This is Part Two of a series on passenger rail in the U.S. Part One can be found here.
If instead of getting on his train to Boston, our proto-traveler took a time machine to the year 1826—the year the first commercial railways were chartered in the United States—"bleak” wouldn’t even begin to describe the prospects of a trip to Boston from New York City, which could be expected to take a day and a half by stagecoach.
But things were changing, and fast.
Early Development
Whereas today’s American rail planners today consistently fail to take lessons from superior rail development abroad (California High Speed Rail is just one of many projects that could’ve avoided its current woes if it had done so), in the early 19th century, American entrepreneurs learned from and emulated others voraciously.
Three Baltimore residents, two of whom would go on to help found the famous Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (better known to Monopoly fans everywhere as the B&O) traveled to England in the 1820s to observe the country’s development of rail firsthand.
This copy-catting arose partly out of necessity: the innovations behind steam-propelled rail were European, not domestically derived—America was several decades behind in its industrial development. But Americans payed close attention to the developments of rail and steam propulsion technology where they were being developed—across the pond—especially its opening of the first modern, double-tracked steam railroad, which opened in 1830.
Remarkably, the United States followed with a railroad of its own in three short years, the Charleston and Hamburg Line, connecting Charleston and Hamburg, South Carolina, with a 136-mile, steam-propelled link.
It looked something like this:
Early lines like the Charleston and Hamburg and the B&O soon spurred development of a robust, nationwide network—the envy of the rest of the world.
The takeaway: good train systems borrow, great train systems steal. Today, American planners feel as though everything we build must reinvent the wheel. This has proven to be a disaster. In the 1820s and 30s, American planners took innovations liberally and used them to create growth and development on a scale that was singularly American.
Tomorrow, we’ll look into the common carrier charters that railroad operators signed up for.
This is a freeform daily newsletter about the transportation industry: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I take shallow dives into topics that I think are interesting, including write ups of startups in the space, historical explorations, market analyses, company and personal profiles, interviews with industry players, and occasional personal essays.
Thanks for reading—and please let me know if you have any feedback or if there is anything you would like to see me cover.
Ride well,
DS