Two Great Groups of Railroads; East to West, and North to South—Some of the Giant Roads—Canals—Development of the Country’s Natural Resources—Railroad Projects—Locomotives Imported—First Locomotive of American Manufacture—Opposition of Canal-owners to Railroads—Development of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Mines—The Merging of Small Lines into Systems.
Fifteen or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of the United States. Measured by corporations, known by a vast variety of differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this great number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common purpose in operation, to less than a score of transportation organisms, each with its own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.
The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so follow the natural lines of traffic within the country. Two or three systems—such as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson—run at variance with this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country routes. A few properties have no long-reaching routes, but derive their incomes from the transportation business of a comparatively small exclusive territory, as the Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the New Haven in Southern New England, both of them recently brought under a more or less direct single control, and the Long Island. Still other properties find their greatest revenue in bringing anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mountains to the seaboard, and among these are the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia & Reading systems.
The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These break themselves quite naturally into two divisions—one group east of the Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim to find an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms reach Chicago and St. Louis, where the other group of transcontinentals begin.
Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking as great railroads within this territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie. Several of the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange point, about half way between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South, reaching between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic of the centres of the section, now rapidly increasing its industrial importance.
The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of mileage. The eastern roads, serving a closely-built country, carry an almost incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching into a country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called Harriman lines—the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific—occupy the centre of the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Santa Fe and the Gould roads share this territory.
To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific, together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway, another approaching completion in the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The “Grangers” (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that occupy the eastern end of this western territory,—the St. Paul, the Gould lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island—are just now showing pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time.
The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating. They tell with precise accuracy the development of American transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our review of them must be cursory.
When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to Baltimore, making the price of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first that a great effort must be made toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own reward.
The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo—from Atlantic tidewater to the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles, and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time.