The leisureliness and timidity of the first trains would seem to us amazing, did we not remember how tiny the engine was, how unstable the road-bed, and how loosely the cars were coupled together by bolt and pin. Twenty years after this first road was built one of the printed instructions to engineers was to be perfectly sure before they pulled out of the station that they had their entire train with them and had dropped no cars in starting. At first it was the custom for the engineer to stop the train to collect fares, or for any other urgent business connected with the road. It was many years before the companies dared run night trains. The Michigan Central, which was opened in 1837, found in the autumn of 1841 that its depots were so loaded with barrels of flour and cords of wood that they would not be able to get it all to Detroit before the close of navigation on the lakes. The directors conferred together and hired teams to transport the goods from stations near Detroit to that place. For the long distances they had no alternative but to put one of their four locomotives on for night service, but they considered it unsafe and hoped that such extreme measures would not be necessary in the future. When this road had been opened, four years before, an adventurous young man who owned a sorrel pony announced that he was going to race the train for the last mile before it reached Dearborn. The crowds who had been assembled to see the first train come in were much excited over the competition, and, needless to say, the pony won. After the completion of these and other short roads there was a lull in railroad-building, due to the hard times in the western country which succeeded the panic of 1837. In 1845 and 1846 the legislatures began once more to plan internal improvements, and a great era of railroad-building began which continued until the opening of the Civil War. In the history of Lake Erie 1851 stands out as the year when three of the trunk lines were completed and their opening fittingly celebrated. In that year the first train came into Cleveland, and with the thought of the hundreds of trains that enter its stations daily, let us put ourselves back into the city of 1851 and watch the first train arrive.