, mostly passenger traffic, which was very heavy at this time.[17] But the dawning of a new era in transportation had already been heralded in the national hall of legislation. In 1832 the House Committee on Roads and Canals had discussed in their report the question of the relative cost of various means of intercommunication, including railways. Each report of the committee for the next five years mentioned the same subject, until, in 1836, the matter of substituting a railway for the Cumberland Road between Columbus and the Mississippi was very seriously considered. In that year a House Bill (No. 64) came back from the Senate amended in two particulars, one authorizing that the appropriations made for Illinois should be confined to grading and bridging only, and should not be construed as implying that Congress had pledged itself to macadamize the road.