As the first transcontinentals pushed toward completion and others were added, settled regions were crisscrossed with rails for through traffic (see Map 16.1). All major lines tried to secure access to New York in the east and to Chicago and St. Louis in the west. On the more northerly routes, the New York Central completed a through line from New York to Chicago by 1877, and the Erie did the same only a few years later. After the mid-1880s, the trunk lines filled the gaps, gaining access to secondary railroad centers and building feeder lines in a north-south direction.
From 1864 to 1900, the greatest percentage of track, varying from one-third to nearly one-half of the country’s total annual construction, was laid in the Great Plains states. Chicago became the chief terminus, the center of a web of rails extending north, west, and south. St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Denver became secondary centers. The Southeast and the Southwest lagged both in railroad construction and in the combination of local lines into through systems. Sparseness of population and warin-duced poverty accounted in part for the backwardness of the Southeast, but the competition of coastal shipping was also a deterrent to railroad growth. The only southern transmountain crossing utilized before 1880 was the Chesapeake and Ohio, and, except for the Southern, no main north-south line was completed until the 1890s.
MAP 16.1
----Southern Pacific
' Union Pacific
¦ Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Illinois Central Gulf
Today's Basic Railroad Network
The modern railroad network of the United States reflects the great waves of railroad building that occurred in the nineteenth century.
Table 16.1 on this page shows the expansion of total line mileage nationally. One feature is unsurprising: The eventual slowing in percentage jumps in mileage added. In pioneering work on economic development Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets (1929) and Arthur Burns (1934) showed that rapid industrial expansion was typically followed by a tapering off in the growth rate (and speed of productivity advance).
Production, in cotton, and in steamboating. It is interesting to note, however, that the total absolute mileage doubled in the 25 years preceding 1910. Work by Albert Fishlow (1972a) reveals three major waves in the late nineteenth-century pattern of main track construction: 1868-1873, 1879-1883, and 1886-1892. These construction booms ended promptly with each of the major financial crises of the period: 1873, 1882, and 1893. As J. R. T. Hughes (1970) has argued, this is not terribly surprising when we recall that railroad construction depended heavily on borrowed money. Railroad construction had a strong influence on aggregate demand and business cycles. It accounted for 20 percent of U. S. gross capital formation in the 1870s, 15 percent of the total in the 1880s, and
7.5 percent of the total in each of the remaining decades until 1920. These investments reinforced and responded to swings in the business cycle. In 1920, railroad employment reached its peak, about 1 worker in 20.
World History
