No nation ever expanded as rapidly as the United States, or as vastly. How did it hold together? A network of roads, rivers, and canals, however elaborate, was wholly inadequate. The railroad - invented almost simultaneously in England and America - was the answer. George Stephenson was the steam-operated-locomotive pioneer in Britain, and his Rocket made a first run in 1825; John Stevens, an American, had anticipated the feat by a few months, but only by a trial run on his own estate. By the end of the 1820’s a dozen projects were under way - the Baltimore and Ohio, the Charleston and Hamburg, the Mohawk and Hudson, the Boston and Lowell among them. The first to achieve success was that built by a group of South Carolina industrialists who formed a company to build tracks connecting Charleston with the Savannah River town of Hamburg. They laid down no less than 136 miles of track - the longest railroad in the world at that time. In December 1830, The Best Friend of Charleston made its trial run on the newly built tracks; a few months later, a new and more powerful locomotive, the West Point, also pictured here, pulled out on a trial of speed, with barrier car and four cars for the 117 passengers - 50 of whom were women.