Camden & Amboy Railroad: Map, History, Photos

Last revised: September 15, 2026

The Camden & Amboy was New Jersey’s first railroad that actually ran, and for a generation it was the state. The legislature chartered the Camden & Amboy Rail Road & Transportation Company on February 4, 1830, the same day it chartered the Delaware & Raritan Canal Company. Robert L. Stevens was president. The object was the two richest cities on the Atlantic seaboard: Philadelphia on the Delaware, New York by way of the Raritan and a steamboat. Horses opened Bordentown to Hightstown on October 1, 1832. South Amboy followed that December. Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, opened in 1834. The English 0-4-0 later called John Bull went into regular service in 1833. In 1871 the Pennsylvania Railroad took a 999-year lease of the United Companies. The corporate name was folded into the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company on May 18, 1872.

It was never a long railroad. The original main line was about 61 miles from South Amboy to Camden. What it owned was a franchise. New Jersey took stock and transit duties in exchange for a monopoly on New York–Philadelphia traffic. Newspapers called the state the Camden & Amboy State, and they were not being kind. The 1820s and 1830s as a founding era are the beginning. The national encyclopedia is railroad history. This page is the Joint Companies: the charter, the T-rail, the Bull, the wreck at Hightstown, and the iron the Pennsylvania later called the Amboy Branch.

John Bull locomotive in 1893, formerly Camden and Amboy number 1

The John Bull, which once operated on the Camden & Amboy, in a photograph dating to 1893.

On this page: At a glance · Twin charters, 1830 · The Joint Companies · Bordentown to South Amboy · T-rail, ties, and the Bull · Camden and steam · Hightstown, November 8, 1833 · Trenton, New Brunswick, and a through route · The 1848 map · Mail, realignments, and challengers · United Companies and the Pennsylvania · What remains

At a glance

Item	Detail
Legal name	Camden & Amboy Rail Road & Transportation Company
Charter	New Jersey, February 4, 1830. Delaware & Raritan Canal Company chartered the same day
First president	Robert L. Stevens. Edwin A. Stevens, treasurer
Operating headquarters	Bordentown, New Jersey
First public trains	Bordentown–Hightstown, October 1, 1832 (horses). Directors’ trip September 19
South Amboy	Through passengers December 17, 1832. Freight January 24, 1833
Camden	Full main line completed December 19, 1834. About 61 miles, South Amboy to Camden
Gauge	4 feet 10 inches as built
Principal lines	South Amboy–Camden; Bordentown–Trenton (1838); Trenton–New Brunswick (January 1, 1839)
Joint Companies	Act of Union February 15, 1831, with the Delaware & Raritan Canal. Protection Act March 2, 1832
United Companies	Joint board with the New Jersey Rail Road, effective 1867. Formal consolidation May 18, 1872
Pennsylvania Railroad	999-year lease approved May 1871; took the United Companies from the start of the 1872 company
Successor	United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company, into the Pennsylvania, Penn Central, Conrail, and today’s Amtrak / NJ Transit / Conrail Shared Assets map

Construction dates follow Coverdale & Colpitts and the United New Jersey corporate history. Monopoly legislation is the New Jersey acts of 1831–32. Information compiled September 15, 2026.

Twin charters, 1830

Colonel John Stevens of Hoboken had already tried. On February 6, 1815 New Jersey gave him a charter for a railroad between Trenton and New Brunswick—the first railroad act in the United States. No rail was laid. The paper company is a date on this page and on the Granite Railway, which was the first road actually built. The idea stayed in the family. Robert L. Stevens, the colonel’s son, was the country’s leading steamboat builder when the 1830 legislature finally chose railroads and canals at once rather than one or the other.

February 4, 1830, produced two charters. The Camden & Amboy would run from the Delaware at Camden (and Bordentown) across the waist of New Jersey to South Amboy on Raritan Bay. The Delaware & Raritan Canal would cut the same isthmus with water. Each charter kept rivals a stated distance from the termini. The railroad owed the state transit duties. Private capital would build both, which suited a legislature that did not want to float a New York–style canal debt. Surveys on the railroad began that spring. Spades went into the ground at Bordentown in December 1830 and headed northeast, away from Philadelphia, toward the bay.

The Joint Companies

A canal next to a railroad was a fight waiting to happen. On February 4, 1831 the railroad gave the state 1,000 shares in return for a nine-year ban on a parallel line. On February 15 the so-called Marriage Act, the Act of Union, pooled the stock and earnings of the two companies under a joint board. They kept separate books. Together they were the Joint Companies. Robert F. Stockton spoke for the canal. The Stevenses spoke for the railroad. On March 2, 1832 the Protection Act locked up New York–Philadelphia traffic across New Jersey. No other railroad was to carry that business, and none was to build within three miles of the Camden & Amboy’s ends, without the Joint Companies’ consent. The monopoly was later extended toward January 1, 1869.

New Jersey took another 1,000 shares. Transit duties and dividends paid a large share of state government. Investors in the Joint Companies drew 6 to 12 percent a year and extra dividends besides, a return almost unheard of in early American railroading. The popular press called the arrangement a monopoly because it was one. For mid-century politics in Trenton, the Joint Companies were the dominant interest. That is the corporate story. The canal as a waterway has its own history along the D&R; this page is the railroad that married it.

Bordentown to South Amboy

Bordentown and South Amboy were the terminals that mattered. Steamboats finished the trip to Philadelphia from the Delaware landing and to New York from the bay. Camden was the winter insurance policy, used when ice stopped the river boats. Grading toward Camden started in the summer of 1831 and was then dropped so every crew could finish the northern 34 miles. Stone blocks and imported iron went down first. The deep cut and the curves at South Amboy gave the engineers trouble. Wooden crossties—still a novelty on an American railroad—were what finally let the last miles close.

Directors and friends rode horses from Bordentown to Hightstown and back on September 19, 1832. Public service on those first 13 or 14 miles opened October 1. Stages still bridged Hightstown to South Amboy. Through passengers used the whole Bordentown–South Amboy line on December 17, 1832, a rainy day, fifty or sixty people, two and a half hours with fresh horses staged along the way. The Delaware froze ten days later, which is why Camden had always been in the charter. Freight started January 24, 1833: three cars, one horse each, goods off the New York boat at South Amboy, wagons from Sand Hills into Philadelphia when the river was ice. In the first full year about 110,000 passengers and 6,000 tons of merchandise moved through South Amboy. A through ticket with the boats ran about $3 and about 9½ hours, an hour or two better than the old combination of stages and water.

T-rail, ties, and the Bull

Robert L. Stevens sailed to England in the fall of 1830 for rails and a locomotive. While he was there he designed a rolled iron rail with a flanged base that could be spiked to a timber without a chair—the American T-rail. British mills already rolled related sections. Stevens had to find a mill that would roll his pattern. The first shipment, 550 bars 18 feet long at 36 pounds to the yard, arrived at Philadelphia on the Charlemagne on May 16, 1831. Later cargoes followed. He also invented the hook-headed spike that held the rail down. Stone blocks were the first American fashion, copied from England. Crossties proved cheaper and faster on a road that had to open before winter. The 1840s as a decade carry T-rail forward as an industry standard; the C&A is where the United States first put Stevens’s section in the ground.

The locomotive was a Stephenson Planet-type 0-4-0, ordered after Stevens watched the original Planet on trial. It was finished in the spring of 1831, shipped from Newcastle, and landed at Philadelphia aboard the Allegheny. A sloop took the crates up to Bordentown in early September. Isaac Dripps, a young steamboat mechanic who had never seen a locomotive and had no drawings, put it together. A whiskey cask on a small flatcar served as tender. He had it under steam by September 15. On November 12, 1831 members of the legislature and Joseph Bonaparte, once King of Spain, rode a short dignitary trip—the first movement by steam on a New Jersey railroad. Then the engine sat. The road was not ready. Crews nicknamed it the old John Bull; the railroad had named it Stevens and numbered it 1.

Dripps stayed as master mechanic for more than twenty years. American track was rough and unfenced. He added a two-wheel leading truck to steer the 0-4-0 around the C&A’s curves, then a pilot to shove animals off the rail. The first pointed-bar version impaled the animal. The plow-shaped cowcatcher that followed is the one that stuck. Cab, headlight, and bell came in time. The C&A bought American copies of the rebuilt Bull. In 1834 the shops turned out a heavy engine called Monster. Those machines are dates on this page. How an English four-coupled engine became an American locomotive is the Bull’s own story.

Camden and steam

Regular steam on the Bordentown–South Amboy passenger run began September 9, 1833. The Bull left Bordentown about 7 a.m. and came back from South Amboy at 4 p.m.—the first steam passenger schedule between the New York and Philadelphia landings. Grading south of Bordentown resumed that spring. Trains were running to Rancocas Creek, about 12 miles, by late fall. Delanco came in the same season. The last spike to Camden went down on December 19, 1834. Passengers for Philadelphia still took a boat at Bordentown or at Camden. There was no Delaware River rail bridge. The C&A began carrying mail in 1834, years before Congress declared the railroads post roads in 1838.

Hightstown, November 8, 1833

Two months after steam took the passenger trains, a southbound from South Amboy suffered a hot box between Hightstown and Spotswood. The crew had already stopped to oil the journals and slowed to about 20 miles an hour. An axle on a coach still failed. The car overturned. Of 24 people in it, two died—John C. Stedman of Raleigh within minutes, another passenger later—and almost everyone else was hurt. It is the earliest recorded American wreck in which passengers on a regular train were killed. Cornelius Vanderbilt broke a leg and took a month to recover. He said he was done with railroads. He was not. Former president John Quincy Adams, riding in another car, was unhurt. His diary called it the most dreadful catastrophe his eyes had ever beheld. The Irish actor Tyrone Power was aboard and wrote the wreck into Impressions of America.

Trenton, New Brunswick, and a through route

The Protection Act did not stop a railroad from Jersey City to New Brunswick. The New Jersey Rail Road & Transportation Company, chartered March 7, 1832, was held to local traffic by statute. It opened Jersey City to Newark on September 15, 1834, reached Elizabeth in 1835, Rahway and the Raritan opposite New Brunswick in 1836, and bridged the river in 1837. It bought turnpikes and a bridge company the way a railroad in that decade acquired a path. It was not the 1815 paper charter. It was a real competitor on the Hudson side of the isthmus.

From Pennsylvania the Philadelphia & Trenton was building toward the same prize. In 1836 it came to terms with the Joint Companies. The C&A tied the map together with a branch Bordentown to Trenton, opened April 1838, and then Trenton to New Brunswick, opened January 1, 1839. That was the first all-rail, boat-to-boat through route between Philadelphia and New York: P&T into Trenton, C&A to New Brunswick, NJRR to the Hudson ferries. Jamesburg to Monmouth Junction added another connection later. The New Brunswick Division as first built hugged the Delaware & Raritan Canal and wound with it. In 1864 a new alignment left that towpath route, tying in at Trenton with the Belvidere Delaware. The Princeton Branch opened the next year so the college town would not go dark. Kingston kept a stub on the old line from 1866. The straightened Trenton–New Brunswick iron is the C&A piece of today’s Northeast Corridor. The original South Amboy–Camden main never was.

The 1848 map

Map of the Camden and Amboy Railroad circa 1848 from Appletons Railroad and Steamboat Companion

A map of the Camden & Amboy Railroad, circa 1848. From Appleton’s Railroad and Steamboat Companion. American-Rails.com collection.

Appleton’s companion atlas caught the company in middle age: the Amboy main, the Delaware landings, the New Brunswick connection, and the canal still drawn as a partner rather than a relic. Other roads were already on the charter books—the Camden & Atlantic toward the shore, the Raritan & Delaware Bay across the southern counties, talk of a National Railway that would break the monopoly. For the rest of its independent life the C&A spent money on connections, ferries, and short pieces that protected the franchise more than they lengthened the milepost.

Mail, realignments, and challengers

By mid-century the Joint Companies owned or held interests in steamboats, ferries, stages, turnpikes, and other railroads as well as the canal. Wheaton Lane, in From Indian Trail to Iron Horse, treated the monopoly as the central fact of New Jersey transportation before the Civil War. A March 16, 1854, statute pushed the exclusive New York–Philadelphia right toward 1869. Southern New Jersey still wanted its own iron. The Raritan & Delaware Bay, later the New Jersey Southern, fought the Joint Companies in the legislature and the courts through the 1850s and 1860s. A state court in 1867 ordered it off a Camden & Atlantic connection. The monopoly did not outlast the Pennsylvania’s lease. Once the PRR was in, the southern road could finally reach Delaware Bay.

A Florence branch opened in 1872, at the edge of the independent company. The shops at Bordentown and the tidewater yard at South Amboy remained the mechanical heart. Gauge stayed 4 feet 10 inches into the Pennsylvania years, a reminder that “standard” was still an argument. The C&A was profitable almost from the first season. In 1833 it took in about $500,000 against $287,000 in expenses. Those numbers explain the dividends, and they explain why Trenton was so slow to let anyone else build.

United Companies and the Pennsylvania

From Appleton’s Railroad and Steamboat Companion of 1848. American-Rails.com collection.

The New Jersey Rail Road had the Hudson waterfront the C&A lacked. The C&A had the legislature. On February 27, 1867, an act allowed the Joint Companies and the NJRR to consolidate interests if two-thirds of each stock list agreed. Articles signed January 28, 1867, created the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Companies, often dated from January 1 or February 1 depending on the lawyer. All three corporations stayed alive. A joint board ran them as the United Companies. Ashbel Welch and J. G. Stevens signed for the canal and the C&A; Hamilton Fish was among the NJRR names.

The Pennsylvania Railroad, building an empire west of Philadelphia, needed a New York entrance that was not a ferry rumor. Its board approved a lease of the United Companies on May 15, 1871; the United Companies approved May 19. The term was 999 years. Formal merger of the C&A, the D&R Canal Company, and the NJRR as the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company followed on May 18, 1872, with the Pennsylvania already in the house. By then the United Companies owned, leased, or controlled more than 450 miles in New Jersey. The old C&A main became the Amboy Branch. The Jersey City–Trenton–Philadelphia line, NJRR and Philadelphia & Trenton with the C&A’s New Brunswick connection, became the Pennsylvania’s New York–Philadelphia main—four tracks in time, the spine Amtrak still calls the Northeast Corridor.

The John Bull had been stored in 1866 after some 35 years. The Pennsylvania understood a relic. It restored the engine for the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia and later for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the year of the photograph at the top of this page. The locomotive is at the Smithsonian. That story is the John Bull.

What remains

The original South Amboy–Camden main is not the four-track Northeast Corridor. NJ Transit’s River Line light rail uses the Camden–Bordentown piece. Conrail Shared Assets Operations and NJ Transit split the rest of the Amboy Branch; freight still works South Amboy and the old towns along the bay. The Trenton–New Brunswick connection, realigned in 1864, is the C&A contribution to Amtrak’s NEC and to NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor Line. The Princeton Branch, opened in 1865 so Princeton would not lose its trains, still leaves the corridor at Princeton Junction. The Delaware & Raritan Canal is a state park. A marker at Bordentown remembers the first steam movement in New Jersey on November 12, 1831.

New Jersey as a state is New Jersey. The Pennsylvania as a company is the Pennsylvania. The founding decade is the 1820s and 1830s. The Camden & Amboy is the 61 miles, the Marriage Act, and a monopoly that paid the bills in Trenton until the Pennsylvania signed a lease for 999 years.

Sources

Churella, Albert J. The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume I: Building an Empire, 1846–1917. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Twin 1830 charters, Joint Companies, Protection Act, P&T settlement, United Companies 1867
Coverdale & Colpitts. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company: The Corporate, Financial and Construction History of Lines Owned, Operated and Controlled to December 31, 1945, vol. 2, Lines East of Pittsburgh. Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott, 1946. Main-line dates, Bordentown Branch, 1864 New Brunswick realignment, 1872 consolidation
Lane, Wheaton J. From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey, 1620–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939
Acts of the New Jersey Legislature: charters of February 4, 1830; stock and parallel-line act of February 4, 1831; Act of Union February 15, 1831; Protection Act March 2, 1832; United Companies enabling act February 27, 1867
“The First American Locomotive.” Scientific American Supplement 32, no. 832 (December 12, 1891). Charlemagne T-rail cargo May 16, 1831; Dripps assembling the Bull; first steam at Bordentown
Smithsonian National Museum of American History: John Bull locomotive; model rolled T-rail, ca. 1831 (Stevens flanged-base section)
John Quincy Adams diary, November 8, 1833 (Hightstown wreck). Tyrone Power, Impressions of America (1836), for a passenger’s account
Freeman, Leslie E., Jr. “The New Jersey Railroad and Transportation Company.” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin 88 (May 1953)
Appleton, D. Appleton & Co. Appleton’s Railway and Steamboat Companion, 1848. Maps reproduced on this page
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Delaware & Raritan Canal history (1831 partnership; 1871 PRR lease of canal and railroad)