RIDING THE RAILS - The Legend of the Tom Thumb
In approximately 1830 "or there abouts" the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had run tracks to Ellicott's Mills. They laid about thirteen miles of "snakehead" rails as they were called. They were still using horses to pull the cars.
There was a short turn of 150-foot radius in the track and while talking to the English who were experimenting with locomotives; they were told that no locomotive could draw a train on any curve shorter than a 900-foot radius.
The Directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Line were devastated at the news due to the labor and expense they had already invested as well as the notoriety that a failure would bring them. But a man by the name of Peter Cooper stepped up and said that he thought he could design an engine that could handle the small radius, and so of course they told him to give it a try.
He went to New York and got a tiny little one-horse power engine and carried it back to Baltimore. It had a three and one-half inch cylinder and a fourteen-inch stroke. He then got some boiler iron and made a boiler about the size of an ordinary wash boiler. The next problem was to connect the engine to the boiler.
Mr. Cooper had an iron foundry and some skill in working in it, but he couldn't find any iron pipes. The fact was that there hadn't been any for sale in America at that time, so he took two muskets and broke off the wood stocks, and used the barrels for tubing to the boiler. He then went into a coachmaker's shop and made the rest of the locomotive, which he called the "Tom Thumb" because it was so small. He didn't intend it for actual service but to prove that an engine could be built to circumnavigate small radius turns.
He got steam up one Saturday night and with the president of the railroad and two or three other men they went out two or three miles. They then put the engine up in a shed for the night. All were invited for a ride to Ellicott's Mills on Monday.
Monday morning came and to Mr. Cooper's grief and chagrin he found that some thief had been there and chopped off all of the copper from the engine and hauled it away, presumably to sell to a junk dealer. It was all gone!
It took Cooper another week or more to repair it, but then they started for the Mill. They had six people on the engine and thirty-six in the car. They made the trip in about an hour and twelve minutes, going up an average grade of eighteen feet to the mile. After easily making the 150-foot radius turn at the Mill they made the return trip in about fifty-seven minutes.
The result of the experiment was that bonds were immediately sold and The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became a success!