Rail transportation in the United States
Rail transportation in the United States includes freight and passenger service. Freight moves along a well integrated network of standard gauge private freight railroads that also extend into Canada and Mexico. The United States has the largest rail transport network of any country in the world, about. A larger fraction of freight moves by rail in the United States than in most countries and freight rail companies are generally profitable.
Passenger service includes mass transit in most major American cities. Except for commuter rail, most transit systems are not connected to the national rail network. Federal Railroad Administration regulations require passenger cars used on the national rail network to be heavy and strong enough to protect riders in case of collision with freight trains.
Intercity passenger service is provided nation-wide by Amtrak, with some links to Canada. A few smaller regional providers, including the Alaska Railroad, Brightline and some commuter rail systems link nearby cities. Amtrak offers high-speed Acela service along the East Coast. Intercity rail service was once a large and vital part of the nation's passenger transportation network, but passenger service shrank in the 20th century as commercial air traffic and the Interstate Highway System made commercial air and road transport a practical option throughout the United States. With the exception of the new Brightline system, U.S. passenger service is government subsidized.
History
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, 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
Between 1762 and 1764 a gravity railroad 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 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, 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...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 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.