The whole distance by this route is only 93 miles, instead of 118, the distance by the present line, and the passage will occupy five or six hours, instead of eight or nine. From Baltimore southwardly two routes offer themselves; you may take the steamboat to Norfolk, a distance of 200 miles, which is accomplished in 18 or 20 hours, whence another boat ascends the James River to Richmond still more rapidly, the distance of about 135 miles being passed over in 10 hours; or you may go from Norfolk to Weldon on the Roanoke by a railroad 77 miles in length, of which two thirds are completed.[CD]
From Baltimore you may also go to Washington, by a branch of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and thence by steamboat down the Potomac to a little village, 15 miles from Fredericksburg, from which a railroad is now in progress to Richmond. It will be 58 miles in length, and will cost but 12,000 dollars a mile, including the engines, cars, and depots. From Petersburg, 20 miles from Richmond, a railroad extends to Blakely on the Roanoke, 60 miles, and the interval between Petersburg and Richmond will soon be filled up. The Petersburg and Roanoke railroad, which is shorter than the post-road, follows with very little deviation an old Indian trail, a remarkable fact, which was told me by the able engineer Mr Moncure Robinson. It extends, almost entirely on the surface of the ground and without embankments, through the sandy, uncultivated plains, intersected by pools of stagnant water, which uniformly border the sea from the Chesapeake to Cape Florida, and are annually infested by the fever of the country. The whole region is most admirably adapted for railroads, which are constructed almost wholly of wood. The surface is graded by nature, and the sandy soil offers an excellent foundation for the wooden frame on which the rails are placed. The still virgin forests, consisting of pine and oak, afford an inexhaustible supply of timber for the construction of the railways, free to whoever wishes to use it. But if the nature of the country is well suited to this object, the condition of the population is far from being so. In this sterile tract, the inhabitants are thinly scattered over the surface, and there are only a few villages here and there on the rivers. Large towns, in which alone the necessary capital would be found, do not exist, and the aid of Northern capitalists has been necessarily resorted to. Philadelphia capital has been largely employed in the construction of the Petersburg and Richmond railroads, and without it, the great line between the South and the North, will not be continued across North Carolina, one of the poorest States in the confederacy, and connected with the works completed or in progress in Georgia and South Carolina.