The Railroad That Made New Jersey — and the Sidewalk Where You Can Walk Its Ghost

There is a stretch of ground in this Delaware River town where, if you stand quietly enough, you can almost feel the whole modern world coming down the tracks toward you. It was here, nearly two centuries ago, that one of the first railroads in America was chartered and built — the Camden & Amboy — and it changed not just how New Jersey moved, but the very idea of what distance meant.

Hours instead of days

We forget how strange the railroad was to the people who first saw one. In 1830, when the state granted the Camden & Amboy its charter, a journey between Philadelphia and New York was an ordeal of stagecoaches, river steamers, and prayer, measured in miserable days. The Camden & Amboy set out to do it in hours. Robert Stevens, the company's engineer, sailed to England, came home, and along the way designed the T-shaped iron rail and the hook-headed spike that hold trains to the earth to this day. The locomotive he imported, the John Bull, first turned its wheels on a test track near this town in 1831 and would run, astonishingly, for more than three decades.

I have always thought South Jersey undersells this. We speak of Trenton and of the shipyards and of the glassworks, but the plain fact is that a corridor of ground running through Bordentown and down toward Camden was one of the birthplaces of American rail — the technology that would knit a continent together, win a civil war on its supply lines, and pour immigrants and freight and ambition into every corner of the country. It started, in no small part, here.

History you can walk

What brings the old line to mind now is a quieter thing than a locomotive. The Bordentown Historical Society is developing a self-guided walking tour that traces the former route of the Camden & Amboy through town — some fifteen interpretive signs that will let a visitor follow the ghost of the rail bed on foot. The project drew a $9,000 grant from Burlington County, part of a slate of local-history awards, and it arrives with good timing as the nation marks its 250th anniversary in 2026.

You stand on the actual line. You look up at the actual sky the John Bull’s smoke once dirtied. The distance between yourself and 1831 gets very thin.Henry Whitaker

It is worth saying that the Camden & Amboy's story is not a simple pageant of progress. The line became a byword for monopoly power in its day; New Jersey was mocked in the national press as "the State of Camden and Amboy" for the railroad's grip on its politics. Good history holds both truths at once — the marvel of the machine and the mischief of the men who ran it. Come the semiquincentennial, there will be plenty of fireworks, and most of it will fade by autumn. What lasts is the quieter work — a set of signs on a Bordentown street, a grant well spent, a town deciding that the ground it walks on has something to say. Two hundred years ago, the future arrived here on iron rails. Soon you'll be able to walk out and meet it.

Based on reporting from Burlington County, The Sun Papers, Insider NJ, and the Bordentown Historical Society.