By the time the LIRR won its charter in 1834, coastal surveys conducted by top U.S. military engineers had long since made clear how much easier it would be to lay railroad tracks across the undulating glacial soils of Long Island than the rocky river valleys of Connecticut. This was a matter of national importance, as Maj. David Bates Douglass made clear in an 1839 letter to the railroad.

“The route in question… is, in fact, the precise line which Providence seems to have designed as a part of the great chain of intercommunication which is to affiliate and bind together, in a community of interests, the cities and seaports of the Atlantic frontier,” Douglass wrote.

With a nearly straight, level track from Brooklyn to a cross-Sound ferry at Greenport, the Long Island Railroad Company could deliver passengers, merchandise, and mail to Boston in 12 hours — faster, safer, and more reliable than a steamboat.

The LIRR’s original Main Line began with the lease of the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad, laid out by Douglass and completed in 1836, with its terminus in the center of the village of Jamaica. That wealthy village dating to the city’s earliest Dutch settlement still held a beaver pond at its center, drained only many years later, a stubbornly resilient obstacle for builders. The Brooklyn and Jamaica had been envisioned as a way to carry cordwood and agricultural produce west and ashes and manure east, to deliver passengers to the village of Bedford and the Union Course race track near East New York — and to open Kings and Queens County farmlands to residential development. The more ambitious project was hatched by a network of old Long Island families and Manhattan merchants linked by blood and marriage. Their railroad stumbled financially and passed through many hands, but would eventually transform the primeval salt marshes of Long Island City, Newtown Creek and Bushwick, and the empty plains of Hempstead, where cattle foraged among grasses that had stood 5 or 6 feet high. The LIRR’s first train cars had four wheels, like stagecoaches. Its iron rails were imported from Liverpool, and its ties were of Canadian red cedar and Long Island chestnut. Long Island groves supplied the cordwood that fueled it for its first two decades.

East End farmers had been accustomed to send much of their produce by boat to Connecticut, because New York by wagon was a three-day journey. The completion of the railroad in 1844 made it a matter of four hours.

Horses stampeded in terror when Ariel, the first locomotive, passed with its train of cars, and farmers gaped up as it passed at 25 miles per hour — so fast they could not make out the features of the passengers. And even city sophisticates struggled to describe its “choo-choo” sound, which would soon be as familiar as children’s books.

“Which, chich, chich, chu — which, chich, chich, chu, was the language held by Ariel as she flew along the track,” a New York Herald columnist recorded after his first ride to Hicksville in 1837. “Riding over the Long Island Rail Way deceives the senses into the belief that you are stationary, and that the country is flying by you as a great natural panorama.”

But now that they had ready access to the city, farmers began switching from staple crops to more profitable and perishable market vegetables, fruits and berries. The trains also supplied abundant loads of fertilizer swept from city streets, making the sandy soil productive. Nor did farms need any longer to be self-sufficient, as new grocery stores offered merchandise brought in by train. Still, for years, these disorienting changes were connected in many minds with the Devil, in part because of the locomotives’ deadly bulk, screaming whistles and the catastrophic wildfires set off by cinders flying from their stacks. There would be years of wrangling over whether they should be allowed to run on Sundays, even those collecting farm-fresh milk for city infants.

The LIRR quickly gained renown as the fastest on the North American continent. It would play the central role in a high-profile newspaper war between Greeley and his arch-rival James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald over who could be the first to report the international financial and diplomatic dispatches that British packet steamers were carrying across the Atlantic. Market-moving news was reaching Boston long before New York, costing Wall Street traders a fortune. Soon shifting coalitions of American newspapers were hiring special “exclusive” LIRR trains to rush the latest European news from Greenport to Lower Manhattan. The ballyhooed newspaper races stoked nationwide excitement, which reached its zenith in February 1846, amid trade tensions with England and the threat of war in Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. When Bennett and other publishers arranged exclusive use of the LIRR’s trains to carry sensitive news expected from Cunard’s steamship Cambria, Greeley organized rival papers to fund a “Halifax Express,” that would meet the ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, days before it was due in Boston, and rush its news all the way to New York by a relay of sleigh, steamboat, train and horseback. This express was ludicrously expensive. And it would be thwarted when steamboat tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt secretly agreed to help Bennett, offering his fastest boat. A brutal blizzard — and suspicious train delays in Boston — held up Greeley’s sweating messengers until hours after the LIRR’s locomotive had set a new speed record to Brooklyn’s South Ferry. “We bow to Fate and the elements.… But the Long Island Railroad was monopolized against us,” Greeley protested.

But the railroad was no match for the cutthroat competition unfolding on the New York-to-Boston corridor, where rivals were multiplying and Vanderbilt was maneuvering to dominate all of them. He himself had been brought on as an LIRR director, with authority over its steamboat service, after the LIRR bought three cross-Sound ferries from him. Under Vanderbilt’s direction, the Long Island undertook ruinous price cuts and route changes that served his strategic goals at the expense of the LIRR’s own survival. Vanderbilt left the board shortly after that newspaper race, as the fare war on the Sound had by then brought him the supremacy he sought. But it also had left the LIRR unable to pay its debts. In 1847, the LIRR’s last ferry, New Haven, was seized, forcing the abrupt cancellation of  its Boston express service. And by 1848, a rail connection would be completed through Connecticut.