James Gray Bethune established a steamer running across the lake and up the Otonabee which was navigable through to Peterborough. This meant goods and passengers could be brought at least to the south shore of Rice Lake. The remaining 8 miles of rough tracks was viable for passengers and light goods, but no use for the valuable timber and mine products. By 1835, only 10 years after the first steam railway in the world, there was active discussion about building a railway up to what later became Harwood. However, the townspeople invested instead in a plank road, using 300,000 feet of 3-inch wooden planks, allowing horse-drawn vehicles to haul heavy goods. By 1850 the plank road was breaking up, and was impassible in wet conditions, so the railway scheme was revived. By 1852 there was considerable enthusiasm for the railway project within the town. Unfortunately river traffic had become seen as yesterday's solution by this time, so the plans were expanded to include a long bridge across Rice Lake, to take the railway right up to Peterborough. By 1854 the rails reached the shore of the lake, and it found good work transporting passengers and nearly 2 million feet of lumber from the Rice Lake down to Cobourg that summer. However, all the revenue had to ploughed into building an ill-fated bridge, using hundreds of wooden trestles, 31 Burr Truss spans, and a centre-pivot swing bridge to allow boats to pass. The prime mover locally for getting the Railway company off the ground was D'Arcy E. Boulton, a lawyer based in Cobourg, who enthused the town with the plan. They agreed to begin funding the scheme that was initially expected to cost £150,000, but ended leaving many people with worthless railway bonds and the town council with a debt that was only finally repaid in the 1930s. The man appointed to manage the project was Samuel Zimmerman, who had previously been instrumental in building the Great Western Railway (Ontario). The bridge was constructed over the summer of 1854 and was officially opened on 29 December that year. Three days later it collapsed when ice movements shifted the trestles out of line, splintering the Burr Truss sections. The proposed solution was to stabilise the trestles (or 'stilts' as their critics dubbed them) by an infill of soil, which did happen on the southern side, still visible as a strip of land