By 1850 which states had railroads

The car was 40 feet in length, featuring 10 upper and 10 lower berths containing mattresses and sheets but no sheets. It also boasted a small toilet, wash basin, wood-stove for heating purposes, and candles for lighting. While rudimentary by later standards it was quite revolutionary for the time. Railroads in the s also saw a major shift in traffic flow. Before trains became a reliable means of transportation the fastest way to move people and goods was via the water.

For this traffic to move from the East to Midwest required the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers which flowed in a predominantly southern direction, eventually reaching New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

With railroads building directly westward into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois traffic could flow directly east-west with Chicago fast become the terminating western hub because of its location along Lake Michigan. The city also was the ideal northern terminating point for railroads built north-south such as the Illinois Central and after the western railroads opened they chose Chicago as their eastern terminating hub since so many railroads already served the city and interchanged people and goods there.

Railroads in the s and the expansion that took place during the decade set the stage for what would transpire during the Civil War and how the campaign played out. The North would hold a commanding advantage in the war not only because most of the country's industrial base was centered in the Northeast but also because most of the railroads with most of the trackage centered in the Northeast and Midwest.

Aside from the war other factors that were becoming issues at that time included different track gauges affecting traffic interchange and the limited number of bridges crossing major waterways.

In a gentleman by the name of Andre Kristopans put together a web page highlighting virtually every unit every out-shopped by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division. Alas, in the site closed. However, Don Strack rescued the data and transferred it over to his UtahRails.

If you are researching anything EMD related please visit this page first. The information includes original numbers, serials, and order numbers. Wes Barris's SteamLocomotive. The amount of information found there is quite staggering; historical backgrounds of wheel arrangements, types used by virtually every railroad, preserved and operational examples, and even those used in other countries North America and beyond.

It is difficult to truly articulate just how much material can be found at this website. It is a must visit!

Today, there are tens of thousands of miles scattered throughout the country. Many were pulled up in the 's and 's although others were removed long before that. It is an excellent resource with thousands of historic maps on file throughout the country. Just type in a town or city and click on the timeline of maps at the bottom of the page!

All content copyright American-Rails. Contact Us. About American-Rails. Creating The Site. In the decades before the s, cities in the South seemed to have little to do with one another: information rarely circulated between them, commodities were traded more to the North, especially New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and travelers headed out of the region rather than across and within it.

Historians have often dismissed Southern railroad development before the Civil War as antithetical to the plantation system of the South and indicative of the region's limited priorities.

Because slavery encouraged local production of cheap goods and low consumer demand, they contend, rails carried cash crops to market, but brought little back into the plantation. Built to carry light loads, the argument goes, Southern railroads could not withstand the heavy hauling of the war and they broke down quickly. Southern railroad management was inefficient, fractious, and ill suited to large-scale business operations, critics have charged, and because Southern roads were laid with track produced in England or the North and operated with locomotives built and fitted out in shops outside of the South, the network, such as it was, could not be maintained in the war.

For a traditional argument along these lines, see Robert C. There was fierce competition between railroad owners who did not want their equipment to ever fall into the hands of their rivals.

The lines of competing railroads rarely met, even if they ran through the same town. The railroads also lacked a standard gauge, so that trains of different companies ran on tracks anywhere from four feet to six feet wide.

Anything that needed to be transferred from one railroad to another had to be hauled across town and loaded onto new freight cars. Maintaining the trains and rail lines became a major problem as well. Most of the Confederate government's manufacturing efforts concentrated on supplying equipment and ammunition for the military. The railroads were owned by civilians and the Confederate government opposed taking over civilian industries.

The railroads therefore began to run into difficulties very quickly. They did not have the parts to replace worn out equipment. The Southern railroads, before the war, had imported iron from England. Once the war began, the Union blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports was very effective in shutting off that supply. Locomotives and tracks began to wear out. By a quarter of the South's locomotives needed repairs and the speed of train travel in the South had dropped to only 10 miles an hour from 25 miles an hour in Fuel was a problem as well.

Southern locomotives were fueled by wood--a great deal of it.