"hourly", noun, "public conveyance that runs every hour", antedated nearly 50 years

[George Thompson]

Here is a vision of the future of New York City.
It also offers a considerable antedating of one sense of "hourly" as a noun.
 It fails by one year to antedate one sense of "accommodation" as a noun,
and "railroad" as a verb, but the current version of the "railroad" entry in
OED -- I suppose that a revision is in hand even now -- has a nearly 20 year
gap between the earliest and the second appearances.

A rail road could be constructed through Broadway, so as not to prevent
waggons, carts, and carriages from crossing at any particular point.  ***  If
it were advisable to rail road busy streets and thorough fares, it would put
out of use entirely the "accommodations" and "hourly," now employed.  A
person could pass from Wall street to the Ninth Ward in five minutes -- the
extremities of the city would be brought as near as the different ends of a
single ward -- and a large extensive city would, in regards to
transportation, be as accessible from one point to another as the densest
village. ***

            Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer, December 3, 1830, p. 2,
col. 3



accommodation (noun) 6  b. ellipt. for accommodation stage
n.<http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:32445/view/Entry/1134?rskey=0n7NhJ&result=1&isAdvanced=true#eid115646587>,
accommodation train n. at
Compounds<http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:32445/view/Entry/1134?rskey=0n7NhJ&result=1&isAdvanced=true#eid115646589>.
U.S.

1829    A. Royall Pennsylvania II. 9,   I‥intended to take the Accommodation
in the morning.

1877    ‘E. W. Martin’ Hist. Great Riots 117   The Sharpsville
‘accommodation’‥had been lying for two hours without an engine.

1891    C. Roberts Adrift in Amer. ii. 33   We went on what is called an
‘accommodation’, that is, a freight train with a passenger car at the end of
it.



                hourly (adj) 2 b. as n. (U.S.) A public conveyance that runs
every hour.

1877    J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 4) ,   Hourly, formerly used
in and about Boston for an omnibus.

1881    Harper's Mag. Feb. 388   The terrors of the ‘hourly’ or omnibus.

railroad, verb, 1829, 1848



railroad (verb) 1. trans. To construct railroads in (a country, etc.). Also
fig. Now rare.

1829    A. Royall Pennsylvania I. 123   They are canaling and rail-roading
the whole country.

1848    E. Cook Poems (ed. 3) II. Pref. p. ix,   The public mind seems
nearly as much railroaded as the country.

&c.

-- 
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org