The House Committee struck out these amendments and substituted a more sweeping one than any yet suggested in the history of the road. This amendment provided that a railroad be constructed west of Columbus with the money appropriated for a highway. The committee reported, that, after long study of the question, many reasons appeared why the change should be made. It was stated to the committee by respectable authority, that much of the stone for the masonry and covering for the road east of Columbus had to be transported for considerable distances over bad roads across the adjacent country at very great expense, and that, in its continuance westward through Ohio, this source of expense would be greatly augmented. Nevertheless the compact at the time of the admission of the western states supposed the western termination of the road should be the Mississippi. The estimated expense of the road's extension to Vandalia, Illinois, sixty-five miles east of the Mississippi, amounted to $4,732,622.83, making the total expense of the entire road amount to about ten millions. The committee said it would have been unfaithful to the trust reposed in it, if it had not bestowed much attention upon this matter, and it did not hesitate to ground on a recent report of the Secretary of War, this very important change of the plan of the road. This report of the War Department showed that the distance between Columbus and Vandalia was three hundred and thirty-four miles and the estimated cost of completing the road that far would be $4,732,622.83, of which $1,120,320.01 had been expended and $3,547,894.83 remained to be expended in order to finish the road to that extent according to plans then in operation; that after its completion it would require an annual expenditure on the three hundred and thirty-four miles of $392,809.71 to keep it in repair, the engineers computing the annual cost of repairs of the portion of the road between Wheeling and Columbus (one hundred and twenty-seven miles) at $99,430.30. On the other hand the estimated cost of a railway from Columbus to Vandalia on the route of the Cumberland Road was $4,280,540.37, and the cost of preservation and repair of such a road, $173,718.25. Thus the computed cost of the railway exceeded that of the turnpike but about twenty per cent, while the annual expense of repairing the former would fall short more than fifty-six per cent. In addition to the advantage of reduced cost was that of less time consumed in transportation; for, assuming as the committee did a rate of speed of fifteen miles per hour (which was five miles per hour less than the then customary speed of railway traveling in England on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, and about the ordinary rate of speed of the American locomotives), it would require only twenty-three hours for news from Baltimore to reach Columbus, forty-two hours to Indianapolis, fifty-four to Vandalia, and fifty-eight to St. Louis.