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As in Canada the railroads of the United States had a major effect on the development of the country, enabling people and goods to move around so much faster than the wagon trains of previous eras. All the railroad companies were private to begin with, started by entrepreneurs and men of vision, though there were a few fraudsters among them. And many of them established their railroads in areas which were very undeveloped – they also sold real estate and built towns to attract new settlers; and even ran bus lines to connect passengers to the railway stations, and local road haulage vehicles to carry freight to the railhead as the first real intermodal systems in the world. Many of them made more from selling real estate than they ever did from the railway operations. Yet he railroads were hugely influential in expanding agricultural production throughout the USA, with the railways able to transport food to the main consuming areas.
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The first was the Baltimore & Ohio, which opened in 1830. A year later the first tentative few miles of the Mohawk and Hudson opened between Albany and Schenectady (New York State) – it went on to become part of the New York Central Railroad. The Baltimore and Susquehanna opened in 1831 and then others were added over the next few years. By 1840 there were 2,755 miles; by 1850, 8,571 miles; and by 1870 almost 50,000. Twenty years later that had more than trebled as new lines opened in almost every part of the continent, though with a bias towards the industrialised north-east.
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In 1862 Congress had passed a law calling for two railroads (Union Pacific and Central Pacific) to build a line that connected east-west and construction began in 1863, from Sacramento, California, building eastwards. It eventually linked with one being built from Omaha, Nebraska. Millions of dollars were needed for this huge project but Congress granted the railroad companies four miles of land for every mile of track laid and this was a huge incentive as it allowed them to sell off the real estate close to the new railroad, enabling families and businesses to travel and ship freight – on their railroads !
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Most of the construction work was carried out by imported Chinese labour. By 1869 over 1700 miles of track had been laid and the two lines met at a town called Promontory, in Utah. Perhaps "town" was a bit over ambitious; it was little more than a couple of shacks. By 1895 four more tracks crossed the entire country, enabling transcontinental travel, yet this brought one previously unknown major problem to travellers. Because of the speed of the trains (in essence no more than about 50 mph on average) passengers were almost keeping up with the Sun as it crossed from east to west. Every little town along the route had its own time, based on solar time at that point. This caused problems with time-keeping and the necessity to keep changing watches every hundred miles or so. To overcome this problem the railroad companies got together and came up with time zones for each of the four major areas of the USA. Within that time zone every town kept to the same time. This system is still in place today.
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By 1948 there were 14 railroads in North America (two of them in Canada), all of which had over 1000 locomotives each – the biggest, in terms of both mileage and locomotives, was the Pennsylvania Railroad, with almost 10,000 miles of track and 4,467 locos. The largest in mileage terms was the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway with 13,081 miles, running through New Mexico and up to the Kansas/Colorado border. Ironically it never served Santa Fe directly as it proved too difficult to lay tracks ! Electrification was also in place, either on the third-rail system or overhead – the first electrified lines dated back to pre-1910.
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Technological advances along the way had helped the railways expand. Refrigerated wagons enabled fresh meat to be transported huge distances and advances in locomotives, passenger comfort (Pullman cars were introduced in ) and signalling enabled better railways to operate, though their huge influence was investigated many times by Congress and several anti-trust laws were enacted to regulate them. Some of the great trains of the 20th century were in operation: the Twentieth Century Limited in 1902; the Super Chief in 1936 between Chicago and Los Angeles; the California Zephyr in 1949, between Chicago and San Francisco, the first passenger train with a domed observation car.
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Yet post-war the rise of aviation began to sound the death-knell for long-distance rail travel and the 50s, 60s and 70s were a time of merger, retrenchment and even bankruptcy. By 1970 railroads were used more for freight than passengers and in 1971 Amtrak was established to run passenger services throughout much of the United States and today has 21,000 miles of track in 46 States – in 2008 they carried 29 million passengers. Today the US has a busy north-east corridor route (Washington DC to Boston via New York City), many localised and regionalised railroads serving the big cities and their suburbs.
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There is also a large amount of transcontinental freight operations. In 2008, for example, 17 million carloads of freight were transported on the rails of the US, as well as 300,000 container-loads. In all, for 2008, the estimated year end figure comes out to something like 1.7 trillion ton-miles. About 40% of all freight in the USA goes by rail.
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