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Timeline of United States railway history

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The Timeline of U.S. Railway History depends upon the definition of a railway, as follows: A means of conveyance of passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, also known as tracks.

Steam locomotives of the Chicago and North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards, 1942

1795–1829

  • 1795–99 & 1799–1804 or '05 — In 1795, Charles Bulfinch, the architect of Boston's famed State House first employed a temporary funicular railway with specially designed dumper cars to decapitate 'the Tremont's' Beacon Hill summit and begin the decades long land reclamation projects which created most of the real estate in Boston's lower elevations of today from broad mud flats, such as South Boston, Eastern parts of Dorchester, much of the shorelines of the entire Charles River basin on both the left and right banks and Brighton from mud flats, and most famously, the Back Bay.[1]
  • 1815-1820s One interpretation of historical documents indicates the same equipment was used for a longer, more ambitious period to level and effectively remove 'The Tremont', Copely, Cope's, and Beacon Hills again into what became Boston's Back Bay. These moves were far from completing the project; photos from the 1850s show the majority of the Back Bay was still tidewater.

1810s–1830s

  • 1800–1825 Various inventors and entrepreneurs make suggestions about building model railways in the United States. Around Coalbrookdale in the United Kingdom, mining railways become increasingly common. An early steam locomotive is given a test run in 1804, but is then wrecked carelessly. For unknown reasons, the inventor does not rebuild it for nearly two decades.[2]
  • 1809 Scottsman quarry owner Thomas Leiper, in 1809 when denied a charter to build a canal along the Crum Creek from his quarry to the docks in the tidewater, commissions a 60 yards (55 m) railroad test track in the yard of the Bull's Head Tavern in Philadelphia. The track had a grade of one inch and a half to the yard,[3] with a 4% grade to test whether a horse could successfully pull 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) against the slope.
  • 1810–1829 The Leiper Railroad, a horse-drawn railroad three-quarters of a mile long, opens in 1810 after Thomas Leiper failed to obtain a charter with legal rights-of-way to build his desired canal along Crum Creek. The quarryman's 'make-do' railroad solution was the continent's first chartered railway, first operational non-temporary railway, first well documented railroad, and first constructed railroad also meant to be permanent. It was perhaps the only railroad replaced by a canal, and also one of the first to close, and of those, perhaps is alone in reopening again in 1858.

1825–1832

Inspired by the speedy success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (1825) in England's railway historical record, capitalists in the United States — already embarking upon great public works infrastructure projects to connect the new territories of the United States with the older seaboard cities industries by the canals of America's Canal Age, almost overnight began dreaming up projects using railroads — a technology in its infancy, but one employing steam engines which were rapidly becoming widely known from their successful use on steamboats. American steam engine pioneers were willing to experiment with Heat Engines using higher pressures than the mainly Atmospheric engines still fashionable in Great Britain. The rest of the world lagged the two English speaking nations. Railroads began to be proposed where canals wouldn't do, or would be too costly and with an increase in rolling stock tonnage capacity, locomotive power, and a growing confidence born of experience and new materials in less than three decades, the United States generally would discard canals as the principal design choice in favor of far more capable freight haulage technologies.

  • 1825 American John Stevens (inventor), builds a test track and runs a locomotive around it in his summer home estate, Hoboken, New Jersey. This partially settles the tractive power questions, showing that on level track, metal on metal wheels can provide tractive effort and pull a load. The ability for any engine to do so on a grade is still widely doubted in the press and minds of potential investors (pubs, clubs, boardrooms, etc.), while the minds of many potential investors were well aware that most railroads in the capital poor United States would have to surmount significant grades to be useful technology. And while news from Europe was delayed 4–8 weeks, well connected Americans were aware in general of United Kingdom news coverage's and to a lesser extent, that of continental European developments. In consequence, the 1825 success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway only gradually eroded the three-way nay-sayer beliefs that the careful expensive gentle engineered grades extant in the early British railways was impracticable in most cases in America and that such grades were necessary since steel on iron rails would not provide traction on hills, were it possible to build a locomotive engine powerful enough to surmount such grades. In each case, it would take experience and success against such over at least several months before the misconceptions fell into disdain.
  • 1826: The 3 miles (4.8 km) industrial animal powered Granite Railroad opens in Quincy, Massachusetts, to convey quarried granite for the Bunker Hill monument. It later becomes a common carrier railroad.

During the summer of 1827,[a] a railroad was built from the mines at Summit Hill to Mauch Chunk. With one or two unimportant exceptions, this was the first railroad in the United States.

— James E. Held, Archaeology[6]

The resultant Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, where mules rode special cars down as well, after the coal hoppers, then returned empties up the nine mile return trip, became the first U.S. railway to carry passengers in the same year of 1827. In less than two years the railway was attracting so many visitors, it began charging fares, and then added and operated special tourism excursions on Sunday as a tourist road — which role it carried into 1932 as the world's acknowledged first roller coaster. In 1847 the cable railway return track was constructed with planes climbing two prominences along Pisgah Ridge, shortening the up trip to twenty minutes from nearly four hours by mule.

1830s
  • August 8, 1829: The Stourbridge Lion, first steam locomotive imported into the US, is tested along tracks built by the Delaware and Hudson company. Deemed too heavy for the company's rails, it and its three brethren are converted to stationary engines for cable railway parts of the transportation system.
  • 1830 ushers in a flurry of railroad incorporations, charter applications, grants and beginnings of construction. The B&O opens its first 13 miles (21 km) stretch to Ellicott's Mills and begins regular scheduled passenger services on schedule, May 24, 1830.
  • 1830 the 26 miles (42 km) Beaver Meadows Railroad from Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania, is incorporated and constructed to open a second major coal field to the Lehigh Canal at Parryville beyond the Lehigh Gap. This would form the seed company of the first class Lehigh Valley Railroad after the 1870s.
The DeWitt Clinton as it would have appeared on its inaugural run in 1831.

Railroads gradually replace canals as the first-choice mode of transportation infrastructure to champion and build, while canals hold a whip hand on economy for decades more, but falter on flexible destinations, speed, and where they suffer seasonal stoppages yet service year round needs. By the 1860s, in any case, where all the important older canals were to be found any canal with functions satisfiable by parallel railways (excepting by definition, ship canals) is eyed by investors to be supplanted by a competing railroad. The idea of a rail network in the US, which is by then showing early signs some areas have overbuilt in the Eastern United States is still not a common business model. Cut throat competitive capitalism, not co-operation are the rule, and the decade kicks off the forty years or so of the robber barons and excesses in capitalism.

1850–1900

1900–1970

Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, which first opened in 1913.

1970–present

Notes

  1. [a]
    Summer of 1827 is in conflict with highly detailed account by Brenckman and other more local (and more contemporary) historians.[5] Brenckman's detailed account details preparations stockpiling wood, iron, tools and materials over the entire preceding winter and fall with work parties defined and told off with work commencing as soon as soil melts allowed work to lay sleepers in March and April with the aim of not affecting coal deliveries to the canal head, so it could resume operations as soon as ice and flooding permitted. Further, framework, couplings, tires and other iron castings were carried out in the LC&N Co.'s own foundries in Mauch Chunk, the company having financed at least 12 of the first 14 blast furnaces North of Easton — so triggered the iron and steel industries of Bethlehem and Allentown south of the Blue Ridge escarpment.

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