The New York and New England Railroad

By Gregg M Turner

Railroads were the first big business enterprises of America and made possible many other industries. They knitted our expansive nation together and ably transported people, materials, supplies, goods, and mail.

Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of railroads were built in the United States during the nineteenth century. Among the more colorful was the New York and New England Railroad, which connected Boston with the Hudson River via the uplands of Connecticut. If ever a company had its share of trials and tribulations it was this firm. Yet its fascinating, topsy-turvy past is today largely forgotten.

This work brings to life how the New York and New England Railroad evolved from humble beginnings to becoming a potent transportation force. Meticulously researched with many period images and a lively text, our journey begins in the 1840s and lasts until the late 1890s. Climb aboard for a special trip into this unique chapter of American railroad history!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662423628

Book preview

Chapter 1

Route of the Air Line

It is somewhat hard to imagine that nearly two hundred years ago—when President James K. Polk was in the White House and America was waging war with Mexico—that a handful of Connecticut investors would band together to build a railroad from New Haven, directly, to Boston. None had any prior railroad experience or knew where the track would be laid or how much such a project would even cost. Yet those were the circumstances under which they launched the New York and Boston Railroad—nicknamed the Air Line.

The phrase Air Line denoted a rail route that took a near-straight path from beginning to end. It was as if a cartographer stretched a string in midair over a map to discover and fix the shortest route possible between the beginning and end terminals. Chartered in Connecticut in 1846, the New York and Boston Railroad was projected on a direct, diagonal path from New Haven to Boston via Middletown, Willimantic, and Northwest Rhode Island.¹

Middletown, headquarters of the new railroad, fronted the Connecticut River. Back then, many citizens felt that its glory days as a port were over when news of the railroad broke. Local manufacturing had come of age, and cries for better and faster transportation could be heard, especially since that majestic waterway froze over for one-third of the year.

Sixteen miles upstream sat Hartford, the onetime head of sloop navigation. Rivalry between the two cities, notes one author, had been rooted since Colonial days and had flowered into a cutthroat competition.² Interestingly, Hartford then shared the honor of being the state capital along with New Haven—a throwback to colonial times. To appease public demand, the state’s General Assembly would alternate its legislative sessions between the two settings.

American railroads surfaced with seriousness in the 1830s and 1840s. Connecticut, land of steady habits, would come to fancy them. The first opened in 1837 from Providence to Stonington, Connecticut, where connecting steamboats plied to New York City via the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. The first line wholly contained in the state was the Hartford and New Haven Railroad, which opened between the two capitals in 1839. Five years later, the line reached further north to Springfield, Massachusetts. Here, connections could be made with the Western Railroad, eastward to Worcester, then the Boston and Worcester Railroad to Boston proper.

Among those wanting a railroad to directly connect New Haven with Boston by way of Middletown was Charles R. Alsop, a Yale graduate, lawyer, pistol manufacturer, and city mayor. But obtaining a charter would prove fractious. The petition for such was laid before the General Assembly in New Haven by Samuel Russell of Middletown, founder of Russell & Company, the largest American trading house in China, from 1842 to its closing in 1891.

Before Russell’s appearance, the Hartford Daily Courant printed the text of the railroad’s charter. However, it purposely deleted the controversial clause that permitted the company to erect a drawbridge across the Connecticut River between Middletown and Portland. The petition was tabled for further discussion.³

Other General Assembly representatives would offer their endorsements for the Air Line on May 12, 1846. Then rose lawyer Thomas C. Perkins, the representative from Hartford, who vehemently protested the building of the bridge. This was the first time the word bridge had been heard in the hallowed hall. The House immediately went into an uproar with representatives of the mill towns [along the proposed route] rising to protest the protest, and those who took their cue from the Hartford representative shouted down the hillbillies. No man waited for the Speaker’s permission to air his views, and the onlookers in the gallery yelled and shrieked from both sides. The clerk was unable to record a vote.⁴

Russell reappeared and presented a separate petition for the bridge, which would be so designed and built as to not impede river navigation. Pandemonium, however, broke out anew. Perkins, now backed by representatives from river towns above Middletown, asked that a vote on the charter be delayed until the next legislative session in Hartford. Supporters of the Air Line shouted no. The Middletown Constitution reported that when the vote came up for a second time, the House of Representatives approved the measure by three votes. In the Senate, before votes were cast, a motion was made to strike the charter’s seventeenth section—the right to bridge the Connecticut River. But the motion failed by one vote, and the legislative act—as written initially—was passed and sent to the governor.⁵

Isaac Toucey became governor of Connecticut in the same year the Air Line was chartered. A native of Newtown, he had practiced law in Hartford and became prosecuting attorney for Hartford County. Toucey’s various ties to Hartford included its powerful maritime faction that consisted of merchants, traders, bankers, commissioned agents, shipping concerns, vessel owners, and seamen. It surprised no one that he vetoed the Air Line bill, after which he returned it to the House of Representatives with an explanation of his action.

Connecticut Governor Isaac Toucey

Toucey himself did not object to the railroad being built; in fact, it had his unqualified approbation. What he deeply opposed was the railroad’s right to erect a drawbridge across the Connecticut River. The question presented, therefore, is whether the Legislature of Connecticut can grant to a corporation the power to interrupt this navigation…between a port of delivery and the sea. If one bridge but partially obstructs the navigation and therefore may be permitted, then a second and a third bridge may be constructed, and by the same process of reasoning, the whole river may be encumbered with bridges, from the port of Hartford to its mouth till free navigation is broken up and rendered impractical.⁶

Toucey’s explanation for the veto was read to the General Assembly on June 16, 1846, while still in session at New Haven. Amid hot verbal crossfire, notes the Middletown Constitution, the bill was repassed over the Governor’s signature by a majority of three votes in the Senate and four in the House of Representatives.⁷ The stage was now set for a titanic battle between the so-called Bridgers (the Air Line and its friends) and the Anti-Bridgers (the city of Hartford, its maritime faction, and other towns or entities that would support the cause).

No fewer than nineteen sections or clauses comprised the charter of the New York and Boston Railroad. The first cited its incorporators. It also specified where the railroad could be built, from some suitable point in the city of New Haven to the city of Middletown, and thence easterly through the town of Windham to the east line of the state, towards the city of Boston, upon such route as shall be deemed most expedient.⁸ The firm was also empowered to make joint stocks and unite with other railroads, as Connecticut could not charter needed lines for the project in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Other charter sections set the capital stock at $2 million (twenty thousand shares at $100 each) with the privilege of increasing such to $3 million. The immediate affairs of the company would be vested in nine directors—the president of the directors being the president of the company. Once stock subscription books closed, the first meeting of the stockholders could be held, provided that $2 million of stock had been subscribed. The all-important right of eminent domain—the power to acquire all land necessary for the rail route—was described in Section 7. No property could be purchased unless the landowner was fairly compensated. If a conflict arose, the dispute would be adjudicated by three disinterested parties appointed by the Superior Court. It was also lawful for the new company to collect tolls from passengers and shippers of freight. Section 15 specified that if the sum of $500,000 was not expended on construction within three years of being chartered or if the company should not complete its railway within six years, then the charter would become void.

But it was Section 17 that proved to be contentious, for it empowered the railroad to erect a bridge across the Connecticut River. Nevertheless, it was to have a good and convenient draw to admit the free and easy passage of such vessels as may have occasion to pass up and down said river.⁹ The drawspan itself was to have a minimum width of eighty-five feet—wider than any vessel likely to pass through. Three disinterested parties, appointed by the Superior Court, would approve the bridge’s actual location and construction plans.

Before and after receiving its charter, friends of the Air Line set about promoting their enterprise. Promoters combed the route from New Haven to the eastern border of the state. Their mission was to explain the advantages of the rail line, locate potential stock purchasers, and to place favorable articles in newspapers—to counter negative ones planted by the road’s enemies. In doing so, the doors of countless homes, farms, and factories were knocked on, handbills and broadsides were distributed, and meetings staged in town halls, church basements, and schools. Stock subscription books opened in September 1846, and within a week, Middletown-area folks subscribed to $268,000 of stock.¹⁰ Most shares were sold on the payment plan—so much down, so much when assessments would be called in.

Two subjects growing in importance was where the track would be located in Connecticut and how much the project would cost. For answers, Alsop and his Central Committee hired a prominent civil engineer. Edwin Ferry Johnson—later chief engineer of the famed Northern Pacific Railway out west—undertook the locating survey and prepared a detailed cost estimate. He presented it to the committee in September 1847.¹¹

Before publicly releasing the document, Alsop’s group appended a preface. It noted that the Air Line had been attacked at two sessions of the General Assembly since being chartered, with a force and energy altogether unusual, but it withstood the assaults and remains intact.¹² Certain parties—politicos, Hartford’s maritime faction, communities above Middletown, and many angry citizens—did not want the drawbridge at Middletown built, nor, as it turns out, even the railroad. In an 1880 memoir about Johnson’s life, the writer noted that his continued advocacy of the Air-Line Road even provoked the narrow-minded spite of the managers of the Hartford and New Haven Railroad. Although there was no possibility that the local business of the Hartford road would be in the slightest degree endangered, or that even the bulk of its through travel would be seriously affected by the construction of a competing road, for years a persistent and unscrupulous war was carried on against the Air Line, both in and out of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut, by that corporation.¹³

Edwin Ferry Johnson, Civil Engineer

Johnson recommended that the Air Line’s route begin in New Haven at the west end of the Railroad bridge over the Mill River, near the eastern limit of the city.¹⁴ From that point to Middletown, he located two possible paths: one passing from the Quinnipiac River to the Farm River Valley and to the valley of the West River to Middletown (by way of North Branford and Durham). The other pursued a more direct course following the valley of Mud Creek through the eastern portion of Wallingford to a depression in a ridge known as Reed’s Gap, after which it would intersect the valley of the West River to reach Middletown.

After reaching Middletown and crossing the Connecticut River with a drawbridge, Johnson and his survey party advanced the rail route through Portland to tap its immense brownstone quarry traffic. It then roughly followed the Colchester Turnpike for about ten miles. The line would then enter the east branch region of the Salmon River in Chatham (East Hampton) and continue to that river’s source near the dividing line between Hebron and Lebanon. From there, the railroad was plotted through the valley of the Ten Mile River, a branch of the Willimantic River, and crossed the latter at Willimantic.

From the busy manufacturing setting of Willimantic, the survey then proceeded through the valley of the Natchaug River for five miles to a ridge depression in Hampton. From there, two lines were run to the Rhode Island border: one passing through Brooklyn and Danielson, the other pursuing a course via Dayville. Both routes would unite before reaching Rhode Island "at a