Wayne County

Honesdale, PA · est. 1947

Honesdale honors its place in railroad history with a replica of the Stourbridge Lion, the English-built engine that in 1829 became the first locomotive to run on rails in the United States. Displayed beside it is the Eclipse, an original passenger coach from the Delaware & Hudson's gravity railroad. Together they recall the town's role at the very dawn of American railroading.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1947

On August 8, 1829, at Honesdale, the Stourbridge Lion made the first run of a steam locomotive on rails in the United States. English-built for the level stretches of the Delaware & Hudson's gravity railroad, the engine was piloted by Horatio Allen, who took it out despite doubts that the wooden trestlework could bear its weight. The trial proved that steam power could move on iron rails on American soil — a glimpse of the railroad age to come.

Town of Highland, NY

This marker stands beside one of engineering's quiet landmarks: the aqueduct John A. Roebling threw across the Delaware in 1848 to carry the Delaware & Hudson Canal's boats over the river. Roebling suspended the canal's water-filled trough from wire cables of his own design, a technique he would later scale up into the Brooklyn Bridge. For half a century, mule-drawn boats laden with Pennsylvania anthracite floated high above the river current on their way to market. When the canal era ended in 1898, the span was repurposed to carry road traffic, which it still does.

Scranton, PA

In the mid-19th century, northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields ran on ingenious gravity railroads — lines that let loaded coal cars coast downhill by their own weight, with stationary steam engines hauling the empties back up a chain of inclined planes. The Pennsylvania Coal Company's route carried anthracite between the mines around Pittston and the canal at Hawley for more than three decades. This surviving 'Pioneer' car, retired when the gravity line gave way to conventional steam locomotives, was handed over to the City of Scranton in 1909 as a relic of that vanished technology.