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Columbia-Philadelphia Railroad and its Successor, The By William Wilson SC
The Columbia Philadelphia Railroad 1896 By William Wilson 1896
Soft Cover
Copyright 1985 SECOND printing 1992
72 pages
INTRODUCTION
In 1827 and 1828, my great-great grandfather, Major John Wilson, selected and surveyed the right-of-way of the Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad, which later became the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad westward from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pa. One member of the survey party was Major Wilson's teen-age son, W. HaseII Wilson, my great grandfather.
W. Hasell Wilson spent most of his working life with the Columbia & Philadelphia R.R. and the Pennsylvania R.R. or its affiliates. In his mid-eighties, he published a small book, Reminiscences of A Railroad Engineer, which described his railroad experiences from serving, at age 16 as a member of his father's 1827 survey party to his retirement in his mid-seventies. Except for a change in title, and a few minor deletions, this book is a reprint of Hasell Wilson's book.
As the author points out, he represented the fourth generation of a family of Scottish civil engineers which traced its ancestry back to James Wilson, an engineer and architect at Sterling, Scotland.
The fifth generation of this engineering family was represented by Hasell Wilson's three sons: John A. Wilson, Joseph M. Wilson and Henry A. Wilson. All three were engineering graduates of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and each, during their early years, held important engineering and managerial positions with the Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1876, they formed the prestigious Philadelphia civil engineering and architectural firm of Wilson Brothers & Co. They designed, and supervised the construction of many important structures both in and outside the railroad industry. Among the many important Philadelphia projects designed by the brothers and their associates were the famous Broad Street Station of the Pennsylvania R.R., the Reading Terminal at Twelfth and Market Streets, the Main Exhibition Building and Machinery I Tall at the Centennial Exposition (with Henry Pettit), the Drexel Institute Building and the water filtration system of the City of Phildelphia.
In their wildest dreams, the members of the engineer party that made the preliminary 1827 survey of the Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad could not have seen the tremendous advances the future would bring in railroading. In 1827, it was contemplated that horses would pull the cars on the new railroad taking the better part of a day between the railroad's terminals. But, one hundred and eleven years later, the time scheduled for the Pennsylvania Railroad's crack passenger train "The Broadway Limited," over that same right of way, on its New York to Chicago run, was only 16 hours!
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