Railroad History: Changing the Face of America

In Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," Tess and Angel deliver cans of milk to a railroad station. Tess had never seen a train before, and as the milk cans are loaded onto the train, she says with wonder, “Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts tomorrow, won't they?” The fact that goods—and people—could be removed to a distant location dozens or even hundreds of miles away overnight was hard for Tess, and millions of others, to grasp.

In this age of automobiles and airplanes we don't think of railroads much anymore, unless, as I do, we happen to live near one. Not long ago a visiting friend, hearing a strange rumbling, said nervously, “What's that?!”
“A train,” I replied and he calmed down. The fact is we still move tons of materials daily by rail, more cheaply and rapidly than by almost any other means. In a town in Wyoming where my cousin lives, 18 miles of railroad trains carrying coal from the mines leave town every day.

In the village where I grew up, I could walk to the station, buy a ticket for about $1 and be in the center of New York City in less than an hour. During the commuter hours in the morning and evening, trains stopped at our station about every 20 minutes—Grand Central Station in the city seemed like the hub of the universe. Traveling to visit my grandmother in western New York aboard the Empire State Express each summer seemed the height of luxury.

This project invites you to delve into the history of American railroads. Libraries are filled with books on the subject, and railroad museums can be found in many states. (My favorite is in Sacramento, where one can see, among other things, a locomotive named for Governor Leland Stanford.)

Resources

• The National Railroad Museum site in Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a section on Railroad History.
• A railroad history Timeline from the San Diego Rail Museum.
• The New York Central Railroad Museum as a page of links to sites about railroads.
• There is a Railroad History magazine, which you can probably find in many libraries.
• Link to the Pacific Railway Act of 1862
• A site called RailsandTrails has an interesting collection of transportation documents, including timetables, schedules, charts, etc.
• The Union Pacific Railroad history site.
• In Colorado, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad still runs steam trains daily for railroad buffs.

Railroad Museums

• The Baltimore & Ohio Museum in Baltimore has a rich collection of railroad information.
• The Railroad Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is about a 2/1-2 hour drive from Annandale. Lancaster County is the home of many Amish people.
• The Fairfax Station Railroad Museum is one of abut a dozen railroad museums in the state of Virginia.
• The National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian in DC has a transportation section.

You may not be able to find too many documents, but start with these sites and put together an essay on how you think railroads changed America. For starters, you could consider how railroads affected our ideas of time. Note that our time zones—Eastern, Central, Mountian and Pacific—were created by and for railroads. You might also consider how railroads pushed other technologies forward in areas of communication, steel production and so on.

History 122 | Projects for Part 1 | Updated May 20, 2006 2:22 PM