In the early decades of the 19th century, the industrial town of Stourbridge, England stood at the center of global transformation.

Its foundries and workshops helped give rise to a new technology that would redefine transportation, the steam locomotive.

The American Delaware and Hudson Canal Company were interested in purchasing steam locomotives to move anthracite coal from the mines in northeastern Pennsylvania to market in New York, so they turned to British engineering.

Completed in 1829, Stourbridge line was shipped in pieces from England to New York and then to Honesdale, Pennsylvania where it was reassembled, becoming the first steam engine to run on rails in the United States.

The Delaware and Hudson Canal was built in the late 1820s for one purpose only, which was to get coal from the mines around what would become Carbondale to market in New York.

And it consisted of two main components.

One was the canal itself, which was dug from near Kingston, New York on the Hudson to here, where what would become Honesdale.

They built a gravity railroad to get the coal over the mountains to here.

The canal story reflects the broader transition from waterways to waterways like canals and like rivers.

At the time the canal was built they were the only way that you could ship bulk commodities any distance at all.

By the time the canal finished in 1898, the Delaware and Hudson Company became an entirely a railroad company.

It'll be 200 years since the Stourbridge line turned its wheels in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

First steam locomotive in the United States of America in the western hemisphere.

Why would it matter still be relevant today?

Well, we could say that this was the birth of American railroading.

It had to start someplace.

We were very proud to say it happened here.

The Stourbridge line opened up American railroading from sea to shining sea.

This Stourbridge line had what we like to call grasshopper legs, and these were pistons and rods.

The steam inside the boiler caused the so - called grasshopper legs to move and turn the wheels.

The locomotive weighed about seven to seven and a half tons, that's without water, nearly double what the track could support.

The track itself was lightly built using hemlock wooden rails capped with iron strips.

As a result the locomotive was never put into regular service.

Instead it became a proof of concept showing that steam locomotion worked.

The decision to make a replica of the Stourbridge line probably inspired by the celebrations of 1929, of the centennial of its running.

And the D&H shops outside of Albany, they researched what the Stourbridge line was really like.

It's as close as we can come to an exact working replica of the original engine.

The people who saw the Stourbridge line run for the first time in 1829 had never seen anything like this.

In Honesdale the Stourbridge line is more than a replica, it's a working link to the origins of American railroading, and a reminder of how innovation travels across time and place.

This was a transformational event in the history of the United States.

Nowhere in the western hemisphere had a commercial steam locomotive ever been operated, so this was something new.

Business people had a great vision for what was to come, and how this could transform what would become the industrial revolution.