Pontchartrain Railroad

Chartered in 1830, the railroad began carrying people and goods between the Mississippi River front and Lake Pontchartrain on 23 April 1831.

The 6-mile (10 km) long 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm) gauge[1] line connected the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans along the riverfront with the town of Milneburg on the Lakefront.

It was the third common carrier railroad to officially open for service to the public in the United States, following the Baltimore and Ohio and the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company.

The right-of-way was approved by the New Orleans City Council on 15 March, and construction began immediately, with a pair of parallel railroad tracks.

[3] In the late 19th century, the Pontchartrain Railroad became less important for commerce, as ships too large to use the Lakefront routes became common and the extensive network of long-distance railways grew.

Generations of New Orleanians fondly remembered the archaic veteran steam engine nicknamed "Smoky Mary" running on the line as late as the 1930s.

The final straw, however, was the closing of the Milneburg resorts while a land reclamation project dredged earth into the shallows of lake Pontchartrain there in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This 1836 sketch by G. W. Sully shows the riverfront terminal of the Pontchartrain Rail-Road on the left, at the head of Elysian Fields Avenue .
Pontchartrain Rail-Road in its early years, depicting a 4-2-0 locomotive and carriages, "Milneburg Train. Ponchartrain Railroad 5 mile line from Elysian Fields Street to the Shore of Lake Ponchartrain at Milneburg ."
The Elysian Fields neutral ground, formerly the right-of-way of the Pontchartrain Rail-Road. The old mile-stone at the bottom right is one of the few surviving physical reminders of the long defunct railway.