The nation's earliest railroads were built in the 1820s and 1830s,
primarily in New England and the
Mid-Atlantic states. The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered in 1827, was the nation's first common-carrier railroad. By 1850, an extensive railroad network had taken shape in the rapidly industrializing
Northeastern United States and the Midwest, while fewer railroads were built in the
South, which was more agricultural than other regions. During and after the
American Civil War, the
first transcontinental railroad was built, to join
California with the rest of the national network, at a connection in
Iowa. Railroads expanded throughout the rest of the 19th century, eventually reaching nearly every corner of the nation. The railroads were temporarily
nationalized between 1917 and 1920 by the
United States Railroad Administration, because of American entry into
World War I. Railroad mileage peaked at this time. Railroads were affected deeply by the
Great Depression, and some lines were abandoned. A great increase in traffic during
World War II brought a reprieve, but after the war railroads faced intense competition from
automobiles and
aircraft and began a long decline. Passenger service was especially hard hit; in 1971 the federal government created
Amtrak, to take over responsibility for intercity passenger travel. Numerous railroad companies went bankrupt starting in the 1960s, most notably
Penn Central Transportation Company in 1971, in the largest bankruptcy in the nation's history at the time. Once again, the federal government intervened, forming
Conrail, in 1976, to assume control of bankrupt railroads in the northeast. Railroads' fortunes changed after the passage of the
Staggers Rail Act (1980), which
deregulated railroad companies, who had previously faced much stronger regulation than other modes of transportation. With innovations such as
trailer-on-flatcar and
intermodal freight transport, railroad traffic increased. After the Staggers Act, many railroads merged, forming major systems, such as
CSX and
Norfolk Southern, in the Eastern United States, and
BNSF Railway, in the Western United States;
Union Pacific Railroad also purchased some competitors. Another result of the Staggers Act was the rise of
shortline railroads, which formed to operate lines that major railroads had abandoned or sold off. Hundreds of these companies were formed by the end of the century. Freight railroads invested in modernization and greater capacity as they entered the 21st century, and intermodal transport continued to grow, while traditional traffic, such as coal, fell.
19th century , , built in 1834, is still in use today on the
Northeast Corridor. Between 1762 and 1764 a
gravity railroad (
mechanized tramway) (
Montresor's Tramway) was built by British Army engineers up the steep riverside terrain near the
Niagara River waterfall's
escarpment at the
Niagara Portage in
Lewiston, New York. Between the 1820s and 1840s, Americans closely watched
the development of railways in Great Britain. There, the main competition came from canals, many of which operated under state ownership and from privately owned steamboats plying the nation's vast river system. In 1829, Massachusetts prepared an elaborate rail plan. Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – the nation's only source of civil engineering expertise – was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the then 1,058 graduates from the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies. Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were
Stephen Harriman Long,
George Washington Whistler, and
Herman Haupt. State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of
eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even over the owner's objections. The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was chartered in 1827 to build a steam railroad west from
Baltimore, Maryland, to a point on the
Ohio River and began scheduled freight service over its first section on May 24, 1830. The first railroad to carry passengers, and, by accident, the first tourist railroad, began operating in 1827. Named the
Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, initially a gravity road feeding anthracite coal downhill to the
Lehigh Canal, using mule-power to return nine miles up the mountain; but, by the summer of 1829, as newspapers documented, it regularly carried passengers. In 1843, renamed the
Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, it added a steam powered cable-return track for true two-way operation and ran as a
common carrier and tourist road from the 1890s to 1937. Lasting 111 years, the SH&MC is described by some to be the world's first
roller coaster. The first purpose-built common carrier railroad in the northeast was the
Mohawk & Hudson Railroad; incorporated in 1826. It began operating in August 1831. Soon, a second passenger line, the
Saratoga & Schenectady Railroad, started service in June 1832. In 1835, the B&O completed a branch from Baltimore southward to Washington, D.C. The
Boston & Providence Railroad was incorporated in 1831 to build a railroad between
Boston and
Providence, Rhode Island; the road was completed in 1835 with the completion of the
Canton Viaduct in
Canton, Massachusetts. Numerous short lines were built, especially in the south, to provide connections to the river systems and the river boats common to the era. In
Louisiana, the
Pontchartrain Rail-Road, a route connecting the
Mississippi River with
Lake Pontchartrain at New Orleans was completed in 1831 and provided over a century of operation. Completed in 1830, the
Tuscumbia, Courtland & Decatur Railroad became the first railroad constructed west of the
Appalachian Mountains; it connected the
Alabama cities of
Decatur and
Tuscumbia. Soon, other roads that would themselves be purchased or merged into larger entities, were formed. The
Camden & Amboy Railroad (C&A), the first railroad built in
New Jersey, completed its route between its namesake cities in 1834. The C&A ran successfully for decades connecting
New York City to the
Delaware Valley, and would eventually become part of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. By 1850, over of railroad lines had been built. The B&O's westward route reached the Ohio River in 1852, the first eastern seaboard railroad to do so. Railroad companies in the North and Midwest constructed networks that linked nearly every major city by 1860. In the 1850s the Congress decided to promote railroads by giving them land grants. The
Illinois Central Railroad was the first to be established. Banks loaned it the $27 million needed for construction and by 1860 it operated 705 miles of track criss-crossing Illinois from Chicago to Galena to Cairo. It was the longest railway in the world. It set up a depot every ten miles, where ambitious men rushed in to start a town by buying plots from the land grant. In the decade of the 1850s, the national railway grid was expanding rapidly from 8,400 miles of track to 25,000. Outside the Midwest, rail mileage doubled, but inside the region it expanded by a factor of 7 from 1,300 to 9,000 miles. Chicago thereby became the nation's greatest rail center. Much of the necessary iron and steel was imported from Pittsburgh, but new mills were Increasingly set up in Chicago. When the war broke out in 1861, Chicago's main rivals Cincinnati and St Louis lost access to their primary markets to the South. Chicago replaced them as the hub for the national distribution of wheat and meat. Furthermore Chicago became the supply base for the Western armies, as General
Ulysses S Grant took the Illinois Central down to Cairo, and then marched south to seize control of Kentucky and Tennessee on his way to Memphis, Chattanooga, and Atlanta.
Transcontinental railroad With the rapid growth and wealth of Gold Rush California in the 1850, a transcontinental railroad became an urgent necessity. There were two problems: Should there be a northern route or a southern route, and how to pay for it. When the Confederate states left the Union during the Civil War, the first question was solved. The success of the Illinois Central indicated that land grants would be the main financial device... in May 1869 The First Transcontinental Railroad in the U.S. was built in the 1860s, linking the railroad network of the eastern U.S. with California on the
Pacific coast. Completed on May 10, 1869, at the
Golden spike event at
Promontory Summit, Utah, it created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the
American West, catalyzing the transition from the
wagon trains of previous decades to a modern transportation system. It was the first transcontinental railroad by connecting myriad eastern railroads to the Pacific Ocean. Authorized by the
Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and heavily backed by the
federal government, the first transcontinental railroad was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line and was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of
Abraham Lincoln, completed five years after his death. The building of the railroad required enormous feats of engineering and labor in the crossing of the
Great Plains and the
Rocky Mountains by the westbound
Union Pacific Railroad (UP) and eastbound
Central Pacific Railroad, the two federally chartered enterprises that built the line. It enabled the accelerated populating of the West by
homesteaders, leading to rapid cultivation of new farm lands. The Central Pacific and the
Southern Pacific Railroad combined operations in 1870 and formally merged in 1885; the Union Pacific originally bought the Southern Pacific in 1901 and was forced to divest it in 1913, but took it over again in 1996. Much of the original
roadbed is still in use today and owned by UP, which is descended from both of the original railroads.
Regulation Large railroad companies, including the
New York Central,
Grand Trunk Railway, and the
Southern Pacific, spanned several states. In response to
monopolistic practices, such as
price fixing and other excesses of some railroads and their owners, Congress created the
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887. The ICC indirectly controlled the business activities of the railroads through issuance of extensive regulations. Congress also enacted
antitrust legislation to prevent railroad monopolies, beginning with the
Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Financiers such as
Cornelius Vanderbilt and
Jay Gould became wealthy through railroad ownerships.
Rail gauge selection at Cape Horn, California, Many Canadian and U.S. railroads originally used various broad gauges, but most were converted to by 1886, when the conversion of much of the southern rail network from gauge took place. This and the
standardization of couplings and air brakes enabled the pooling and interchange of
locomotives and rolling stock.
Impact of railroads on the economy The railroad had its largest impact on the American transportation system during the second half of the 19th century. The standard historical interpretation holds that the railroads were central to the development of a national market in the United States and served as a model of how to organize, finance and manage a large corporation, along with allowing growth of the American population outside of the eastern regions.
20th century , freight train pauses at
Cajon, California, in March 1943 to cool its braking equipment after descending
Cajon Pass; the
U.S. Route 66 is visible to the right of the train. train in New York. 's
double stack freight train in
Wisconsin The principal mainline railroads concentrated their efforts on moving freight and passengers over long distances. But many had suburban services near large cities, which might also be served by
Streetcar and
Interurban lines. The Interurban was a concept which relied almost exclusively on passenger traffic for revenue. Unable to survive the Great Depression, the failure of most Interurbans by that time left many cities without suburban passenger railroads, although the largest cities such as New York City,
Chicago,
Boston and
Philadelphia continued to have suburban service. The major railroads passenger flagship services included multi-day journeys on luxury trains resembling hotels, which were unable to compete with airlines in the 1950s. Rural communities were served by slow trains no more than twice a day. They survived until the 1960s because the same train hauled the
Railway Post Office cars, paid for by the
US Post Office. RPOs were withdrawn when mail sorting was mechanized. As early as the 1930s, automobile travel had begun to cut into the rail passenger market, somewhat reducing
economies of scale, but it was the development of the
Interstate Highway System and of
commercial aviation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as increasingly restrictive regulation, that dealt the most damaging blows to rail transportation, both passenger and freight.
General Motors and others were convicted of running the streetcar industry into the ground purposefully in what is referred to as the
Great American Streetcar Scandal. There was little point in operating passenger trains to advertise freight service when those who made decisions about freight shipping traveled by car and by air, and when the railroads' chief competitors for that market were interstate trucking companies. Soon, the only things keeping most passenger trains running were legal obligations. Meanwhile, companies who were interested in using railroads for profitable freight traffic were looking for ways to get out of those legal obligations, and it looked like intercity passenger rail service would soon become extinct in the United States beyond a few highly populated corridors. The final blow for passenger trains in the U.S. came with the loss of
railroad post offices in the 1960s. On May 1, 1971, with only a few exceptions, the federally-funded
Amtrak took over all intercity passenger rail service in the continental United States. The
Rio Grande, with its
Denver-
Ogden Rio Grande Zephyr and the Southern with its Washington, D.C.–
New Orleans Southern Crescent chose to stay out of Amtrak, and the
Rock Island, with two intrastate
Illinois trains, was too far gone to be included into Amtrak. Freight transportation continued to labor under regulations developed when rail transport had a monopoly on intercity traffic, and railroads only competed with one another. An entire generation of rail managers had been trained to operate under this regulatory regime.
Labor unions and their work rules were likewise a formidable barrier to change. Overregulation, management and unions formed an "iron triangle" of stagnation, frustrating the efforts of leaders such as the
New York Central's
Alfred E. Perlman. In particular, the dense rail network in the Northeastern U.S. was in need of radical pruning and consolidation. A spectacularly unsuccessful beginning was the 1968 formation and subsequent bankruptcy of the
Penn Central, barely two years later. On routes where a single railroad has had an undisputed monopoly, passenger service was as spartan and as expensive as the market and ICC regulation would bear, since such railroads had no need to advertise their freight services. However, on routes where two or three railroads were in direct competition with each other for freight business, such railroads would spare no expense to make their passenger trains as fast, luxurious, and affordable as possible, as it was considered to be the most effective way of advertising their profitable freight services. The
National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) was formed in 1967 to lobby for the continuation of passenger trains. Its lobbying efforts were hampered somewhat by
Democratic opposition to any sort of
rail subsidies to the privately owned railroads, and
Republican opposition to
nationalization of the railroad industry. The proponents were aided by the fact that few in the federal government wanted to be held responsible for the seemingly inevitable extinction of the passenger train, which most regarded as tantamount to political suicide. The urgent need to solve the passenger train disaster was heightened by the bankruptcy filing of the
Penn Central, the dominant railroad in the
Northeastern United States, on June 21, 1970. Under the
Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, Congress created the
National Railroad Passenger Corporation (NRPC) to subsidize and oversee the operation of intercity passenger trains. The Act provided that: • Any railroad operating intercity passenger service could contract with the NRPC, thereby joining the national system. • Participating railroads bought into the new corporation using a formula based on their recent intercity passenger losses. The purchase price could be satisfied either by cash or rolling stock; in exchange, the railroads received Amtrak common stock. • Any participating railroad was freed of the obligation to operate intercity passenger service after May 1971, except for those services chosen by the
U.S. Department of Transportation as part of a "basic system" of service and paid for by NRPC using its federal funds. • Railroads who chose not to join the Amtrak system were required to continue operating their existing passenger service until 1975 and thenceforth had to pursue the customary ICC approval process for any discontinuance or alteration to the service. The original working brand name for NRPC was
Railpax, which eventually became
Amtrak. At the time, many Washington insiders viewed the corporation as a face-saving way to give passenger trains the one "last hurrah" demanded by the public, but expected that the NRPC would quietly disappear in a few years as public interest waned. However, while Amtrak's political and financial support have often been shaky, popular and political support for Amtrak has allowed it to survive into the 21st century. To preserve a declining freight rail industry, Congress passed the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973, sometimes called the "3R Act". The act was an attempt to salvage viable freight operations from the bankrupt
Penn Central and other lines in the northeast,
mid-Atlantic and Midwestern regions. The law created the
Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), a government-owned corporation, which began operations in 1976. Another law, the
Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 (the "4R Act"), provided more specifics for the Conrail acquisitions and set the stage for more comprehensive deregulation of the railroad industry. Portions of the
Penn Central,
Erie Lackawanna,
Reading Railroad,
Ann Arbor Railroad,
Central Railroad of New Jersey,
Lehigh Valley, and
Lehigh and Hudson River were merged into Conrail. On December 31, 1996, the
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway merged with the
Burlington Northern Railroad, creating the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. The freight industry continued its decline until Congress passed the
Staggers Rail Act in 1980, which largely deregulated the rail industry. Since then, U.S. freight railroads have reorganized, discontinued their lightly used routes and returned to profitability. ==Freight railroads==