were more durable, more flexible, more efficient, more cost-effective and most importantly- faster than the canals. In 1848, the trains finally arrived in Binghamton in the form of the Erie Railroad. The new technology had caught up with the Chenango and the arrival of the 'iron horse' spelled the eventual end for the canal. Over the next two decades the Binghamton area developed into a transportation hub. Along with the canal, the area was now being served by several railroad lines. After the Civil War, railroad expansion would come to include the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western, the New York, Ontario and Western and the Delaware and Hudson in the Chenango and Susquehanna Valleys. This ultimately rendered the canal obsolete. In a sadly ironic twist, it was the canal that carried the engines for the trains, the tools and the railroad men. It was the canal's own barges that carried the rails for the tracks that would replace them. It is also noteworthy that the D&H began its existence as a canal company. Despite its success in augmenting the economic development of the Southern Tier and Central New York, the Chenango Canal itself had never been a financial success. After years of competition and decline and continual financial loss, by a vote of the state legislature the Chenango Canal was closed in 1878– just four decades and four years after it was opened. The land and assets were broken up and gradually sold, mostly at auction. Some of the properties were sold to private interests, some were deeded to municipal areas and others were held by the state. Much of the channel was subsequently filled in, and frequently paved over, particularly within the cities and the more populated areas. But some of the more isolated stretches of the canal were simply closed and abandoned. While most of the larger towns, and all of the state, benefited from the triumph of the railroads, many of the smaller villages and hamlets did not. For practically every small settlement that was located on the line of the canal, but which was missed by the railroad, when the canal departed prosperity went with it. Two good illustrations of this are the once-prospering villages of Port Crane and Pecksport, where very little of either one is left today. After 1900, a surviving stretch of the then-closed canal gained notoriety owing to its use to transport contraband