Erastus Corning and the Railroad He Built from Ten Companies

In eighteen fifty-three, a man named Erastus Corning, the first Erastus Corning, not the mayor, but his ancestor, consolidated ten separate railroad lines stretching from Albany to Buffalo into a single company. He called it the New York Central Railroad, and he ran it from Albany. It was one of the largest railroad consolidations of its day.

Corning was an industrialist who had come to Albany from Connecticut as a young man, made a fortune in ironware and nails, and turned his attention to the railroads when it became clear they were going to reshape the continent. The Albany-to-Schenectady line that became part of his consolidation was already notable: the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, opened in eighteen thirty-one, was the first steam railroad in New York State and one of the first anywhere in the country to run on a regular schedule. After Corning unified the lines in eighteen fifty-three, Albany served as the railroad's headquarters for fourteen years.

Cornelius Vanderbilt bought control in eighteen sixty-seven and moved headquarters to New York City, which is where the story of the New York Central mostly gets told. Albany gets the footnote. But the trace of that moment is still visible in the geography of the city, the rail corridor running along the river, the old station sites, the neighborhoods that grew up to feed and house the people who made the trains run.

Albany was the hinge, the place where lake and river trade crossed over into rail, and held the continent's commerce together for one decisive decade.