Railroads

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RAILROADS

Although railroads dominated the American transportation network by the eve of the Civil War, their origins during the early Republic were quite modest. The first railways in the United States developed from crude systems developed by miners to transport bulky coal and ores from the mouth of the mine to a river or canal. These early rail lines consisted of wood planks placed along the route with iron rails on top to provide durability. Most of these systems were less than one mile long and used gravity—as one full cart descended the route it pulled an empty car to the top—as a form of power. The first true "railroad" appeared in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1826. Called the Granite Railroad, this threemile-long line, which transported stone from a quarry to nearby docks, used a raised track on wooden ties and cars with flanged wheels. This line was soon followed by similar systems in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal-mining country. Although technically railroads, these early efforts used mules or a stationary steam engine to pull carts.

Early American railroads rarely came into direct competition with turnpikes or canals, which were the preferred forms of transportation through the 1830s. The comparative advantage of rail systems over water or wagon travel was the ability to climb or descend higher altitudes. Thus, many early rail lines complemented existing canal networks; for example, Pennsylvania's ambitious State Works used a railroad link on its Main Line from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna River and employed an ingenious system of stationary steam engines pulling cars on inclined planes to provide a link over the mountains from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown. These early efforts, although costly, demonstrated that railways were more practical than boats or wagons for reaching certain areas. The replacement of horse or mule power with steam-engine locomotives by 1829, moreover, made railroads the cutting edge of transportation technology in the early Republic.

Entrepreneurs from large cities found state governments unwilling to fund the construction of railroads that could handle both passenger and freight travel, so the main investors in this new technology came from the private sector. In 1828 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began its ambitious project of linking Baltimore to the Ohio River by railway. By 1830 the B&O had completed only thirteen miles of track; nevertheless, its directors demonstrated the viability of rail travel during a time when canals and turnpikes dominated the nation's transportation network. Investors in Boston soon followed with a plan to link Boston and Worcester with a railroad. In the year the B&O opened, only about twenty-five total miles of railroad track were in use in the United States, but several projects such as New Jersey's Camden and Amboy, South Carolina's Charleston and Hamburg, and New York's Mohawk and Hudson were under way. By 1835 more than one thousand miles of track had been created and the railroad's place as the future means of transporting passengers and goods had been established.

bibliography

Larson, John Lauritz. Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Stover, John. American Railroads. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Taylor, George Rogers. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rinehart, 1951; Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989.

Sean Patrick Adams

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation