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The American Railroad Network, 1861-1890 (The Railroads)

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It is hard to imagine that any bit of data on the subject was missed. Most of it is presented "as is", so this is a compilation rather than an analysis. There are a lot of photos. They look like photocopies, so the clarity is not what might be hoped for. Still, this is a unique and information filled reference.

Everyone who studies American railroad history needs a copy of The American Railroad Network 1861-1890. I own an orriginal copy, without any photographs, but this doesn't dimininish the value of this great work.

Even a short railroad was an incretably expensive business, and so the early railroad builders didn't dream that it was possible for railroads to criss-cross the nation. So most of the early railroadds were built to help THEIR CITY trade goods with THEIR REGION. This resulted in a bunch of short lines that often deliberatly would not connect to a compettetors railroad. Yet, if someone wanted to ship goods across country, then the goods had to be unloaded, carted accross town, and reloaded. Sometimes goods would have to be unloaded and reladed many times.

This book is the story of railroads learning to cooperate with each other in order to speed up the flow of goods and passengers. There are chapters on the problems of the three main regions, standerizing the rail guage, and another on the express rail business.

The best part of the book are the three fold-out regional maps which clearly show all of the nation's railroads as of 1861. At that time, there were six different gauges (or widths between the rails) scattered about the nation. Each gauge is shown in a differnt color. This however, does not include the famous 3-foot Narrow Gauge that was so popular in the 1870s and 1880s.