Building the Baltimore and Ohio, America’s first railroad, was arduous and dangerous, and many laborers died in the process, including Barney Dougherty, who was killed by a fall from the center of the first arch of the Thomas Viaduct on October 14, 1834. Living in improvised camps near the tracks, laborers worked from sunrise to sunset for a meager $8 to $15 a month in unsanitary conditions. The construction gangs included Irish and German immigrants, free blacks, and native-born Americans, and they sometimes faced corrupt contractors and ethnic rivalries. For the Baltimore and Ohio’s engineers, railroad building was an experiment of trial and error, and differences in terrain led them to alter the existing British design to create a distinctively American railroad. In the late 1820's, laborers laid parallel rows of granite blocks four and one-half feet apart between Relay and Ellicott Mills, with iron strap rail fastened to the blocks. This stone railroad proved too cumbersome and costly to build, and wooden stringers and ties, ancestors of the modern railroad track, ultimately became the preferred track structure. Some granite stringers that remain from the 1800's have been used to build bridges and retaining walls along this trail, and iron rails wore impressions into the rectangular blocks through years of grinding rail traffic.
