In 1875, twenty years after its original projection, the Utica & Black River Railroad finally came through the village, bisecting the Comstock property with a right-of-way thirty-six feet wide and dividing it thereafter into a “lower shop,” where the pills and tonics were made, and the “upper shop,” where the medicines were packaged and clerical duties performed.  The superintendent and his family lived above the upper shop in an apartment; it was in the spacious attic above this apartment that the records of the business, in a scattered and ransacked condition, were found.  Inasmuch as the first recorded sale of land to Comstock occurred in March 1876, almost simultaneously with the arrival of the railroad, it is a fair surmise that the second building was put up about this time.

The coming of the railroad also put a station almost at the doorstep of the factory, and thereafter many shipments came and went by rail.  The company’s huge volume of mailings, often ten or fifteen bags a day, was also delivered directly to the trains, without going through the local post office.  For some years, however, heavy shipments, including coal for the factory’s boilers, continued to come by ship.  The Brockville ferry also operated from a dock immediately adjacent to the railroad station; one end of the station was occupied by the United States Customs House.

Almost from the time of its arrival in Morristown, the Black River Railroad operated a daily through Wagner Palace Sleeping Car from New York City via Utica and Carthage, and service over the same route was continued by the New York Central after it took over the North Country railroads in 1891.  This meant that Mr. Comstock, when he had business in New York City, could linger in his factory until the evening train paused at the station to load the afternoon’s outpouring of pills and almanacs, swing aboard the waiting Pullman, and ensconce himself comfortably in his berth, to awaken in the morning within the cavernous precincts of Grand Central Station—­an ease and convenience of travel which residents of the North Country in the 1970s cannot help but envy.  The daily sleeping car through Morristown to and from New York City survived as long as the railroad itself, into the early 1960s, thus outlasting both of the Comstocks—­father and son.

[Footnotes 8:  Or perhaps Mr. Comstock merely failed to pay for an engraved plate and to order a book; these county histories were apparently very largely written and edited with an eye to their subscribers.]

The pills were originally mixed by hand.  In the summer of 1880 the factory installed a steam engine and belt-driven pill-mixing machinery.  At least one rotary pill machine was purchased from England, from J.W.  Pindar, and delivered to Comstock at a total cost (including ocean freight) of L19-10-9—­about $100.  One minor unsolved mystery is that a bill for a second, identical machine made out to A.J.  White—­with whom Comstock had not been associated