May 17, 1875: Travel by Railroad a Dirty Way to Travel

By Margaret Leidy Harner from her book One Day at a Time: A Social History of Boyertown, PA.

May 17, 1875: There is a humorous sidelight connected with travel by railroad, but only for those at the depot and not for the travelers alighting from the coaches whose faces are so smudged with soot and smoke that they might have been performers in makeup for a minstrel show.

Emerging from a train whose engine burns bituminous coal, passengers look as if they resided in Pittsburgh, and fashion styles have adjusted to make black the favored color to wear when traveling.

If the locomotive burns wood in is boiler, it throws off sparks from its stack that have been known to set fire to things standing close to the tracks. Although the early passenger trains were crude, it was still a great improvement over jostling stage coaches or jolting buggies.

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