Class 1 freight rails: part 1 - historical overview

Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific Kansas City, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific

In the gaseous hot ball of 19th century US rail activity roils the primordial elements of American industry: a technology startling in its potential yet exaggerated in its promise by visionaries and hucksters, transformed into shape by private enterprise with government aid and later controlled and extended by the ambitious and vicious. The atrophying influence of parochial interests by the long reach of commerce enabled by rails chronicling our country’s reluctant transition from a collection of states to a unified nation. The indefatigable pursuit of more. The booms, the busts.

Today’s Class 1¹ freight carriers, rewound in time to the early 1800s, would unravel into a vast collection of local projects, designed to connect nearby towns, haul coal from mines, and feed into waterways. In the ensuing decades, entrepreneurs, with enthusiastic support of local merchants in major seaports like Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and DC vying to establish themselves as premier trading hubs, reached inland for access to new markets.

This was an inherently uncertain enterprise that repelled investment. Whereas in Europe, established cities long preceded the rails, in this newly settled continent one could not quite know what they were building toward or even what they were building toward would eventually become. With private capital hard to come by, rails relied on generous government support, including eminent domain rights, land grants, tax exemptions, loans, and even permission to hold lotteries (the US states were able to subsidize rail development in significant part by issuing bonds to British investors, who would be lured into financing successions of US rail manias in the 1800s). Ambition converged with capital and technology to expand 1k track miles in 1835 to around 9k by 1850 and nearly 30k by 1860, rivaling the length of all the rail laid in the rest of the world².

After the 1850s, scattered skeins of parochial track began to coalesce into ever denser networks along the Eastern seaboard. Ten local railroads in New York state merged to become New York Central and another series of combinations created the Pennsylvania Railroad (the “Pennsy”), with Philadelphia as its hub. NY Central and Pennsy ran alongside two smaller Eastern trunks, the Erie and the Baltimore & Ohio. Those networks converged on Chicago (among other cities), which emerged as the dominant gateway for east-west traffic, to interchange traffic with “Granger” railroads, entrenched but poorly run outfits built to transport agricultural goods to market. The big 4 would thrive during the Civil War, carrying ammunition and materials to the Union Army and American grain to European countries crippled by light harvests.

The explosive energy of the 1850s rail mania could not be confined to first movers on the east. In the Midwest, building on generous land grants, Illinois Central Railroad emerged as the longest railroad in the world in 1856, with most of its 700 miles of track a direct shot south from its main trunk, which stretched from the southern tip to the northwest corner of Illinois. IC, along with Mobile & Ohio, which ran from southern lllinois to Alabama, siphoned traffic away from shippers who ferried freight up and down the Mississippi River. On the east-west axis, Chicago & Rock ran past the Mississippi River into Council Bluffs, IA.

In the relative disarray of the South – where rails, disallowed from crossing state boundaries by local governments who feared losing control, never consolidated into long distance networks, and were starved of investment and badly damaged by the Civil War besides – the Louisville & Nashville emerged as the only major trunk, and even it resisted connections with the north until the 1880s. Financial ruin triggered by the panic of 1873 would force weaker short lines into larger systems, fostering the creation of networks that had by then been nearly 30 years in the making up north.