Which canal was the first venture of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, the Delaware and Hudson Canal or the Delaware and Raritan Canal?
Delaware and Raritan Canal The Delaware and Raritan Canal (D&R Canal) is a canal in central New Jersey, United States, built in the 1830s, that served to connect the Delaware River to the Raritan River. It was intended as an efficient and reliable means of transportation of freight between Philadelphia and New York City, especially coal from the anthracite fields in eastern Pennsylvania. Before the advent of the railroads, the canal allowed shippers to cut many miles off the route from the Pennsylvania coal fields, down the Delaware, around Cape May, and up along the (occasionally treacherous) Atlantic Ocean coast to New York City.
Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad A predecessor to the Class I Delaware and Hudson Railway, the 1820s-built Delaware and Hudson Canal Company Gravity Railroad "('D&H Gravity Railroad')" was a historic gravity railroad incorporated and chartered in 1826 with land grant rights in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania as a humble subsidiary of the Delaware and Hudson Canal and it proved to contain the first trackage of the "later organized Delaware and Hudson Railroad" (so eventually became a first class Class I Railroad). It began as the second long U.S. gravity railroad built initially to haul coal to canal boats, was the second railway chartered in the United States after the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road before even, the Baltimore and Ohio (e. 1827). As a long gravity railway, only the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad (e. 1827) pre-dated its beginning of operations.