In 1837, the Louisa Rail-Road Company agreed with suppliers to provide rails, sills, and keys for track construction and to haul the iron, spikes, and plates and lay the wood and ironworks in a substantial, workmanlike manner. The iron strap rails, spikes, and plates likely came from England. The agreement specified heart pine or heart white oak rails in lengths of fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five feet, five inches wide and nine inches deep, made from sound timber free of decay, windshakes, or knots, with a heart surface for the iron to rest on. White oak or post oak sills were also required to be strong, durable, and free of imperfections, measuring seven feet nine inches long and eleven inches in diameter at the small end before hewing, flattened on one side to eight inches wide at the small end and barked. The roadway was to maintain a rail gauge of four feet, eight and one-half inch, a standard gauge used in England and most of the Northeastern United States. The reproduced rail and crosstie section represents about one-thousandth of a mile of railroad and would have cost $2.12, while one mile of track structure cost $4,000.00 including grading, leveling, excavating, and installation, and the purchase and fastening of the strap rails cost an equal amount. The forty-nine-mile road between Taylorsville on the original Louisa Rail Road near modern-day Doswell and Gordonsville cost $408,000, or $8,327 per mile. Because this railroad structure required intensive labor and materials and locomotives became heavier, it was replaced by U-rail and T-rail, and by 1853 nearly all strap rail on the Louisa Rail-Road and its new owner, the Virginia Central Railroad, had been replaced. Some removed rails and iron were later reused in buildings and for other purposes in Louisa County, including at least one home, the Spicer House, and a corncrib on the property of Shelby Millholland. The locomotive Washington, built by the William Norris Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1836, was similar to early locomotives that ran on the Louisa Rail Road.