<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like most of the tales told by Simon Winchester in his book <\/span>The Men Who United The States – America\u2019s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible <\/span><\/i>(2013 – HarperCollins), the story of American railroads does not begin with trains.\u00a0 One has to go back a little further in time and talk about the development of steam power and steam powered river travel before tackling the topic of travel by rail.\u00a0 The concept of steam as a power source goes back much farther in time, back to the days of Hero\u2019s Engine.\u00a0 In the 1st century of the Christian Era (CE), a Greek-Egyptian mathematician and engineer named Hero of Alexandria described the device, also known as Hero\u2019s aeolipile.\u00a0 It is considered to be the first steam engine (or reaction steam turbine) and consisted of a spherical ball containing water.\u00a0 As the sphere was heated, the steam generated would flow out of two right angle tubes on either side of the sphere.\u00a0 The escaping steam caused it to spin around a central axis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The aeolipile was not a practical source of power, did no real work, and was not a direct predecessor of the industrial type of steam engines to come, but it did demonstrate the concept well.\u00a0 The volume of steam is 1,600 times that of the water it is made from.\u00a0 The spinning of Hero\u2019s engine certainly showed the escaping steam produced force when directed out of the sphere.\u00a0 One of the earliest champions of steam power in the Americas happened to be Irishman Christopher Colles.\u00a0 His first claim to fame was producing America\u2019s first highway map in 1789.\u00a0 Fifteen years before, just after he arrived on these shores from Limerick, he built steam powered pumps for water works in Philadelphia and New York, but neither worked very well.\u00a0 Colles the map maker did, ironically, begin the trend that would compete with the roadways he had mapped, and in his wake, other inventors were entering the game.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ten years before Colles, Robert Watt invented the condensing steam engine.\u00a0 When a watch and button maker\/silversmith from Connecticut named John Fitch built a paddle boat powered by a Watt-type steam engine in 1787, it chugged along the Delaware River not far from the site of Washington\u2019s famous crossing.\u00a0 Not able to attract investors to his idea of steam powered water transportation, he faded from the historical record.\u00a0 He always felt his pioneering work would be recognized one day and sadly, in his despair, took a fatal overdose of opium in 1798, never receiving his due for having an idea ahead of its time. \u00a0 In 1807, Pennsylvanian Robert Fulton would likewise use a Watt engine to power dual fifteen foot paddlewheels on his craft called the <\/span>North River Steamboat Clermont <\/span><\/i>(later shortened to just the <\/span>Clermont<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0 It is Fulton who is remembered in the history of steam powered travel.\u00a0 The boat began making regular trips between New York and Albany in a remarkable thirty-two hours, regardless of the wind or weather.\u00a0 Ten years later, the first steam powered paddle wheeler would push its way up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati.\u00a0 Within the next two years, there would be sixty vessels plying the waters of the Big Muddy.\u00a0 The trip up the Mississippi took 25 days in 1817 and ten years later, that number had been lowered to a week.\u00a0 John Fitch must have been turning over in his grave.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first steam locomotive (aptly named <\/span>Locomotive No. 1<\/span><\/i>) chugged out of the station in northeast England in 1825.\u00a0 It took two hours to pull the thirty coal cars containing 700 passengers the twelve miles between the mining town of Stockton and the port of Darlington.\u00a0 The first American locomotive hauled nothing and went nowhere – it didn\u2019t even have a name.\u00a0 It was built by a rich elderly New Yorker named John Stevens.\u00a0 Its journey around a small circular track in Hoboken, New Jersey is, like John Fitch, a forgotten piece of American transportation history.\u00a0 Stevens\u2019 role as the father of the American railway was inspired by him hearing the sad story of John Fitch\u2019s 1787 experiment.\u00a0 The <\/span>American National Biography <\/span><\/i>said of Stevens, \u201cFrom that moment [hearing Fitch\u2019s story] until his death he devoted himself and his fortune to the advancement of steam-propelled transportation both on water and on land.\u201d\u00a0 As Winchester says, \u201cSteam, in other words, became John Stevens\u2019 religion, in which he had unwavering faith.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Stevens\u2019 progress toward using steam powered watercraft on the Hudson River was slow developing.\u00a0 He drew up plans for a ferry system, a bridge, and a tunnel to cross the Hudson.\u00a0 Stevens was a century and\u00a0 a half ahead of time as these would all come to pass in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n As he aged, he lost his interest in boats and turned his attention to railroads.\u00a0 His first plan was a timber rail line from New York City through the Hudson-Mohawk Gap in 1815, a full decade before the Erie Canal would utilize the same route.\u00a0 Carriages and wagons with flanged wheels would be propelled along these rails by steam engines.\u00a0 The circular demonstration railway he built was his last-ditch effort to convince the legislature his plan would work.\u00a0 His plan still did not get the backing he sought, but his idea set off the widespread development of steam powered railroads.\u00a0 Only two years after his demonstration, there were a number of full-size railways springing up in the American East.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It would be Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, who would turn over the first shovel of sod to start construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.\u00a0 Carroll said, \u201cI consider this among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.\u201d\u00a0 Stevens died in 1838 as things began to move at a more rapid pace.\u00a0 His two sons became the directors of a lucrative route built between New York and Philadelphia with one also being credited with inventing the cowcatcher that would famously grace the front of American locomotives.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The pace of railway building was furious between 1828 and 1868.\u00a0 The Civil War and the Long Depression of 1873-79 slowed things for a while but picked up shortly after.\u00a0 Winchester demonstrates the rapidity of railway construction by stating, \u201cWhen Tennessee\u2019s Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, he traveled to the White House in a horse-drawn carriage.\u00a0 When he left office after his second term, he boarded a steam train for home.\u00a0 At the start of his presidency, there were less than twenty miles of track laid in the country and eight years later, the number had increased to nearly three thousand miles.\u00a0 Still, it took a while to get things moving properly.\u00a0 When the B&O Railroad opened, the wagons and carriages were pulled by horses as no locomotives had been built.\u00a0 The first models were built in England and with their own railroad boom in progress, it took some time to obtain them.\u00a0 By 1939, however, American manufacturing had gotten into gear and produced more than three hundred locomotives of varying designs and sizes.\u00a0 Part of the rub was that the standard four-foot, eight and a half inch \u2018gauge\u2019 for tracks was not formalized until 1886.\u00a0 In 1839, there were six different gauges in use.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The American economy certainly felt a surge caused by railroads and by 1870, they were the second largest employer in the country after agriculture.\u00a0 Conversion from wood to coal fired locomotives stimulated mining and a whole industry grew up to fill the need for ties, rails, cars, and locomotives.\u00a0 Carloads of ore and grain could now be moved vast distances in short periods of time.\u00a0 The industrial revolution in the American East put the country, as Winchester sees it, \u201cOn its way toward global economic supremacy.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Social changes were also spurred by the spread of rails and iron horses.\u00a0 Travelers began carrying pocket watches because time zones were yet to be invented.\u00a0 Rapid travel to different cities on a relatively rigid schedule meant they needed to account for each railway keeping its own standard time.\u00a0 Clocks at the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Pittsburgh, for example, had many faces and multiple hands to keep track of the trains that made connections there with as many as fifty \u2018railroad times\u2019 in use in the East.\u00a0 New skills were in demand – the industry needed to train boilermakers, foundry workers, civil engineers, and business managers geared to expand railroads and business was chugging along quite nicely (sorry, had to get one RR joke in there).\u00a0 The era of vacations and leisure time were concepts spurred on by railroads – families could travel to vacation homes, lodges, and resorts quickly and cheaply.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Flying into Chicago gives one a bird\u2019s eye view of the enormous railyards that helped the Windy City grow.\u00a0 Sitting at the crossroads of northeastern rail traffic, the switching yards performed a daily dance getting raw materials and finished goods sorted out.\u00a0 Shipping on the Great Lakes combined with multiple rail lines meeting in the Chicago hub ensured products like lumber, coal, wheat, corn, mineral products, and any number of manufactured items could be directed to their rightful destinations.\u00a0 All these factors made the American Northeast attractive to industry and the people needed to make them go.\u00a0 The South, however, was not so fortunate.\u00a0 Southern railways were smaller and more localized than their kin in the North.\u00a0 The economic imbalance caused by this unequal development was instrumental in the rise of the Confederacy and the Civil War.\u00a0 The supremacy of the Northern railways ended up being a major factor for the Yanks as troop and supply movements aided their war effort and gave them a major advantage over the Rebs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It took but thirty years to have more than 27,000 miles of track criss-crossing America, but they were concentrated in the northern Midwest and East.\u00a0 Even though the idea of a transcontinental railroad was first mentioned in 1838, it would not be realized until Theodore Judah laid out the route in 1860.\u00a0 The young 24 year old easterner had made enough of a name for himself in the East to be hired to bring the first rail line in the West, one that would connect Sacramento with the newly opened Sierra Nevada goldfields.\u00a0 Judah soon realized the impact it would have on the nation to have a railway connection from coast to coast.\u00a0 He convinced an ailing President Buccanon to set the wheels in motion, so to speak.\u00a0 Route planning was proved to be a roadblock due to the sticky situation called \u2018slavery\u2019 – several proposed routes to the West were turned down because they crossed so called \u2018slave states\u2019.\u00a0 President Lincoln had more pressing things on his mind when he signed the Pacific Railway Act on July 1, 1862 (like defending the capital from the Confederate troops who were massing on the outskirts of town and writing the Emancipation Proclamation).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It took nearly a year just to sort out the gauge question.\u00a0 Lincoln passed a second railroad act in 1863 which set the gauge to the standard used at the time in Britain\u2019s Liverpool to Manchester line (which was also adapted throughout the United Kingdom).\u00a0 Though authorized and begun during the American Civil War (1861-1865), rapid progress was delayed until the conclusion of the conflict.\u00a0 Two companies were handed this monumental task.\u00a0 The publicly chartered Union Pacific Railroad Company was authorized to,\u00a0 \u201cLay out, locate, construct, furnish, maintain, and enjoy a continuous railroad and telegraph . . . from a point on the one hundreth meridian of longitude west from Greenwich, between the south margin of the valley of the Republican River and the north margin of the valley of the Platte River, to the western boundary of Nevada Territory.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A privately financed company out of San Francisco, the Central Pacific Railroad, was tasked to, \u201cConstruct a railroad and telegraph line from the Pacific coast . . . to the eastern boundaries of California. . .\u201d\u00a0 Section 10 of the act goes on stating, \u201cThe Central Pacific Railroad Company, after completing its road across said State, is authorized to continue the construction of said railroad and telegraph through the Territories of the United States to the Missouri River . . . until said roads shall meet and connect.\u201d\u00a0 The shorter Central Pacific line was started first with (a ceremonial shovel of dirt in January 1863) due to the monumental task of carving a railbed through the mountainous west.\u00a0 Ted Judah\u2019s plan called for the railroad to follow the Donner Pass, the route made infamous for the doomed Donner Party who had become stranded there some fourteen years earlier.\u00a0 Judah\u2019s persistence and planning made the Transcontinental Railroad possible, but he would not live to see its completion.\u00a0 He was bitten by a mosquito in 1863 on one of his many crossings of Panama and died in the autumn of that year.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When the big day arrived, after a two day weather delay, the May 10, 1869 joining of the two massive projects was celebrated in grand fashion.\u00a0 As Winchester describes the event, \u201cThe Union Pacific\u2019s gleaming black-and-brass train <\/span>No. 119<\/span><\/i> drew up to the most westerly end of the eastern line;\u00a0 The Central Pacific\u2019s great workhorse, the <\/span>Jupiter<\/span><\/i>, drew up, decorated with flags and buntings, to the easterly end of its line from the Pacific.\u00a0 Thousands waited in the sunshine, millions more around the country, promised the news by telegraph the instant that it happened.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIt\u201d being the driving of the so-called \u2018Golden Spike\u2019 to mark the completion of the line – but there was more to it than just the one \u2018Golden Spike\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was, of course, the 18 ounce pure golden spike donated by a wealthy San Francisco contractor.\u00a0 It was inscribed with, \u201c<\/span>May God continue the Unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the World.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>There was another spike made of pure silver, and a third made of an alloy of precious metals.\u00a0 These were too soft to be driven so they were to be placed in pre-drilled holes and \u2018tapped\u2019 into place.\u00a0 The fourth spike was made of iron with a small copper plate attached to the top which was connected to the telegraph lines laid in both directions during the construction.\u00a0 When former governor and senator of California, Leland Stanford (and yes, founder of the college that bears his name) struck the iron spike, a wire attached to his silver-plated maul would complete the circuit and send a message to both coasts:\u00a0 The line was complete.\u00a0 Just to be sure the message went through, a local telegraph operator had warned stations around the country that he would follow up the strike with three dots to confirm Stanford\u2019s completion of the \u2018Ceremony of the Golden Spike\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The cacophony of cannon fire, church bells, rockets, mortars, and marching bands marked the joining of both coasts by rail.\u00a0 The decorative \u2018last rail\u2019 (finally polished by a billiard table maker in the Bay City) was removed almost immediately, bound for a museum, as were the ceremonial spikes.\u00a0 So many of the other \u2018last rails\u2019 were torn up and carted away as souvenirs, guards had to be posted.\u00a0 The hub-bub in Promontory, Utah Territory wasn\u2019t the true final coast-to-coast connection.\u00a0 It would be four more years before a bridge would span the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa and passengers would no longer need to take a ferry to reboard the west bound trains in Omaha, Nebraska.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Fifty years after the \u2018Golden Spike\u2019, 250,000 miles of railway criss-crossed the nation with more to come.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Escanaba & Lake Superior Railroad removed the tracks between Rockland and Ontonagon after the closure of the paper mill in the latter.\u00a0 Perhaps an up-tick in the local economy will see this 12 mile section back in service one day.\u00a0 Stay tuned.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Cream with TRAIN TIME – what else would you expect?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like most of the tales told by Simon Winchester in his book The Men Who United The States – America\u2019s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible (2013 – HarperCollins), the story of American railroads does not begin with trains.\u00a0 One has to go back a little further in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2674"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2677,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}