RAILROAD 



4920 



RAILROADS 



on the tracks of another. Many fantastic- 

 stories are told to explain how four feet. ci<:ht 

 and one-half inches came to be the standard 

 gauge, but the most plausible explanation is 

 that early cars measured five feet from outside 

 of wheel to outside of wheel, each wheel being 

 an inch and three-quarters thick. 



Early Railroads. The railway had its begin- 

 nings in the coal mines of England, where for 

 several centuries timbers were laid lengthwise 

 for the wheels of the carts to run on. Later 

 the timbers were covered with iron, and be- 

 fore the nineteenth century were replaced by 

 u rails. The first railroad of this kind 

 in America was that built at Quincy, Mass., in 

 1826, to carry stones for the Bunker Hill 

 Monument. The first locomotive to run on a 

 railroad was put in operation near Cardiff, 

 Wales, in 1804, but it soon broke the rails. 

 Others succeeded it, however, and in 1825 a 

 regular passenger service was established on 

 the Stockton & Darlington line, in England. 

 The Baltimore & Ohio, chartered in 1827, was 

 the first one in the world built to be a common 

 carrier, but it did not adopt steam engines until 

 after another American line, the South Caro- 

 lina Railroad, had done so in 1830. 



Some Figures. Below are the statistics of the 

 leading railroad nations, considered in three dif- 

 ferent ways: 

 Greatest Total Mileage. 



United States 265,000 



Russia 50,000 



Germany 40,000 



British India 35,000 



France 32,000 



Mileage per 10,000 Inhabitants. 



Australia 41.3 



Canada 38.1 



Argentina 27.2 



New Zealand 27.1 



United States 25.9 



Mileage per 1,000 Square Miles. 



Belgium 479.3 



Luxemburg 326.7 



Switzerland 223.3 



Great Britain 195.4 



Germany 189.7 



Consult Crandall and Barnes' Railroad Con- 

 struction; Haney's Congressional History of 

 Railways. 



Related Subject*. The reader who wishes 

 further information on certain phases of the gen- 

 eral subject of railroads is referred to the follow- 

 ing articles in these volumes 

 Cape-to-Cairo Railway Monorail, Suspended 

 Common Carrier Municipal Ownership 



Electric Railway Railroads, Transconti- 



Eminent Domain nental 



Interstate Commerce Transportation 



Act Trans-Siberian Railway 



Locomotive 



The subhead Trantfortatio* in the articles on 

 the various countries, states and provinces may 

 also be consulted. 



RAILROADS, TRANSCONTINENTAL, a term 

 frequently used to distinguish the great systems 

 that traverse North America from the region 

 of the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast. 

 When engineers undertook the first surveys to 

 find passes through the mountains, the coun- 

 try was a wilderness between Missouri and 

 California. The difficulties were twofold 

 physical and financial and they were enor- 

 mous. In no department of its industrial life 

 has America produced men of finer minds or 

 of keener constructive vision than the pioneer 

 builders of its railroads. They literally created 

 a civilization where the Indian and the prairie 

 dog alone had flourished. 



The discovery of gold in California gave an 

 impetus to projects for rail lines to the west- 

 ern coast. As early as 1853 Congress ordered 

 surveys, but private capital was not eager to 

 risk itself in a venture so dubious as that of 

 building a railroad through thousands of miles 

 of uninhabited country. Moreover, the finan- 

 cial crisis of 1857 and the outbreak of the War 

 of Secession interrupted for a time industrial 

 progress. Finally the government came to the 

 assistance of investors with generous gifts of 

 the public land; it further engaged to pay the 

 interest on the bonds should the company be 

 unable to do so. With this encouragement, the 

 Central Pacific was pushed from Omaha to 

 San Francisco, being opened to traffic in 1869. 

 This was a kind of substitute for the North- 

 west Passage, sought by navigators for four 

 centuries. 



Railway construction was immensely stimu- 

 lated in the Northwestern states after the coun- 

 try had weathered the crisis of 1873, and several 

 years later the scene of activity was transferred 

 to the southwestern and Rocky Mountain 

 region. The Santa Fe was pushed courageously 

 across a desert, and the building of all the 

 early lines was accomplished at the cost of 

 much hardship and no little actual peril from 

 savage men and savage beasts. Naturally rail 

 development progressed more slowly in Canada, 

 as a result of the vastly smaller population. 

 The Canadian Pacific, from Montreal to Van- 

 couver, was completed with the aid of the gov- 

 ernment in 1886. It now extends from Saint 

 John, on the Bay of Fundy, and from Quebec, 

 on the Saint Lawrence River, to Vancouver. 

 Its length is about 3,380 miles. The Grand 

 Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern are 



