voyage, requiring four changes of vessels. . . The route of nearly 800 miles [via Buffalo, Lake Erie, and the Allegheny River] will be very circuitous; and will be impracticable five months every year. . . It does not require the voice of prophecy to predict that the period is not far distant when the New York canal will be superseded by a railway."[1]
Thus was the question of rivalry between the Atlantic ports stated by a railway exponent of 1825; and the statements must be considered extremely prophetic. The railway commission was appointed too far ahead of the times, but it had a forward influence, and by the act of April 11, the canal commissioners were authorized to have all routes across the Alleghenies surveyed, and in June of the year following the Juniata route was announced to be the preferable route in the commission's report to the governor of Pennsylvania; the tunnel, however, was considered impossible for the same reason as with the tunnel between the heads of Savage and Youghiogheny Rivers in western Virginia—the
- ↑ Facts and Arguments, pp. 57–58.
