Railroads: The First Big Business 459later explained, “I fixed on the railroad system as the
most developing force and the largest field of the day,
and determined to attach myself to it.” Adams’s judg-
ment was acute: For the next twenty-five years the
railroads were probably the most significant element
in American economic development, railroad execu-
tives the most powerful people in the country.
Railroads were important first as an industry in
themselves. Fewer than 35,000 miles of track existed
when Lee laid down his sword at Appomattox. In 1875
railroad mileage exceeded 74,000 and the skeleton of
the network was complete. Over the next two decades
the skeleton was fleshed out. In 1890 the mature but
still-growing system took in over $1 billion in passen-
ger and freight revenues. (The federal government’s
income in 1890 was only $403 million.) The value of
railroad properties and equipment was more than
$8.7 billion. Thenational railroad debt of $5.1 billion
was almost five times the national debt of $1.1 billion!
By 1900 the nation had 193,000 miles oftrack.
The emphasis in railroad construction after 1865
was on organizing integrated systems. The lines had
high fixed costs: taxes, interest on their bonds, main-
tenance of track and rolling stock, and salaries of
office personnel. A short train with half-empty cars
required almost as many workers and as much fuel to
operate as a long one jammed with freight or passen-
gers. To earn profits the railroads had to carry as much
traffic as possible. They therefore spread out feeder
lines to draw business to their main lines the way the
root network of a tree draws water into its trunk.
Before the Civil War, passengers and freight could
travel by rail from beyond Chicago and St. Louis to the
Atlantic coast, but only after the war did true interre-
gional trunk lines appear. In 1861, for example, the
New York Central ran from Albany to Buffalo. One
could proceed from Buffalo to Chicago, but on a differ-
ent company’s trains. In 1867 the New York Central
passed into the hands of “Commodore” Cornelius
Vanderbilt, who had made a large fortune in the ship-
ping business. Vanderbilt already controlled lines run-
ning from Albany to New York City; now he merged
these properties with the New York Central. In 1873 he
integrated the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern into
his empire and two years later the Michigan Central. At
his death in 1877 the New York Central operated a net-
work of over 4,500 miles of track between New York
City and most of the principal cities of the Midwest.
While Vanderbilt was putting together the New
York Central complex, Thomas A. Scott was fusing
roads to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and
Chicago to his Pennsylvania Railroad, which linkedThe Union Railroad Station in Montgomery, Alabama, was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, the nation’s foremost architect in the
late nineteenth century. Richardson borrowed ideas from the past, including arches that evoked ancient Rome. The building’s
massiveness and horizontal lines suggested the power and reach of the railroads: the American empire as built on steel rails.