Talk:Leiper Railroad

Headline text
Just a start... the first railroads were awesome Dlenmn 18:45, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Needs work
Time and again, I come to Wikipedia to answer a single non-trivial question, and the article fails to answer it. I came to this article expressly to learn whether the Leiper Railroad was chartered, and if so the date.

Most of this article is devoted to topics other than that of the article. All kinds of charters for other entities are named. Then it makes a big point of stating, in italics and underlined&mdash;please, nix the underline&mdash;that the Leiper was the first in the country to be chartered. But it then seems to withhold the date of, and the entity that passed, the Leiper charter, rendering the statement about being "first"&mdash;and for that matter being chartered at all&mdash;unsupported, in the one location in Wikipedia where the corroboration is required.

I also suggest moving some, if not most, of the non-Leiper material&mdash;very worthy, to be sure&mdash;to "History of railroads" and/or "History of railroads in Pennsylvania". Create the latter if it doesn't exist.

Still, as the previous commenter says, a good start.

Jimlue (talk) 21:01, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Better treatments written long before
More complete, more succinct accounts of Leiper's railway, unblemished by juvenile italics and underscores, appear in two 19th century histories of the county where the tramway was built:

Smith, George. History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania : From the Discovery of the Territory Included Within Its Limit to the Present Time, with a Notice of the Geology of the County, and Catalogues of Its Minerals, Plants, Quadrupeds, and Birds, Written Under the Direction and Appointment of the Delaware County Institute of Science. Media, PA: Delaware County Institute of Science, 1862, p 389. https://archive.org/details/historyofdelawar01smit/page/n441.

Ashmead, Henry Graham. History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884, p 751. https://archive.org/details/cu31924006215655/page/n1115. The canal that replaced the rail line is discussed at greater length on the following page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.44.70.9 (talk) 23:47, 23 December 2020 (UTC)