Mohawk and Hudson Railroad: Map, Pictures, Locomotives

Last revised: September 15, 2026

The Mohawk & Hudson was New York’s first railroad that actually ran. The legislature chartered the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company on April 17, 1826—the second railroad corporation in the United States after the Granite Railway of Massachusetts, six weeks earlier. George William Featherstonhaugh of Duanesburg had put a notice in the Schenectady Cabinet on December 28, 1825. Stephen Van Rensselaer, the old patroon, was named president. The object was about sixteen miles of iron across the Pine Bush, a shortcut around the Erie Canal’s Cohoes lock flight between the Hudson at Albany and the Mohawk at Schenectady. Money was slow. John B. Jervis took the engineering after Peter Fleming. Van Rensselaer broke ground near Schenectady with a silver spade in late July 1830. The first steam passenger train ran August 9, 1831, behind the American-built 0-4-0 DeWitt Clinton. The company took the name Albany & Schenectady on April 19, 1847. On May 17, 1853 it was one of ten roads that became the first New York Central.

It was never a long railroad. About 16 miles, inclined planes at both ends until the 1840s, strap rail on stone blocks, and a legislature that had just finished the Erie Canal and did not want the water robbed of freight. Passengers were the business. The 1820s and 1830s as a founding era are the beginning. The national encyclopedia is railroad history. This page is the Mohawk & Hudson: the charter, the planes, the Clinton as equipment, the 1847 rename, and the iron CSX still runs between Albany and Schenectady.

1909 Geo E Matthews lithograph of the DeWitt Clinton and Mohawk and Hudson stagecoach-body cars

A 1909 lithograph by Geo. E. Matthews of Buffalo, showing the DeWitt Clinton and the Mohawk & Hudson’s stagecoach-body cars.

On this page: At a glance · Featherstonhaugh and the 1826 charter · Money, Fleming, and Jervis · Pine Bush and the planes · August 9, 1831 · September 24 and the Fulton · Freight, the canal, and Experiment · The planes come off · Albany & Schenectady, 1847 · The first New York Central · What remains

At a glance

Item	Detail
Legal name	Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company. Named Albany & Schenectady Rail Road Company April 19, 1847
Charter	New York, April 17, 1826. First railroad in the state; second U.S. railroad corporation after the Granite Railway (March 4, 1826)
First president	Stephen Van Rensselaer. George William Featherstonhaugh, the other director named in the charter
Headquarters	Albany, New York
First public steam	Albany–Schenectady, August 9, 1831, behind the DeWitt Clinton. Directors’ grand opening September 24
Gauge	4 feet 9 inches as built; later 4 feet 8½ inches
Route miles	About 16 (Appleton’s 16.92 in 1847; ICC 16.89 at the 1853 consolidation)
Principal line	Albany–Schenectady, across the Pine Bush. Inclined planes at both ends until the 1840s
Cost of construction	$1,473,253 (August 1830–January 1, 1848)
Passengers hauled (1847)	229,401
Interchange at Schenectady	Troy & Schenectady; Saratoga Railroad; Utica & Schenectady
New York Central	Articles of consolidation May 17, 1853, with nine other Albany–Buffalo roads
Successor	Albany & Schenectady Railroad, into the first New York Central, Penn Central, Conrail, and today’s CSX Hudson Subdivision / Amtrak Empire Corridor

Construction and traffic figures follow Appleton’s Railroad and Steamboat Companion (1847). Corporate succession is the ICC valuation of the New York Central. Information compiled September 15, 2026.

Featherstonhaugh and the 1826 charter

George William Featherstonhaugh (the family said it fen-shaw) was a Duanesburg gentleman with a scientific streak and a low opinion of the Erie Canal’s eastern lock flight. Between Albany and Schenectady the canal wound some 30 miles around Cohoes Falls. The straight line across the Pine Bush was about 16. A railroad would cut hours to under an hour. On December 28, 1825 he ran a notice in the Schenectady Cabinet that he would ask the next legislature for a company to build it, capital $300,000, exclusive grant, tolls as the legislature saw fit.

Stephen Van Rensselaer of Albany, the old patroon, signed on. The Assembly passed the bill in late March 1826. The Senate was harder. The act became law on April 17, 1826: fifty years, six years to build, capital $300,000 with leave to go to $500,000. Van Rensselaer and Featherstonhaugh were the only directors named in the charter. Van Rensselaer was elected president, a post he held until 1832. He attended few meetings. Featherstonhaugh sailed for Europe that year in the company’s interest. His wife died in 1828; his Mohawk Valley house burned; he drifted. In 1833 he became the first United States geologist. Others finished the railroad he had put on the books.

It was New York’s first railroad charter. It was not the first railroad charter in the United States. The Granite Railway had been incorporated March 4, 1826, and that road was already hauling stone before the Mohawk & Hudson turned a spade. The Baltimore & Ohio, the first American common carrier, was still a year away. What the 1826 act gave Albany and Schenectady was a paper company and a six-year clock.

Money, Fleming, and Jervis

The clock nearly ran out. Stock was slow. Canal men did not want a railroad stealing the water’s traffic, and the charter was written so that railroad rates could not undercut the canal. Peter Fleming surveyed a line and put a cost on it. He resigned in 1830. The directors hired John B. Jervis at $2,000 a year for half his time. Jervis had come up as an axeman on the Erie Canal, then as chief engineer of the Delaware & Hudson, where he laid out the gravity railroad and specified the English engines that included the Stourbridge Lion. He did not like Fleming’s survey. He ran another line farther north.

Ground was broken near Schenectady in late July 1830. Van Rensselaer used a silver spade. Newspapers put the ceremony on the 20th, the 27th, or the 29th. Building began in August 1830. Stock jumped ten percent. The Albany papers promised Schenectady in a quarter of an hour. The road that opened a year later was slower than that, and better than the canal.

Pine Bush and the planes

Albany sits on a shelf. The Hudson waterfront is a few feet above tide; the western edge of town is more than 200 feet up. Between the two cities the Pine Bush plateau rises toward 300. Locomotives and horses could handle the plateau. They could not climb the steeps at either end. Jervis did what he had done on the D&H: inclined planes, stationary steam engines, and ropes.

The first iron did not reach the rivers. At Albany the line ended near the junction of the Western Turnpike and Lydius Street—today Madison and Western Avenues—and stages finished the trip downtown. At Schenectady it stopped on the brow of Prospect Hill, about a mile from the Mohawk. Strap rail on stone blocks, the English fashion, made the plateau. Wooden crossties were still a novelty on an American railroad. The planes, with engines at the heads and cars balanced against stone-loaded counterweights, were finished in 1832. A grand through-to-the-water excursion ran May 14, 1832. From the foot of the Schenectady plane, horses still drew the cars into town.

The Albany plane later sat at Gansevoort Street: horses down Broadway to the foot of what became Third Avenue, then a cable up the grade, the locomotive coupled at the top, and the train across Delaware Avenue onto the Pine Bush. A long fill and culvert on the west side of Delaware Avenue at Morton Street is still a piece of that original roadbed. Strap iron and stone sleepers are a date on infrastructure. The planes themselves were a D&H idea in miniature, and they were a nuisance from the day they opened.

August 9, 1831

Jervis ordered an American locomotive from the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring. David Matthew fitted it up and brought it to Albany. The railroad named it for DeWitt Clinton, the governor who had built the Erie Canal and had died in 1828. Tests in late July 1831 burned Lackawanna coal, then coke, then wood. Speed on coal was about seven miles an hour. Wood worked.

DeWitt Clinton replica posed as the original small 0-4-0 would have appeared

The DeWitt Clinton replica posed as the original 0-4-0 would have appeared, without the later tender and cars. Date unknown.

On Monday, August 9, 1831, the Clinton took a train of cars from plane to plane. The Albany Argus said the engine covered the route in less than an hour, including stops, and on part of the road ran at 30 miles an hour. John T. Clark rode as conductor. James Goold of Albany had built the cars on stagecoach bodies, seats inside and rumble seats on the roof. The resident engineer collected the first fifty cents of established passenger fare. It was the first steam passenger train in New York, and the first paying steam on the Mohawk & Hudson. The canal between the same two cities still took hours and more than a dozen locks.

Horses still worked the road. Steam was new, the planes were not finished, and the foundry engine was a light 0-4-0 on strap rail. Travelers who could pay rode it anyway. The plateau trip was about 40 minutes. That was the whole point of the charter.

September 24 and the Fulton

An English Stephenson engine arrived about the end of August on the Mary Howland. The company named it Robert Fulton. It was roughly twice the Clinton’s weight. Crews later called it John Bull. It is not the Camden & Amboy locomotive of that name; that story is the John Bull. Matthew put the English engine on the road in mid-September. For the directors’ grand opening on September 24, 1831 the Fulton was supposed to haul the official train. A feed-pipe failure put it back in the shed. The Clinton took three cars instead, about 47 minutes plane to plane, with the rest of the consist behind horses. Governor, judges, and legislators rode. The crowd got its celebration. Steam had already been in public service for six weeks.

The original Clinton did not last. The railroad scrapped it in 1833. A driving wheel turned up years later at West Albany. The New York Central built an operating replica, cars and all, for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Henry Ford took that train in 1934. It is at The Henry Ford in Dearborn.

Freight, the canal, and Experiment

The Mohawk & Hudson was a passenger road with a canal looking over its shoulder. It hauled no freight in 1831 and had no cars for it. Demand showed up in 1832. In 1833 a directors’ committee grew lyrical about merchandise, Erastus Corning came on the board as vice-president, and the company ordered two new locomotives named Mohawk and Hudson, thirty freight wagons, and ten mixed cars. That same year it is credited with an early covered freight car—a covered gondola, ancestor of the boxcar. Car types can be found at freight cars.

Freight never paid the way the committee hoped. The road lost a little on it in 1834, made a little in 1835 and 1836, and dropped more than $5,000 in the panic year 1837. The Utica & Schenectady, chartered April 29, 1833, and opened in 1836, was forbidden by the state to carry freight at all, so it fed the Mohawk & Hudson no merchandise. In 1840 the directors voted to stop fighting the canal and to handle only local freight at rates that paid. Canal-style tolls on the Albany–Buffalo railroads came off in December 1851. That is a New York Central date. This company had already changed its name.

Jervis was not done with locomotives. In 1832 the West Point Foundry turned out his Experiment for the Mohawk & Hudson, a 4-2-0 with a swiveling four-wheel leading truck—the first of that American idea, built so the engine could take the road’s curves at speed. Matthew later wrote that he took it plane to plane, fourteen miles, in thirteen minutes with one water stop. The 4-2-0 type is sometimes called the Jervis.

The planes come off

The planes were slow, expensive, and in the way. Talk of removing them started in 1838. Schenectady relocated off Prospect Hill about 1841 so locomotives could run into town. Albany was harder. The company offered the city its State Street property and $150,000 in bonds if Albany would pay to kill both planes and bring the eastern terminus nearer the center. Troy was about to open its own railroad to Schenectady. That concentrated minds in Albany. The city guaranteed bonds. In September 1844 the Albany plane came out. New track climbed the glen of Patroon’s Creek—Tivoli Hollow—and terminated on Montgomery Street near Maiden Lane. The Broadway–Gansevoort–Third Avenue plane route was abandoned. The grade westward out of Albany is still the one the New York Central, Conrail, and CSX have been climbing ever since. In steam and early diesel years it was helper territory.

By 1833 the company already had about 15¾ miles of double track. The charter capital had long since been spent twice over. Appleton’s, adding construction from August 1830 through January 1, 1848, put the bill at $1,473,253. In 1847 the road carried 229,401 passengers. That is what a 16-mile shortcut around Cohoes was worth, even with the canal still full of boats.

Albany & Schenectady, 1847

Albany and Schenectady Railroad system map circa 1847 from W Williams

Albany & Schenectady Railroad system map, circa 1847, from W. Williams—the Albany–Schenectady line as a piece of the Albany & Buffalo routes. American-Rails.com collection.

On April 19, 1847 the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company took the name Albany & Schenectady Rail Road Company. The rivers in the old title had been a promoter’s poetry. The cities were what the tickets said. Williams’s 1847 plates already draw the 16 miles as the eastern stub of an Albany–Buffalo chain, with the Saratoga road and the Utica & Schenectady heading west and north from the same Schenectady platform. The interchange Appleton’s listed that year was the Troy & Schenectady, the Saratoga Railroad, and the Utica & Schenectady. Those companies have their dates on the New York Central page. This page is the 16 miles that made Schenectady a junction.

Sherman and Smith circa 1850 map excerpt with Albany and Schenectady Railroad highlighted in blue

The Albany & Schenectady, highlighted in blue, circa 1850. Excerpt from Sherman & Smith’s Railroad, Steamboat & Stage Route Map of New England, New York, and Canada.

The first New York Central

By 1853 the plateau road was one short company in a line of short companies between the Hudson and Lake Erie. The Utica & Schenectady had opened in 1836. Syracuse, Auburn, Rochester, and Buffalo followed in pieces. Merger talk among the Albany–Buffalo roads hardened once the state dropped canal tolls on them in December 1851. On May 17, 1853 articles of consolidation joined ten companies as the original New York Central Railroad: the Albany & Schenectady; Utica & Schenectady; Syracuse & Utica; Rochester & Syracuse; Buffalo & Rochester; Rochester, Lockport & Niagara Falls; Buffalo & Lockport; Schenectady & Troy; Mohawk Valley; and Syracuse & Utica Direct.

Erastus Corning, who had sat on the Mohawk & Hudson board since 1833, became the first president of the consolidated company. For about a decade the first New York Central was an Albany–Buffalo railroad. Vanderbilt, the Hudson River entrance, and the Water Level Route as a New York–Chicago idea are later, and they are the Central’s story. The Mohawk & Hudson’s story ends when the Albany & Schenectady name is folded into that 1853 company.

What remains

New York Central DeWitt Clinton replica with stagecoach-body cars later at The Henry Ford

The New York Central replica of the DeWitt Clinton and its three stagecoach-body cars, later in the collection of The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan.

The original Pine Bush alignment did not survive intact in the cities. Schenectady left Prospect Hill in the early 1840s. Albany left the Gansevoort plane in 1844 for Tivoli Hollow. Cuts and fills of the 1830s grade can still be read in Albany west of Delaware Avenue, and the 1844 creek-glen climb is the one heavy trains still use. Conrail, taking the bankrupt Penn Central on April 1, 1976, abandoned thousands of miles and kept this one. In the 1999 split it went to CSX as part of the Hudson Subdivision. Amtrak’s Empire Corridor—Empire Service, the Maple Leaf, the Lake Shore Limited—uses the same Albany–Schenectady miles. It is the oldest New York Central–heritage piece on that CSX subdivision. It is not the oldest iron on CSX. The Baltimore & Ohio, which CSX still runs, is older.

New York as a state is New York. The New York Central as a company is the New York Central. The founding decade is the 1820s and 1830s. The Mohawk & Hudson is the 16 miles, the planes, and a charter that beat every other railroad in the state onto the books—then waited five years for the money to catch up.

Sources

Interstate Commerce Commission, Valuation Docket, New York Central Railroad. Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company, special act of New York April 17, 1826; name changed to Albany and Schenectady Rail Road Company April 19, 1847; operated August 9, 1831, to consolidation; 16.89 miles; articles of consolidation dated May 17, 1853
Harlow, Alvin F. The Road of the Century: The Story of the New York Central. New York: Creative Age Press, 1947. Chapter 1, the Mohawk & Hudson
Brown, William H. The History of the First Locomotives in America. New York: D. Appleton, 1871. Chapter 37, letters of David Matthew and John T. Clark on the DeWitt Clinton and August 9, 1831
Albany Argus, August 1831, first public steam trip plane to plane
Schenectady Cabinet, December 28, 1825, Featherstonhaugh notice. Act of April 17, 1826, incorporating the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company
Williams, W. Appleton’s Railroad and Steamboat Companion. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1847. Pages 190–192 (mileage, cost, passengers, interchange); 1847 route plates reproduced on this page
Puffert, Douglas J. Tracks Across Continents, Paths Through History: The Economic Dynamics of Standardization in Railway Gauge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Original 4-foot-9-inch gauge
Starr, Timothy. Early Railroads of New York’s Capital District. 2011
Munsell, Joel. Annals of Albany. Groundbreaking and early operation
The Henry Ford, Dearborn: DeWitt Clinton replica (New York Central, 1893 Columbian Exposition; acquired 1934–35)

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