Background: Railroads in American History

Railroads are tremendously important in the United States today. They carry a large percentage of all freight traffic and take 1.7 million Americans to work every day. Amtrak serves 31 million riders each year. Without railroads, economic activity would slow dramatically and the lives of millions of people would be more difficult and less pleasant.

However, for many people, railroads now operate in the background, whereas once they were front and center in American life. They were the biggest, fastest-growing business enterprises in Nineteenth Century America and a major part of the financial markets. They moved the vast majority of freight and the vast majority of long-distance passengers and employed hundreds of thousands of people. (If you go on a tour at a railroad museum, someone on the tour is likely to mention that they had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for a railroad.)

People traveled frequently by train through the 1950s, when the dominance of trains for inter-city passenger travel was ended in most of the country by a combination of the construction of the interstate highways, growing commercial air travel, and the rise in two-car families.

Poster for the 20th Century Limited,
the glamorous red carpet
New York Central passenger train
(at the Albany-Rensselaer Amtrak station)

Chesapeake & Ohio Railway streamlined steam
passenger locomotive used in the 1940s and 1950s
(at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore)

Union Station, Washington, D.C., 1906
(poster at Union Station)

Locomotive used to pull President-Elect Lincoln's
train through Baltimore on his way to
Washington for his first inauguration
(at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore)

First Stone (symbolic cornerstone) laid for
the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad on July 4, 1828
(at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore)