Chapter 7
●
113
rugged Allegheny Mountains. They rose
steeply 1,400 feet above the town. How
could a canal be built over steep
mountains? This problem was solved by
building a special kind of railroad over the
mountains. This railroad was called the
Allegheny Portage
. Portage means to
carry something over land.
To build the Allegheny Portage, builders
laid tracks on five steep parts of one side of
the mountain. Tracks also were placed on
five steep parts on the other side of the
mountain. Each steep part had two sets of
tracks. One set was for flatcars going up,
and the other was for flatcars going down.
It looked a little like giant stairways!When
a canal boat was loaded upon a flatcar,
horses pulled the flatcar over the rails with
a thick six-inch rope. At the same time, they
would lower flatcars down the other track.
TheAlleghenyPortagewas 37miles long.
On the other side of the mountains, near
Johnstown
, the canal boats were lowered
into the water. It took 28 hours more to
complete the trip to
Pittsburgh
. In total, it
took a canal boat four days to travel
between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This
was a great improvement over the six to
eight weeks it took to travel bywagon.
After all this work, it turned out that our
canals were not used for very long. As soon
as the Main Line Canal was completed in
1834, it was outdated! By the 1850s, canal
boats and Conestoga wagons were being
replaced by another way of moving goods.
Again, a better way of transportation
changed the way people lived and worked.
Menwho worked along the turnpikes were
known as Pike Boys. They sang this song:
We hear nomore of the clanging of hoof,
And the stagecoach, rattling by,
For the steam king rules the traveledworld,
And the old pike is left to die.
Can you guess what the steam king was?
Allegheny Portage
Railroad carried canal
boats over land! What
problem did this
portage solve?
