Railroad Research Paper

This sample Railroad Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Free research papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality research paper on history topics at affordable price please use custom research paper writing services.

Few inventions have had a more immediate or lasting impact on world history than the railroad. As the first mode of land transport capable of outpacing and outdistancing the horse and camel, it brought far-flung parts of continents and disparate peoples together for the first time. It became a potent symbol of modernity, technological prowess, and industrial know-how.

The railroad is a mode of transportation that consists of a locomotive, a train of passenger or freight cars, a two-railed steel track, a graded railbed, and terminals. Unlike other forms of transport, rail travel requires no steering: wheels with flanges (raised rims) keep the locomotive and cars on track. Railroads are energy-efficient because the wheels glide on the tracks with little friction.

A typical rail network consists of a trunk (main line) and branches (spurs). The trunk links the major urban and industrial centers along a roughly straight trajectory. Branches link the hinterland to one or more of the urban-industrial junctures on the trunk. Tokyo, Guangzhou, London, Cologne, Chicago, and New York are among the cities that have become major rail hubs, because they lie either in an industrial region, on the crossroads of multiple trunks, or near a seaport.

Steam engines were used to power locomotives for most of the nineteenth century, but modern engines run on diesel or electricity. Today’s high-speed passenger trains, built by Japan, China, and France, can travel up to 300 kilometers per hour, faster than all other modes of transport except airplanes and spacecraft. The longest trip that can be undertaken without a change of trains extends 10,214 kilometers from Moscow, Russia, to Pyongyang, North Korea. Only ships regularly transport people and cargo a greater distance. “The railroad,” writer Heinrich Heine remarked in 1843, “annihilates space and only time remains.”

The Origin of Railroads

Europe’s mining enterprises began to utilize primitive rail systems to haul coal and iron ores as early as the sixteenth century. Because mine shafts were muddy and uneven, ore haulers placed parallel wooden rails along the mine floors to keep the cartwheels above the ruts. By the late eighteenth century, iron rails had come into common use and some enterprises had begun to extend their tracks from the mine entrances to the coal ports. These colliery railways were especially thick in the coal-mining regions of northeast England, near the Tyne and Wear rivers, where they were known as “Newcastle roads.”

Most historians date the beginning of the “Railroad Age” with the opening of the 44-kilometer-long Stockton and Darlington Railway, a steam-powered freight line that cut the cost of coal transport by more than half, in 1825; and the 50-kilometer-long Manchester and Liverpool Railway, a passenger and freight line that linked two of England’s most important urban-industrial centers, in 1830. Both were designed by George Stephenson, Great Britain’s first great railroad engineer.

Railroad Mania in the Nineteenth Century

By the 1840s Great Britain was in the grips of a “railroad mania,” a period of boom-and-bust construction that led to a fourfold expansion in British tracks from 2,340 kilometers to over 9,700 kilometers within a decade. This period also witnessed the rise and fall of George Hudson, the “Railway Napoleon,” the first of many rail swindlers whose stock manipulations and shady dealings spawned numerous lawsuits, bankruptcies, and political scandals. “Britain is at present an island of lunatics, all railway mad,” Judge Cockburn declared in 1845 (Blum 1994, 14–15).

Railroad mania spread quickly to the coal-producing regions of northwestern Europe—Belgium, northern France, and Rhineland Prussia. This was where the world’s first international line was built, linking Liege, Belgium, and Cologne, Rhineland Prussia. Governments played a greater role on the continent than in Great Britain in promoting rail development and determining the routes. So did international bankers, most notably the Rothschild family, a name that became all but synonymous with continental rail construction in the nineteenth century. Government-business collaboration resulted in a construction frenzy, and by 1907 Europe (excluding Russia) was crisscrossed with 263,000 kilometers of track. Germany alone possessed 58,000 kilometers, followed by France (47,900 kilometers), the Austro-Hungarian Empire (41,800 kilometers), Great Britain and Ireland (37,300 kilometers), Italy (16,600 kilometers), Spain (14,800 kilometers), and Sweden (13,400 kilometers).

Railroads also played a major role in achieving the nation-building ambitions of the United States, the Dominion of Canada, and czarist Russia. The first U.S. rail link, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, began operation in 1830, and for the next three decades construction occurred almost exclusively east of the Mississippi. The discovery of gold in California in 1849, however, put a premium on a fast and secure land route to the Pacific Ocean. Generous subsidies from the U.S. government made it possible for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies to jointly finish a line between Sacramento and Omaha in the years 1863 to 1869. Several other lines followed, including the Southern Pacific (1881), Northern Pacific (1883), and Great Northern (1893). Meanwhile, Canada completed the first true transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific, which linked the eastern port of Montreal to the western port of Vancouver, in 1885. The Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific followed in the early twentieth century. Last, the Russian government constructed the Trans-Siberian Railway, linking Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok, between 1891 and 1916. At 7,600 kilometers, it is still today the world’s longest railroad. By 1907, the United States had laid a total of 382,100 kilometers of tracks (more than all of Europe combined), Canada 36,300 kilometers, and Russia 63,100 kilometers.

Colonial and Foreign-Financed Railroads

The Railroad Age coincided with the peak years of European colonization and imperialism, and consequently most of Africa’s and Asia’s early railroads were built with European capital and know-how. The British jump-started India’s rail network in 1853, with the construction of a 34-kilometer-long line between Bombay and Thana, and by 1880 all of its major cities were connected by rail. Various European governments built lines in China, but construction proceeded at a snail’s pace until the Qing dynasty finally bowed to the inevitable and commissioned a U.S.-trained Chinese engineer, Zhan Tianyou, to build the Beijing-to-Zhangjiakou line in 1905. By 1907, Asia possessed a total of 77,110 kilometers of tracks, not counting those portions of Asia under Russian control. British India alone accounted for 48,230 kilometers, followed by Japan (8,000 kilometers) and China (6,800 kilometers). During the same time period, Africa’s rail network grew to 29,800 kilometers, most of it concentrated in South Africa (11,300 kilometers) and Egypt (5,600 kilometers). Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a transcontinental Cape-to-Cairo railroad, however, remained unfulfilled.

In the Americas south of the U.S. border, national authorities and international investors together provided most of the impulse for the 80,500 kilometers of tracks that were laid there between 1846 and 1907. Argentina developed the largest network (22,100 kilometers), followed by Mexico (21,900 kilometers of tracks) and Brazil (17,300 kilometers). British entrepreneurs financed the most construction in Argentina and Brazil, while the Mexican government managed to finance many of its own tracks.

Technology, Organization, and Regulation

The success of the railroad depended on several key inventions, chief among them the locomotive. Richard Trevithick demonstrated in 1804 that a steam engine could be used to propel railcars, but it was not until the 1820s that George and Robert Stephenson constructed the first modern locomotives, the “Locomotion” and “Rocket,” for use on Britain’s rail lines. Other important breakthroughs include the sleeping car, developed by George Pullman (U.S.) in 1857; pneumatic brakes, invented by George Westinghouse (U.S.) in 1869; the automatic car coupler, patented by Eli Janney (U.S.) in 1873; the electric locomotive, invented by Werner von Siemens (Germany) in 1879; and steel rails and steel cars, which came into widespread use in the early twentieth century. Equally important for a fast, safe, and smooth ride were track lines that followed an even gradient despite changes in the terrain. Two inventions were particularly useful in this regard: the iron bridge, pioneered by Robert Stephenson in Newcastle in 1849, and the railroad tunnel, first used in the Italian Alps in 1871.

Organizational breakthroughs also played a major role in the success of the railroad. The first was the introduction of “Greenwich mean time” (railroad time) in 1840, which made it possible for rail companies to establish uniform timetables and for passengers to plan their trips and make their connections. The second was the use of the telegraph for purposes of signaling and traffic control, a necessity especially on one-track lines where the danger of a head-on collision was always present. Station managers, signalmen, switchmen, and brakemen were all as essential to a safe and trouble-free journey as the engineer.

Track width was the one major technological-organizational problem that was never fully resolved. Most European and North American railroads adopted the same track width used in Britain— 1.44 meters (56.5 inches)—which came to be known as “standard gauge.” Some countries, however, chose a “broad gauge.” Russia and Finland picked 1.52 meters (60 inches), while Spain, Portugal, and India chose 1.68 meters (66 inches). “Narrow gauge” railroads (less than 1.435 meters) were also built, especially in mountainous regions. The chief advantage of a nonstandard gauge is that it offers some protection against a military invasion. The chief disadvantage is that it inhibits the free flow of goods and passengers across borders.

Impact on Society and Politics

The railroad displaced the horse-drawn carriage as the preferred mode of passenger travel as early as the 1840s because it provided a faster, safer, and more comfortable ride under all weather conditions. It also largely outcompeted the canal-and-barge industry for the transport of bulk commodities such as ores, grains, gravel, lumber, chemicals, and petroleum. Rail travel, in fact, proved so superior to all previous modes of transportation that by the 1870s it had achieved a near monopoly on the movement of persons and goods in all the major industrial countries. Monopoly led to price fixing, deceptive business practices, and rampant corruption—and eventually also to government regulations designed to restore a semblance of public trust and private competition. One of the earliest was the Interstate Commerce Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1887. Monopolistic practices also made the railroad one of the most hated symbols of foreign domination. “Nationalization” thus became one of the catchwords of anticolonial and anticapitalist movements in the colonial and developing world. Juan Peron, for instance, purchased Argentina’s railroad system from British investors shortly after coming to power in 1946.

Many nineteenth-century liberals and radicals welcomed the railroad as a tool for bringing the world together in peace and harmony, but rails proved equally useful as a tool of empire-building and warfare. In the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Prussian army skillfully used the German rail system to invade and conquer northern France. Russia’s decision to build the Trans-Siberian Railway through Manchuria was one of the principal causes of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Plans to construct a Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway in the early twentieth century contributed to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

The End of a Monopoly

The Railroad Age came to an end during the first half of the twentieth century with the emergence of automobiles, trucks, buses, airplanes, and pipelines as alternative modes of transport. Nonetheless, with some 1,204,000 kilometers of track on every continent except Antarctica (enough to encircle the earth more than thirty times), the railroad remains central to the movement of people and goods to this day. In densely populated regions, such as western Europe and Japan, rails are often as fast and convenient as autos and planes. Railroads also remain popular in India, China, and other parts of the developing world, where they are typically the only affordable means of travel. Because railroads require far less fuel than trucks, they are also still one of the most cost-effective methods for transporting bulk commodities.

Railroads experienced a small revival in the 1960s with the advent of the “container age” in the shipping industry and the development of high-speed trains. Flatbed rail cars loaded with containers now transport a portion of the finished products that were once carried almost entirely on trucks. Similarly, with the opening of the New Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, railroads began to recapture a portion of the passenger traffic that had been lost to the airlines. The completion of the Channel Tunnel (“Chunnel”) in 1994, for instance, opened up a high-speed rail route between Paris and London that can be traversed in less than three hours.

Although as of 2009 the United States possessed the most usable miles of tracks of any country in the world today (233,000 kilometers), 143,000 were allocated for freight. Passenger traffic in the United States is minuscule (despite the advent of Amtrak service in 1971), compared with other countries whose highway infrastructures, dense urban populations, or economies do not support automobile commuting or ownership. Asia, meanwhile, accounts for nearly 70 percent of all railroad passenger miles worldwide, largely because millions of Indians and Chinese travel by rail every day.

China indeed seems to be the most ambitious railway builder today. Its overburdened system carried 25 percent of the world’s rail traffic on 6 percent of the world’s lines (86,000 kilometers) at the end of 2009. In an effort to boost its economy even further, China embarked on a construction program that will help shift the center of its economic focus inland; it aims to reach 120,000 kilometers of rail line by 2020.

Bibliography:

Ambrose, S. (2000). Nothing like it in the world: The men who built the transcontinental railroad, 1863–69. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Awasthi, A. (1994). History and development of railways in India. New Delhi, India: Deep & Deep.
Bailey, M. R. (Ed.). (2003). Robert Stephenson: The eminent engineer. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Blum, J. (1994). In the beginning: The advent of the modern age, Europe in the 1840s. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.
Burton, A. (1994). The railway empire. London: J. Murray.
Burton, A. (2001). The Orient Express: The history of the Orient Express service from 1883 to 1950. Newton Abbot, U.K.: David & Charles.
Carter, I. (2001). Railways and culture in Britain: The epitome of modernity. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
Conder, F. R. (1983). The men who built railways: A reprint of F. R. Conder’s personal recollections of English engineers (Jack Simmons, Ed.). London: Telford.
Daniels, R. (2000). Trains across the continent: North American railroad history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hawke, G. R. (1970). Railways and economic growth in England and Wales, 1840–1870. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Haywood, R. M. (1998). Russia enters the railway age, 1842– 1855. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs.
Headrick, D. R. (1981). The tools of empire: Technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press.
(1911). Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed., Vol. 22). New York: Britannica.
Roth, R., & Polino, M.-N. (2003). The city and the railway in Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Schivelbusch, W. (1986). The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. New York: Berg.
Simmons, J. (1991). The Victorian railway. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Stilgoe, J. R. (1983). Metropolitan corridor: Railroads and the American scene. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Talbot, F. A. A. (1911). The railway conquest of the world. London: W. Heinemann.
Theroux, P. (1975). The great railway bazaar: By train through Asia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Theroux, P., & McCurry, S. (1985). The imperial way: Making tracks from Peshawar to Chittagong. London: H. Hamilton.

See also:

Free research papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to order a custom research paper on political science and get your high quality paper at affordable price.