ARTICLE: The Coming of the Iron Road

Railways Arrive in the USA

The advent of railroads in the US changed the face of the country forever. The sheer, continental size of the country meant that trains would be done on a scale unseen pretty much anywhere else on earth, and the feats of engineering required to cross rivers like the Mississippi, mountain ranges like the rockies, were continuous, epic challenges. By the beginning of the Second World War, railroads in the USA accounted for a third of all those on the planet, but I wanted to rabbit hole on the very beginning of America’s railroad history…

In Britain, railways were built in a well established country, linking together towns and cities that had existed for centuries. This wasn’t always the case across the Atlantic, and in some cases railroads in America ended up being far more than connections. Because westward expansion was happening at the same time, (see article about the voices of poor indigenous peoples from a couple of weeks ago) railways would end up helping to fill in the map of the United States, as railroads went down and the fate of towns and where new ones might pop up was linked to their development. I’m getting ahead of myself though, because the initial motivations for building railroads were more humble.

Lets take a moment to lol at the naysayers who thought that rail travel had no future. One Boston newspaper remarked that a railroad linking Boston to Albany would be ‘as useless as a railroad to the moon.’ And in Ohio, one school board claimed that trains were the work of the devil. In fairness, loons aside, people didn’t throw money at railroads without question at the beginning. Usually, it took the construction of one, then a period of time as everyone else stared at it to see if it would be profitable or not, before any boom in construction started.

In the US, if we set aside the Granite Railway of Massachusetts, which ran for a princely three miles from 1826, the first proper railroad to carry freight and passengers was the Baltimore & Ohio, which began operation in 1830. The reason for this one? People in the port of Baltimore with goods coming in wanted to open their markets up and do business with those settling on the other side of the Appalachians. In 1830, horses pulled the first cars 26 miles and the railroad was open for business. The bold ambition was to reach the Ohio River. That would not happen until 1852, but by 1834, the line had reached Sandy Hook in Maryland, some 65 miles away from Baltimore. It took almost that long just to build up to carrying 300 passengers a day, convincing them that it was a better alternative to canals and stage coaches, which gives you some idea of peoples slowness on occasion to accept this new mode of transport.

The first stone of the Baltimore & Ohio was laid on 4th July 1828 by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who at the time was the last living person to have signed the Declaration of Independence. (Wikipedia/B&O Railroad Museum)

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