The Railway Age and After: Economic Development and Regulatory Controls

American railroad mileage soared during the nineteenth century, from a paltry twenty-three miles in 1830 to an impressive 163,597 route miles in 1890; more than seventy thousand miles were installed during the boom years of the 1880s. Following the catastrophic depression of 1893–97, major construction resumed that fleshed out the nation’s railroad coverage. Finally, in 1916, the cobweb of steel rails peaked at 254,251 miles. Throughout these construction periods Americans realized that railroads, being proverbial magic carpets, were lifelines for economic prosperity and wide-ranging mobility. Understandably, townspeople, farmers, ranchers, miners, and others did all that they could to gain railroad service. This enthusiasm for the Railway Age and its impact is addressed in various monographs. These include Paul Wallace Gates’s pathbreaking work The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work about the Illinois Central’s effect on the Illinois prairie; Richard Overton’s Burlington West, a chronicle of the Burlington Railroad’s role in settling portions of the Corn Belt; Richard Orsi’s Sunset Limited, an examination of how the Southern Pacific developed the Golden State; and Claire Strom’s Profiting from the Plains, about efforts by the Great Northern to stimulate growth in the Upper Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Readers seeking broader overview studies should peruse Robert William Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth and Carter Goodrich’s Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890.

Following the Civil War, the love affair with railroads at times turned to discontent. Consumer complaints focused on rates and services. There was strong opposition to the Iowa Pool, a non-binding, rate-setting arrangement between Chicago-based carriers and the Union Pacific interchange through the Omaha Gateway. This traffic agreement is the focus of Julius Grodinsky’s monograph The Iowa Pool: A Study in Railroad Competition, 1870–84. Initially, growing anger and public protests centered in four states in the Upper Midwest: Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa, resulting in the Granger Movement of the 1870s.  George H. Miller wrote the classic study on what became the harbinger of meaningful railroad regulation, Railroads and the Granger Laws, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of this multistate crusade.

Legal, regulatory, and politically focused studies also help readers understand the Railway Age. An excellent legal analysis of the industry is James W. Ely’s Railroads and American Law. Although historians and political scientists have included aspects of state and federal regulation, two of the leading works represent the thinking of left- and right-wing leaning scholars. For the former interpretation, see Gabriel Kolko’s Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916, which explores the scope of regulation during the Progressive Era. He concludes that rate reforms were largely a fraud, contending that the railroad enterprise largely structured such national legislation as the Hepburn Act of 1906 and the Mann-Elkins Act four years later. Covering the right-wing perspective, Albro Martin sees progressive reformers as having been highly successful in Enterprise Denied. In his mind their repeated victories at the federal level led to decline, resulting in an industry that experienced long-lasting financial injury. Mark Aldrich discusses less controversial legislation, examining regulatory controls over matters of railroad safety from 1828 to 1965 in Death Rode the Rails, and from 1965 to 2015 in Back on Track. In much the same vein, two books by Richard Saunders, Jr., Merging Lines and Main Lines, focus on the complex topic of railroad mergers during the periods 1900–70 and 1970–2002, respectively. Although most mergers were not especially contentious, one gained widespread criticism, namely the union of the Pennsylvania; New York Central; and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroads, which resulted in the Penn Central Transportation Company in 1968. In less than two years, this mismanaged merger led to the then largest business failure in American history. The upshot was federal intervention with legislation that created the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) in 1976. Given that there were other troubled railroads in the East and Midwest, financial relief measures also became law during the Penn Central crisis.