First passenger car with Cooper's steam engine

The first ride of a carload of dignitaries behind the Cooper steam engine was on August 28, 1830 from Baltimore to Ellicott mills on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  The open car, fashioned after a canal boat, was a "perfect jam" and whisked along the curves at 15 miles an hour - 18 when full speed!


"The boiler of Mr. Cooper's engine was not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a range in modern mansions. It was of about the same diameter, but not much more than half as high. It stood upright in the car, and was filled above the furnace, which occupied the lower section with vertical tubes. The cylinder was but three and one half inches in diameter, and speed was gotten up by gearing. No natural draught could have been sufficient to keep up steam in so small a boiler; and Mr. Cooper used therefore a blowing apparatus, driven by a drum attached to one of the car wheels, over which passed a chord that in its turn worked a pulley on the shaft of the blower.

"And this was the first locomotive for railroad purposes ever built in America, and this was the first transportation of persons by steam that had ever taken place on this side of the Atlantic.

"Mr. Cooper's success was such as to induce him to try a trip to Ellicott's Mills, and an open car, the first used upon the road already mentioned, having been attached to his engine and filled with the Directors and some friends, the speaker [Latrobe] among the rest, the first journey by steam in America was commenced. 

The trip was most interesting. The curves were passed without difficulty at a speed of fifteen miles an hour; the grades were ascended with comparative ease ; the day was fine, the company in the highest spirits, and some excited gentlemen of the party pulled out memorandum-books, and when at the highest speed, which was eighteen miles an hour, wrote their names and some connected sentences, to prove that even at that great velocity it was possible to do so. The return trip from the Mills, a distance of thirteen miles, was made in fifty-seven minutes. This was in the summer of eighteen hundred and thirty."

From   Latrobe's 1870 letter -
It is generally correct in the look of the Cooper Engine, save that perhaps the boiler is larger than it should be in proportion to the size of Mr. Cooper, the Engineman for the occasion. The fan is shown, that was driven by a cord retained in a groove in a wooden rim attached to the wheel. I think the cylinder was upright and fastened to the boiler, and that the piston rod moved a cross-head, which had connecting rods that either worked cranks or a spur wheel mashing into a pinion on the axle, or was connected with Mr. Cooper's contrivance to dispense with the crank as a means of converting the reciprocating motion of the piston into a rotary motion.

There was a narrow platform outside the wheels and below the axles, which I well recollect, and a railing that one might hold on to, while standing on the platform. I recollect it, for when steam was let into the cylinder for the first time in the car shops at Mount Clare, I remember that several of the Directors and myself stepped upon the platform and steadied ourselves by the rail when the wheels made their first revolution, and the first yard of movement followed. 

The passenger car is about right in the above representation of it. The likeness of the passengers is not flattered; the idea of a perfect jam, however, is sufficiently indicated. These I do not recollect in detail. About the tout ensemble, the general effect, there can be no question...

I have brought to my mind by this sketch, the whole scene of the railroad trip, and am altogether satisfied with my illustration, not as a work of art, of course, but as the idea of that which startled the country people along the line of the Patapsco, who turned out to gaze upon the strange exhibition on the twenty-eighth of August, eighteen hundred and thirty. ...  

Stuart, Charles Beebe.  Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America. NY: 1871

©2017 Patricia Bixler Reber
Forgotten history of Ellicott City & Howard County MD