The town of Cobourg was in a great state of excitement as the town council, the directors of the railway, and fifty other prominent gentlemen crowded onto the benches that had been hastily installed on twelve flatbed cars. At ten thirty in the morning, pulled by two powerful locomotives, the Cobourg to Peterborough railway left the station at Cobourg Harbour and chugged northward at the unimaginable speed of fifteen miles per hour. A mere sixty minutes later the train successfully crossed the Rice Lake Bridge and reached Peterborough East, where it was greeted by local dignitaries. After three cheers for Cobourg and three for Peterborough, the passengers marched under a welcoming arch to the Town Hall, where a magnificent dinner awaited them. Toasts and congratulatory speeches flowed as freely as the champagne.
The Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cobourg, the Honorable Ebenezer Perry, recalled that he had arrived in Cobourg in 1815, when it was still known as Hardscrabble.
“And hard scrabbling it was,” he said, “but since then they have scrabbled up a harbour, plank roads, gravel roads, fine buildings, and now a railway.”
But it was stagecoach proprietor William Weller who brought the house down.
“I know why you have called upon me,” he said. “It is to hurt my feelings — for you know I get my living from running stages, and you are taking the bit out of my mouth as well as out of my horses’ mouths. You are comparing in your minds the present with the past, when you had to carry a rail instead of riding one, in order to help my coaches out of the mud. But after all, I find that I am rejoiced to see old things done away with and new things becoming Weller.”
More speeches and songs followed, with festivities continuing through the night. The next day the excursionists found their way to the station for the return trip to Cobourg, but not before railway director D’Arcy Boulton toasted their Peterborough friends with a parting glass of champagne. The celebration was but a taste of good times ahead, he said, and as the train chugged its way back home again, everyone’s heads were filled with dreams of coming good fortune.
Three days later the Rice Lake Railway Bridge collapsed.