Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Transportation Building Dedication Addresses [PAGE 33]

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too, had to be shoved aside, and while a speed of five miles an hour was reached when obstructions did not intervene, the latter were so numerous that it required nearly four hours to cover the nine miles. Such was the first movement by steam on rails on all the earth. Richard Trevithick won his wager and became in truth the Father of the Locomotive. There was none before him " o design and create one. Never t before had there been an attempt at tractive power and never before had steam been made to propel on rails. In the Baltimore & Ohio's Collection are two of the original oars drawn in 1803 by the Trevithick locomotive; several sections of the original rails, as, also, a number of the original stones to which the rails were fastened, and over which was the memorable movement as has been described. Placing the rail sections in position on the stones, and then the cars, discloses that the gauge of the track over which the Trevithick train of 1805 passed was the standard wiflth of today, viz: four feet eight and a half inches. Surprising, surely, this coincidence, or whatever

may be the characterizing of the precedent.

A year after Trevithick1a triumph, Oliver Evans encoumpassed what in its was was a parallel achievement; the passage by steam through the streets of Philadelphia of a great unwieldy dredging scow weighing forty thousand