Railroads

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, survivorship of a railroad is manifested through railroad consolidation. From 1865 to 1910, most of the small railroad companies were steadily absorbed into railroad empires. By 1900, 95 percent of the railroad mileage was consolidated in six systems.

During this period, substantial strides were accomplished in perfecting rail- road engineering, accounting, and management. Each improvement in rail operation brought more and more coordination over freight loads of greater volume and with increasing speed. In 1861, the American rail network was far from integrated. Roads entering the same terminal city had no direct rail connections; they used different gauges and different types of equipment. Therefore, cars of one railroad could not be transferred to the track of another. As a result, the transshipment costs were still high. Reduction of such costs and delays required interim cooperation. The necessary standardized equipment and operating procedures called for detailed and prolonged discussions among the managers of many railroads. They had to work out and then put into operation standardized operating procedures and equipment.

Associated with these problems were several of a technical nature, one of which was the durability of iron rails. In the mid-1860s, a new process in the iron industry allowed for steel to be made into track which proved successful, even at initial high cost, in wearing much longer and bearing much heavier loads. By the 1870s it was thought that no other single technological influence had been effective in reducing cost of rail transportation and improving the financial condition of major rail lines. The introduction of the steel rail is the technological manifestation under consideration in this research as affecting the survival chances of a railroad. The railroad that innovated earlier with the steel rail is seen as improving its probability for survival during the late nineteenth century. Economic historians rank the steel rail as very important in the growth of productivity. Steel rails were rapidly adopted (they were first used in the 1860s and by 1890 they accounted for 80 percent of all track mileage in Innovation.

Before the spread of rail transport, nearly all heavy goods had to be transported by boats and ships, which are much slower than railroads. Moreover, railways were built to places not on waterways. (The lack of good transport systems holds back industrial development).



Trains were developed during the Industrial Revolution and were arguably that period's most important product. In many ways railroads made the Industrial Revolution possible. Factories could not run without a constant supply of raw materials, or without a method of moving goods to market.

Breakthroughs in steel processing led to a boom in railroad construction.




A man by the name of Henry Bessemer invented the massive producing steel process in the mid-1850s; allowing steel to be produced quickly and cheaply.
This helped increase steel production from 77,000 tons in 1870 to more than 1 million tons in 1879
As steel dropped in price, so did the cost of building railroads, generating a boom in railroad construction.
Growth of railroads helped the country expand and prosper.