Railroads

My grandfather was a Railroad man. He was an Illinois Central station master. I enjoy reading railroad histories and was drawn to a recent article in the November 5 Ancestry Weekly Digest.
It is entitled:

"RAILROADS," Excerpt from 'Printed Sources,' Chapter 3-Geographic Tools: Maps, Atlases and Gazetteers, by Carol Mehr Schiffman.

In 1829, a little-noticed event that would soon drastically alter the future transportation of people and commodities took place. Horatio Allen, an engineer, arranged to have four steam locomotives built in England for use by the Carbondale and Honesdale Railroad in Pennsylvania, On 8 August 1829, with Allen at the controls and a crowd watching, the Stourbridge Lion locomotive made its trial run at ten miles an hour down the rails, over a trestle one hundred feet high, and around a curve. This event is described by Rupert Sargent Holland in his book "Historic Railroads" (1927, 134-35). From this humble but successful beginning, other charters to build railroads were granted, and construction began. In 1830 there were only twenty-three miles of railroad in operation. On 15 January 1831, the first passenger train in the United States that was pulled by a locomotive made a run between Charleston and Hamburg, South Carolina. By 1836 there were 1,098 miles of railroad, most of which were in the seacoast states. Mileage was 9,021 in 1850, 30,055 by 1860, 52,922 by 1870, and 74,096 by 1875 ("Encyclopedia Americana" 1956, 410). The extensive railroad system in the North played an important part in the Union's winning the Civil War because it aided greatly in the transport of troops and equipment to and from the battlefields.

Most early railroads were individual segments that were not joined. They connected waterways, the seacoast, and the interior river system. By the late 1830s new technology had improved the steam engine and lowered the cost of building railroads. Because railroads could be built over rough terrain, they joined different market areas that were not dependent on waterways. By 1841 a railroad ran between Boston and Albany. High priority was given to building railroads from east to west, and by 1842 Albany was connected by rail to Buffalo. A line running through southern New York connected Pierpont on the Hudson to Lake Erie in 1851. Also in 1851, Albany and New York were connected by rail, making it possible to travel from New York by way of Albany to Lake Erie. Other lines ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (1852) and Baltimore and Wheeling (1853) (Billington and Ridge 1982, 341). Transportation by rail was cheaper and more efficient than by canal barges or steamboats. Because canals could not compete economically with the flourishing railroads, the canal era came to a close.

As railroads extended farther west, pioneers traveled by trains to the newly opened lands. In 1856 a line was opened between Chicago and the Mississippi River. In the same year the Illinois Central completed a line from Galena down through the center of the state to Cairo and a branch line from Centralia to Chicago. The total distance was 705 miles; it was the longest railroad in the United States at the time. An average of seven thousand and sometimes as many as ten thousand German immigrants were employed in its construction (Holbrook 1947, 103).

Railroads preceded the settlement of the country in the west. They linked isolated cities and towns and brought about the establishment of new towns. Industries appeared along the routes and pioneers settled on neighboring lands. On 10 May 1869 the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads joined at Promontory Summit, Utah, forming the first transcontinental railroad.

You can find the key sources and reference list here.