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The “John Bull”: The C&A's First Locomotive (1831)

Last revised: September 15, 2026

By: Adam Burns

The John Bull is the English 0-4-0 Robert Stephenson & Company finished in the spring of 1831 for the Camden & Amboy. Robert L. Stevens ordered it after he watched Stephenson’s Planet on trial. Crates came across on the Allegheny, then up the Delaware by sloop to Bordentown. 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, 1831. On November 12 members of the New Jersey legislature and Joseph Bonaparte rode a short trip—the first movement by steam on a New Jersey railroad. Regular C&A service waited until 1833. Crews nicknamed the railroad’s number 1, officially Stevens, the old John Bull. The name stuck.

It is not the first steam locomotive in the United States. That is the English Stourbridge Lion, August 1829, on Delaware & Hudson track. It is not the first American-built engine (Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb, 1830) and not the first in regular American revenue service (Best Friend of Charleston, Christmas Day 1830). It is the Camden & Amboy’s first locomotive, and the first steam on a New Jersey railroad. Dripps later added a two-wheel leading truck, a pilot, a cab, a headlight, and a bell—the kit that turned an English four-coupled engine into the American road locomotive people still picture. The original has been at the Smithsonian since 1884. On September 15, 1981, 150 years to the day after Dripps first raised steam, it ran again on the Georgetown Branch along the C&O Canal. A 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad replica lives at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg.

The original John Bull on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Author’s photo.

On this page: At a glance · What it was—and was not · Stevens, Planet, Newcastle · Bordentown, September 1831 · As built · Dripps rebuilds the English engine · Camden & Amboy service, 1833–1866 · Specifications · Retirement and the Pennsylvania · Smithsonian, 1884 · The 1939 replica · September 15, 1981 · Where to see them

At a glance

Construction and first-steam dates follow John H. White, Jr., and the Smithsonian object record. Company dates are on the Camden & Amboy page. Information compiled September 15, 2026.

What it was—and was not

Steam on rails is an English story first. Richard Trevithick showed a locomotive at Penydarren on February 21, 1804. George and Robert Stephenson’s work, and the 1829 Rainhill Trials that made Rocket famous, are the lineage American promoters were reading when they chartered railroads. The United States imported that idea before it built its own.

Order of the American firsts, scoped tightly:

• 1825–26, Hoboken. Colonel John Stevens—Robert L. Stevens’s father—ran a steam wagon on a circular track on his estate. Demonstration, not a common carrier.
• August 8, 1829, Honesdale. The English Stourbridge Lion was the first steam locomotive to operate in the United States. Too heavy for Delaware & Hudson track; it did not become a regular engine.
• Summer 1830, Baltimore. Cooper’s Tom Thumb was the first American-built steam locomotive to run on a common-carrier railroad. It was a test machine.
• December 25, 1830, Charleston. Best Friend of Charleston was the first American-built locomotive placed in regular passenger service.
• August 9, 1831, Albany. Mohawk & Hudson’s DeWitt Clinton was the first steam locomotive to operate in New York.
• September 15 and November 12, 1831, Bordentown. The John Bull was the first steam locomotive on a New Jersey railroad, and the Camden & Amboy’s first engine. Regular service on that road waited until 1833.

Calling the Bull “the first locomotive in America,” as a 1925 publicity drawing once did, collapses those events into a slogan. The claim that holds is narrower and still large: first steam in New Jersey, first engine on the road that held the New York–Philadelphia franchise, and the machine whose American rebuilds—leading truck, cowcatcher, cab—became ordinary equipment on almost every later American road engine except yard switchers.

Stevens, Planet, Newcastle

The Camden & Amboy Rail Road & Transportation Company was chartered February 4, 1830, the same day as the Delaware & Raritan Canal Company. Robert L. Stevens was president. The object was Philadelphia on the Delaware and New York by way of the Raritan and a steamboat. Horses would open the first miles. Stevens wanted a locomotive as well. He sailed to England in the fall of 1830 for rails and an engine. While he was there he designed the rolled iron T-rail that could be spiked to a timber without a chair—the first American use of that section. The T-rail story and the Joint Companies monopoly sit on the Camden & Amboy page. This page is the engine he bought.

At Newcastle he watched Robert Stephenson & Company’s Planet on trial. Planet itself was a 2-2-0 with inside cylinders, finished in 1830 for the Liverpool & Manchester. Stevens ordered a locomotive from the same shop. What arrived in New Jersey was a four-coupled 0-4-0 in that family: inside cylinders, horizontal boiler, vertical stack, trailing tender. The Smithsonian’s object record calls it a standard 0-4-0 Planet class. John H. White, Jr., writing from the same machine, identified the pattern with Stephenson’s Samson goods engines of 1831, with one difference Stevens specified—a low-dome boiler, related to the Bury type but not as high, and therefore short on steam room. Both readings describe the same four-coupled, inside-cylinder English engine. It was not a 2-2-0 Planet proper. It was not yet the American locomotive with a cowcatcher and a cab that the Smithsonian displays.

The shop finished the work in the spring of 1831. Parts were packed and shipped from Newcastle. The sailing ship Allegheny landed them at Philadelphia. A sloop took the crates up the Delaware to Bordentown in early September. September 4, 1831, is the date usually given for arrival at the C&A’s Delaware landing.

Bordentown, September 1831

Isaac Dripps was a steamboat mechanic. He had never seen a locomotive. Stephenson sent no drawings. The crates held a boiler, a frame, cylinders, wheels, and the rest of an engine that made sense in Newcastle and none at all on a New Jersey riverbank until someone put it together. Dripps used what he knew about boilers. A whiskey cask on a small flatcar held water. Eleven days after he began, the machine was under steam. That was September 15, 1831.

The railroad was not ready. Construction had started at Bordentown in December 1830 and was still working northeast toward Hightstown and the bay. Horses would open Bordentown to Hightstown on October 1, 1832. The engine sat. On November 12, 1831 Stevens staged a short dignitary trip for members of the legislature. Joseph Bonaparte, once King of Spain and then living at Bordentown, rode along. It was the first movement by steam on a New Jersey railroad. Then the 0-4-0 went back into storage. Regular steam waited until the road could use it.

The railroad named the engine Stevens and numbered it 1. Crews, looking at an English machine among American copies that followed, called it the old John Bull—John Bull being the cartoon Englishman the way Uncle Sam is the cartoon American. The nickname became the name. By the time the Pennsylvania inherited the relic, nobody was calling it Stevens.

As built

Forget the Smithsonian engine for a moment. As it left Newcastle, and as Dripps first steamed it, the John Bull was a four-wheeled, four-coupled locomotive with no leading truck, no cowcatcher, and no cab. Pistons drove a crank on the rear axle. Outside coupling rods tied the front axle to the rear, so all four wheels were drivers. Cylinders were inside the frame, 9 inches by 20 inches. Driving wheels were 54 inches (4 feet 6 inches), the usual Planet-era size, with cast-iron hubs, wooden spokes and felloes, and wrought-iron tires. The boiler was a low-dome design Stevens had specified: about 2 feet 6 inches in diameter and 6 feet 9 inches long on the figures White and later compilers used. Fuel was wood. Engine weight was on the order of 10 short tons—about 20,000 pounds. A homemade tender, the whiskey cask on a flat, trailed behind. There was no roof over the footplate.

That is a Stephenson goods engine of 1831, not the American 4-4-0 of 1850. The live memory of the Bull—pointed pilot, leading truck, cab, bell, covered tender—is Dripps’s New Jersey rebuild, not Newcastle’s as-built card. The two forms are the same locomotive. They do not look like the same locomotive.

Dripps rebuilds the English engine

American track in 1833 was cheap, uneven, and unfenced. The rigid 0-4-0 derailed. Dripps added a two-wheel leading truck on a frame out in front of the smokebox—Stevens called the extra pair “guide wheels.” They steered the engine into curves and over low joints. To make room for that frame he took the coupling rods off. Only the rear axle stayed powered. The original front axle, still the same diameter as the drivers, now idled. The usual later label is 4-2-0. White, counting the equal-diameter idle axle as its own pair, wrote 2-2-2-0. Either way the engine was no longer four-coupled. Tractive effort fell. The C&A’s original main was smooth and nearly level, and the rebuilt Bull and its sisters still ran for decades on that reduced adhesion.

Animals and debris were the next problem. Dripps hung a pilot on the new truck. The first pointed-bar version impaled the animal. The plow-shaped cowcatcher that followed, about 1833, is the one that stuck. Charles Babbage had sketched a related idea for the Liverpool & Manchester around 1830. The first widely credited working American pilot is this one. David Stevenson described and illustrated the Dripps arrangement in Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America (1838). The device page is the cowcatcher. The Bull is the engine that wore the first one.

Other American fittings came in time. A makeshift roof, then an enclosed cab on the engine itself. A whale-oil headlight taken off a riverboat. A bell. A whistle. A bonnet stack with spark screens. A proper tender, later an eight-wheel covered one. The steam dome was moved forward, just behind the stack, which changed the silhouette again. By the 1850s the English 0-4-0 had been rebuilt into something a later generation would read as an American locomotive: leading truck, cowcatcher, cab, headlight, bell, wood-burning stack. That kit, not the as-built Planet, is what later 4-4-0s inherited.

The C&A copied the rebuilt engine. Boilers, frames, and wheels for those sisters were made in New Jersey; machined parts still came from Stephenson. In 1834 the Bordentown shops turned out a heavy engine called Monster. Those machines are dates on the company page. How this one English four-coupled engine became an American locomotive is the Bull’s own story.

Camden & Amboy service, 1833–1866

Horses opened Bordentown to Hightstown on October 1, 1832, and through to South Amboy that December. 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. Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, opened in 1834. Ferries finished both ends. The railroad as a franchise, a monopoly, and 61 miles of iron is the Camden & Amboy.

Stevens, in the 1832 report, already claimed the leading-truck arrangement a success: ten cars, a load of stone and iron equal to about 340 passengers, over the steepest grades and around the sharpest curves, with speeds over 30 miles an hour and no binding. The Smithsonian’s later summary put ordinary running in the 25-to-30-mile-an-hour range. That is fast for 1833 iron. It is not a later 4-4-0’s timetable. Wood went into the firebox. A steamboat man’s whiskey cask had already given way to a real tender.

The C&A’s original gauge was 4 feet 10 inches, not the 4 feet 8½ inches British shops treated as ordinary and that later lists print for this engine. Both figures appear in the record. A conversion date for this one locomotive is not a fact this page can invent. Gauge as a railroad fact sits with the company.

By the Civil War the Bull and its 4-2-0 sisters were old power. Newer 4-4-0s took the road trains. The English engine spent its last years in switching and stationary-boiler work. It was stored at Bordentown in 1866, after about 35 years. Somebody at the Camden & Amboy decided not to cut it up. That decision is why there is still an engine to photograph.

Specifications

Put the three machines in one place so the replica and the rebuilt Smithsonian exhibit are not silently substituted for 1831. As-built figures follow White, Locobase 3312, and the commonly reprinted Stephenson dimensions. Later-form dimensions are the Smithsonian object measurements of the engine as preserved (with tender). Replica figures are the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania sheet for the 1939 Juniata copy. Heating-surface totals do not all quote the same number; the table keeps the split. Locobase’s 1,020 lbf starting effort is calculated at 40 psi, not a builder’s card. Skip any replica sheet that lists boiler tubes 13.5 inches in diameter—that is a transcription error, not a measurement.

Retirement and the Pennsylvania

The Camden & Amboy stored the engine in 1866. The Joint Companies and the New Jersey Rail Road became the United Companies in 1867. The Pennsylvania Railroad took a 999-year lease of the United Companies in 1871; formal consolidation as the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company followed on May 18, 1872. The Bull came with the house. It was already a relic. The Pennsylvania understood that.

For the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia the railroad cleaned the engine up and stood it next to new power. Publicity wanted an “old” locomotive. Shop forces at Bordentown back-dated the appearance: cab off, eight-wheel tender cut down to a four-wheel car with a roof overhang, bonnet stack replaced by a serrated straight stack, solid pilot wheels swapped for spoked ones. The machine that went to the fair was the 1831 locomotive wearing a 1876 idea of 1831. That exhibition silhouette is what later restorations, and the 1939 replica, had to argue with.

In 1883 the Pennsylvania showed the engine at the National Railway Appliance Exhibition in Chicago. The railroad was looking for a permanent home for a locomotive it no longer needed on the road, and for a job that would suit J. Elfreth Watkins, a civil engineer who had lost a leg in a New Jersey accident and could not go back to line work. The Smithsonian took both.

Smithsonian, 1884

In 1884 the United States National Museum acquired the John Bull from the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was the Institution’s first large engineering artifact. Watkins became the first curator of engineering. Accession number 15804; catalog TR.180001. The engine stood in the Arts and Industries Building’s East Hall. Some later retellings print 1885; the Smithsonian’s own object and institutional histories date the gift to 1884, the year after Chicago.

The Pennsylvania borrowed it back. In 1893 the Jersey City shops put the locomotive in steam and ran it over the PRR main line to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition, stopping at towns along the way. It spent months at the fair and came home in December. In 1927 it left again for the Baltimore & Ohio’s Fair of the Iron Horse, under steam, with an overhaul at Altoona. The original tender had been dismantled in 1910; a replica tender was built for that generation of shows. The Pennsylvania borrowed the engine once more for Chicago’s Century of Progress, 1933–34. Then the museum began to say no.

By 1939 the Smithsonian would not steam the original at the New York World’s Fair. The locomotive was too old and too valuable. It went to Flushing anyway because the replica was not ready, and it was displayed statically—pulled across the stage by a cable, not under fire. After the 1939 season it returned to Washington. In 1964 it moved into the new National Museum of History and Technology, now the National Museum of American History, where it still identifies the transportation wing.

The 1939 replica

The Pennsylvania wanted a working John Bull for the 1940 season of the New York fair. Orders went to Altoona to measure the original and copy it. Workmen at the Juniata Shops began that fall. They substituted a modern welded steel boiler shell and a stamped steel firebox, added a small injector so the engine could take water while standing (the original’s crosshead pumps worked only when moving), and otherwise duplicated iron, brass, and wood. The replica rolled out in late November or early December 1939. It replaced the original at the fair in 1940.

After the fair it was stored, used in the Pennsylvania’s film Clear Tracks Ahead, shown at the 1948 Chicago fair, and then parked at Northumberland with the rest of the PRR Historical Collection. Penn Central’s collapse put that collection on the surplus list. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bought it. The replica entered the new Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania at Strasburg when the building opened in 1976. Its own return to steam came in 1983, after the original’s anniversary run.

September 15, 1981

In the late 1970s John H. White, Jr., curator of transportation at the National Museum of American History, asked whether the original could run once more on the 150th anniversary of Dripps’s first steaming. A boiler-inspection firm looked at the vessel. Compressed-air tests came first. In October 1980 the locomotive made a trial under steam on the lightly used Warrenton Branch in Virginia. Contemporary safety valves and gauges went on for the public run; they came off afterward so the exhibit could go back on the floor as it had been.

On September 15, 1981, White, museum specialist John Stine, mechanic Larry Jones, and William H. Withuhn steamed the John Bull on the Chessie System’s Georgetown Branch along the C&O Canal in Washington. It pulled an 1836 railway car a few miles. The Smithsonian still describes the engine as the oldest locomotive capable of operation, as demonstrated that day, and as thought to be the oldest operable self-propelled vehicle in the world at that date. It has not been under steam since. The original is a static exhibit. The 1981 run is the last chapter of its working life, 150 years after Bordentown.

Where to see them

The original stands in the east-end first-floor lobby of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with a section of early iron railroad bridge. Object TR.180001. The photograph at the top of this page is that engine. Confirm hours on the museum’s site. American-Rails.com does not operate the exhibit.

The 1939 replica is at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, often displayed with Camden & Amboy coach No. 3 of 1836, on long-term loan from the Smithsonian and among the oldest passenger cars in the country. Withuhn came to Strasburg as acting director in 1982 and put the replica back in order. Hartford hydro-tested the boiler to 120 psi and authorized 60. Paint-chip work recovered the color of the wooden lagging. Linn Moedinger of the Strasburg Rail Road made modern safety valves. A water glass and a second injector went on. Withuhn found Isaac Dripps’s drawings of the bonnet stack; the serrated 1876 exhibition stack became the base for a proper bonnet, installed the night before the May 1983 steam-up. The replica later ran at Expo 86 in Vancouver and toured in 1999. By 2008 the museum had taken it off the certified list. It is not a daily road engine. Confirm current status with the museum before you plan a visit around steam.

New Jersey as a state is New Jersey. The Camden & Amboy as a company is the Camden & Amboy. The founding decade is the 1820s and 1830s. The John Bull is the English 0-4-0 that Dripps put together without drawings, the engine that learned to be American, and the oldest steam locomotive that has still, within living memory, moved under its own fire.

Related reading on American-Rails.com

• Camden & Amboy Railroad · Pilot / cowcatcher · Pennsylvania Railroad
• Stourbridge Lion · Tom Thumb · Best Friend of Charleston
• Stephenson’s Rocket · Stephenson’s Planet · DeWitt Clinton
• Steam locomotives · Railroads in the 1820s/1830s · Railroad history
• New Jersey · Railroad museums · Norris Locomotive Works

Sources

• White, John H., Jr. The John Bull: 150 Years a Locomotive. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. Construction, C&A career, Smithsonian years, 1981 steaming
• White, John H., Jr. A History of the American Locomotive: Its Development, 1830–1880. New York: Dover, 1979 (orig. 1968). Samson/Planet-family pattern; Stevens’s low-dome boiler; leading-truck rebuild
• White, John H., Jr. “Resurrection.” American Heritage 32, no. 5 (August/September 1981). 1980 Virginia trial; September 15, 1981, Georgetown Branch run
• Smithsonian National Museum of American History, object TR.180001 / accession 15804: Planet-class 0-4-0 as built; Dripps assembly; 25–30 mph; overall about 36¼ × 7½ × 11½ ft; 1884 gift of the Pennsylvania Railroad
• Smithsonian Institution Archives: “John Bull on Its Anniversary Run, 1981” (SIRIS); “John Bull Locomotive Given Test Run,” September 15, 1981. White, Stine, Jones, Withuhn; modern valves removed after the trip
• Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania (Ronald T. Bailey), John Bull replica roster notes: Juniata 1939; 54-inch drivers; 44,000 lb with tender; 36 ft 3½ in; 7 ft 8 in; 11 ft 4 in to stack; 60 psi; 1876 back-dating; 1893 Jersey City–Chicago steam; 1983 Strasburg restoration
• “The First American Locomotive.” Scientific American Supplement 32, no. 832 (December 12, 1891). Dripps assembling the engine; early Bordentown steam
• Steve Llanso, Locobase 3312 (Camden & Amboy John Bull): 9 × 20 cylinders, 54-inch drivers, 20,000 lb, grate 10.07 sq ft, evaporative heating ~297 sq ft, 1,020 lbf at 40 psi
• David Stevenson, Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America (1838). Dripps-type pilot
• Churella, Albert J. The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume I: Building an Empire, 1846–1917. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. United Companies; 1871 lease
• Coverdale & Colpitts. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company … to December 31, 1945, vol. 2. 1871–72 corporate succession
• American-Rails.com: Camden & Amboy company encyclopedia; cowcatcher / pilot; 1820s/1830s decade

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    Nov 06, 26 08:47 AM

    
    Union Pacific said on November 5, 2026, that passenger obligations would remain if it combines with Norfolk Southern. The capacity claim is a Union Pacific analysis, not a Surface Transportation Board…

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36. FM "C-Liner" Locomotives: Specs, Roster, Photos

    Nov 05, 26 11:19 PM

    
    Fairbanks-Morse Consolidation Line cab units, the C-Liners. 165 locomotives, Beloit and Kingston, March 1950 through February 1955. Models, specs, and production rosters.

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37. Atlanta, Birmingham & Coast Railroad: Map, History, Roster

    Nov 05, 26 12:03 PM

    
    Atlanta, Birmingham & Coast, from Brunswick and Waycross to Atlanta and Birmingham. Atlantic Coast Line control at the close of 1926. Merged in January 1946 as the Western Division. Steam roster of th…

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38. El Paso & Southwestern Railroad: Map, History, Logo

    Nov 05, 26 12:00 PM

    
    The El Paso & Southwestern, the Phelps Dodge copper railroad from Tucson to the Rock Island at Tucumcari. Southern Pacific control on October 31, 1924.

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39. Brightline Says Orlando Service Has Resumed

    Nov 05, 26 11:55 AM

    
    Brightline said on November 5, 2026, that trains to and from Orlando have resumed after weather suspensions in Brevard County. Later that morning the departures page still showed the Orlando segment s…

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40. Metra Customers Must Sign Up Again

    Nov 05, 26 11:43 AM

    
    Metra says customers who want service alerts must sign up again at metratracker.com. The November 2 story says the new system has launched and the old email list is shut down. A notice on the same pag…

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41. Norfolk Southern Packs Six Projects Into One Window

    Nov 05, 26 11:38 AM

    
    Norfolk Southern used one 26-hour window on the W Line for six projects in Indiana and Kentucky, including three bridge replacements. The October 27 account does not give the calendar day of the work.

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42. CSX: More Time to Comment on an Inspection Waiver

    Nov 05, 26 11:29 AM

    
    The Federal Railroad Administration extended comments on a CSX petition for relief from some qualified mechanical inspector rules until December 2, 2026. The November 2 notice does not grant the waive…

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43. Brightline Expects Orlando Service on Thursday

    Nov 05, 26 09:21 AM

    
    Brightline said on November 4, 2026, that it expects trains to and from Orlando to resume on Thursday, November 5. South Florida stations kept running. The departures page still showed the Orlando seg…

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44. Union Pacific: More Time to Comment on an Inspection Waiver

    Nov 05, 26 09:15 AM

    
    The Federal Railroad Administration extended comments on a Union Pacific petition for relief from some qualified mechanical inspector rules until December 2, 2026. The November 2 notice does not grant…

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45. Wisconsin Opens Comments on the 2027 Freight Plan

    Nov 05, 26 09:03 AM

    
    WisDOT opened the draft 2027 State Freight Plan for comment through December 1, 2026. The plan covers freight rail with highways, harbors, aviation, and intermodal links. Completion is expected in sum…

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46. U.S. Rail Traffic Rose 3.5 Percent in the Week Ending October 31

    Nov 05, 26 08:52 AM

    
    U.S. railroads moved 514,080 carloads and intermodal units in the week ending October 31, 2026, up 3.5 percent from a year earlier, the Association of American Railroads said on November 4.

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47. Muni and Bay Area Transit Measures Pass

    Nov 05, 26 08:49 AM

    
    San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said on November 4, 2026 that Proposition H and a regional transit measure passed. Proposition H is about 160 million dollars a year for Muni. The regiona…

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48. Ground Rules Set for Responsive Applications

    Nov 05, 26 08:47 AM

    
    Decision No. 46, served November 4, 2026, denies a request to add Walsenburg to the Union Pacific interchange list and sets what CPKC and CN must include in responsive applications. Four CPKC proposal…

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49. Video of the Vena Address Must Be Released

    Nov 05, 26 08:42 AM

    
    The Surface Transportation Board on November 4, 2026 denied the Union Pacific appeal and ordered the March 17 shipper-conference recording released to the parties by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on November 5. C…

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50. Chicago & North Western Iron Ore C628s

    Nov 04, 26 11:47 PM

    
    Chicago and North Western C628s 6701-6730, the ex-Norfolk and Western high-hoods, in Upper Peninsula iron-ore service from the mid-1970s until December 21, 1986, and what happened to each unit.

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