125 years ago in Railway age: "Is this not, the latter half of the nineteenth century, emphatically the railway age?"

Railway Age, Nov, 2001

June 17, 1876: It is but fifty years since the first railroad for passengers was opened. Men yet in their prime saw the first locomotive beheld in this country. The railway interest of the country and the world is just now at its lowest ebb. It is about to meet the return tide and roll forward to prosperity as Vet unknown. The Railway Age proposes to take it at its flood, and with it flow on to fortune. In this faith appears the publication whose initial number is now before you.

August 3, 1876: Work has commenced on another of the great engineering enterprises of the day, the tunnel under the Hudson river at New York, and in a few years, without doubt, the railroad traveler via New Jersey will ride on to Manhattan Island underneath the waters of the North river, and cheat the ferrymen of the pence in money, and pounds in time, which they now exact. And so the locomotive pushes ahead through mountains, over Niagaras, and under the seas, to its universal destination.

September 28, 1876: A curious evidence of the tendency of the railroad to supplant other means of transportation is seen in the fact that a movement is seriously under way to build a narrow-gauge road along the towpath of the abandoned Wabash canal, in Indiana. The snail-paced canal boat, once sufficient for all demands, has been driven off by the locomotive, and the smooth-trodden path of the mule forms a firm way for the steam train. Who can say that the great Erie canal will not eventually share the fate of its humbler Indiana water-way.

November 2, 1876: A New York dispatch says that the consolidation of the fast freight lines "is looked upon as one of the last steps in the settlement of the railroad war, which many believe has already been settled, except some little informalities." The "little informalities" of cutting each others' throats seem to exist as vigorously as ever. Otherwise, the war may be considered "settled."

November 16, 1876: About 2,000 miles of new railroad have been completed in the United States thus far in 1876--almost double the amount reported up to the same time in 1875, and a third more than for the same period in 1874. This fact is pretty good evidence that the panic has spent its force and that railway building has already been resumed with new vigor and confidence.