The Camden & Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company (C&A) was chartered on February 4, 1830, on the same day as the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company, after the two competing companies had come to a compromise. The C&A and D&R had the same goals — to connect the Delaware River, serving Philadelphia, with the Raritan River, for access to New York City — one by tow-path canal with some new innovations to cross the hills and the other by the untried railroad technology then emerging in Europe. Both ventures were considered risky, and both needed right-of-way grants from the legislature along the river's banks, requiring negotiations and design compromises before either could lay claim to a land rights charter.
Subsequently, the D&R was built to the west of the original C&A, leaving the Delaware at Trenton and running roughly northeast to New Brunswick along the Raritan River valley, while (from the other direction) the original C&A ran south from New York Harbor via South Amboy on Raritan Bay to Camden, thence across the breadth of New Jersey, connecting by ferry across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, both indirectly but much more rapidly linking New York and Philadelphia—at the time America's fastest growing city with its largest city and, perhaps more importantly, tying together many of its oldest industrial centers.