Pioneer Past

Putting the locomotive aside for a moment, one has to stop and put ourselves back at a time when life was very different from today. The State had only been declared for just over fifty years. Few facilities, tools and people were available to make anything happen. Everything was basic. If it wasn’t brought in by ship from England, it had to be manufactured, mined or created in some form to provide the services so people could live and businesses to develop. The concept of purchasing locomotives from America was a leap of faith, based solely on recommendations from the Eastern States as to their ability to do the task. A courageous move one that almost did not work. The pioneers were tenacious people, determined to make good of a problematic situation. The locomotive is nothing without the people associated with it. The stories of how these people felt when seeing these engines for the first time, the way it affected their lives, has unfortunately been lost to time.