good day and as long as twenty on a bad one. Heavy goods went by boat, around Cape May, New Jersey. In 1829, eager to reduce the cost and difficulty of travel, New Jersey began investigating a cross-state canal and railroads. Railroads had already met with success in Britain and several American cities were planning lines of their own. The legislature, amid very aggressive lobbying, decided to build both a canal and a railroad. The canal and the railroad were to be built parallel to each other and controlled by separate companies chartered by the legislature. Each corporation was to give the state $100,000 worth of stock and pay a transit tax levied on cargo and each passenger carried. The corporation chartered to build the canal complicated this arrangement by deciding to also build a railroad. The legislature responded with a so-called "Marriage Act" to combine the two companies. Camden and Amboy: 1830–1834 The Camden & Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company (C&A) was chartered on February 4, 1830, on the same day as the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company, after the two competing companies had come to a compromise. The C&A and D&R had the same goals — to connect the Delaware River, serving Philadelphia, with the Raritan River, for access to New York City — one by tow-path canal with some new innovations to cross the hills and the other by the untried railroad technology then emerging in Europe. Both ventures were considered risky, and both needed right-of-way grants from the legislature along the river's banks, requiring negotiations and design compromises before either could lay claim to a land rights charter. Subsequently, the D&R was built to the west of the original C&A, leaving the Delaware at Trenton and running roughly northeast to New Brunswick along the Raritan River valley, while (from the other direction) the original C&A ran south from New York Harbor via South Amboy on Raritan Bay to Camden, thence across the breadth of New Jersey, connecting by ferry across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, both indirectly but much more rapidly linking New York and Philadelphia—at the time America's fastest growing city with its largest city and, perhaps more importantly, tying together many of its oldest industrial centers. Robert L. Stevens was president of the C&A in the 1830s and 1840s. The C&A was organized on April 28, 1830. Surveys began on June 16. As