By mid-decade in the 1820s, inspired by LC&N success and the Erie Canal the state legislature had formed the Canal Commission and begun funding the survey work and start up of the future Pennsylvania Canal— which was in the planning conception, Railroads being new untried technology in its infancy— to also put an actual long canal channel between the Schuylkill basin (Delaware Valley) and the Susquehanna (connecting the Potomac Valley, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Richmond and Washington, D.C.) as well as an ambitious and audacious subproject of crossing the Alleghenies (see Allegheny Portage Railroad), which in the early funding took most of the monies delaying the easier ditch across the "Pennsylvanian Great Valley.