| Rail Transport In The United States |
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This article is part of the History Of Rail Transport By Country series. Today, most rail transport in the United States is based in Freight Train shipments. Substantial passenger railroad traffic exists only in a few pockets of the country. About two-thirds of U.S. rail riders and one in every three U.S. Mass Transit riders lives in New York City — for more on that phenomenon, see '' Transportation In New York City ''. U.S. railways carried 427 billion ton-miles of cargo annually in 1930. This increased to 750 billion ton-miles by 1975 and had doubled to 1.5 trillion ton-miles in 2005. In the 1950s, the U.S. are Europe moved roughly the same percentage of freight by rail; but, by 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight traveled by rail.[http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/taubmancenter/pdfs/working_papers/fagan_vassallo_05_rail.pdf In 1997, while U.S. trains moved 2,165 billion ton-kilometers of freight, the 15-nation European Union moved only 238 billion ton-kilometers of freight.[http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:HJ0bJerUj98J:freight.transportation.org/doc/SCAN_%2520Intl%2520Freight%2520Euro%2520Market.pdf+EU+rail+2000+ton-mile+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3] network ( for freight railroads with annual operating revenues above $ 277.7 million ( 2004 dollars), Class II for freight railroads with revenues between $10 million and $50 million in 1978 dollars, and Class III for all other freight railroads. These classifications are set by the Association Of American Railroads . In 1939 there were 132 Class I railroads. Today, as the result of mergers and bankruptcies, there are only seven railroads operating in the United States that meet the criteria for Class I. Although Amtrak qualifies for Class I status under the revenue criteria, it is generally not considered a Class I railroad because it is not a freight railroad. As of 2003 , there were 141,961 Mile s (228,464 Km ) of Standard Gauge Rail Tracks in the united states. Rolling stock Every piece of railroad Rolling Stock operating in North America n interchange service is required to carry a standardized set of Reporting Mark s. The marks are made up of a two- to four-letter code identifying the owner of the equipment accompanied by an identification number and statistics on the equipment's capacity and tare (unloaded) weight. Marks whose codes end in X (such as TTGX) are used on equipment owned by entities that are not Common Carrier railroads themselves. Marks whose codes end in U are used on Container s that are carried in Intermodal Transport , and marks whose codes end in Z are used on Trailer s that are carried in intermodal transport. Typically, railroads operating in the United States reserve one- to four-digit identification numbers for powered equipment such as Diesel Locomotive s and six-digit identification numbers for unpowered equipment. There is no hard and fast rule for how equipment is numbered, each railroad maintains its own numbering policy for its equipment. The types of equipment seen in trains on American railroads are not substantially different from the types seen around the world. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Before 1800 The Oldest Railroads In North America had their beginnings in the 18th Century . A railroad was reportedly used in the construction of the French fortress at Louisburg, Nova Scotia , and British military engineers built a Gravity Railroad at Lewiston, New York between 1762 and 1764. 1800 - 1850 Railroad building in the United States began in earnest in the first half of the including the Cars (4- and 8-wheel designs), Track , wheels, Turntable , and load transfer equipment. The only real difference between Bryant's Granite Railway and the Liverpool and Manchester was in the motive power; Bryant used Horse s to pull his trains, while the Liverpool and Manchester used Steam Locomotives . Building on the knowledge learned with the Granite Railway and the pioneering railroads of England, other purpose-built railroads were soon chartered in the US. Incorporated in 1823 , the Delaware And Hudson Canal Company , which later became the Delaware And Hudson Railroad , built its first tracks in 1826 as a gravity railroad in Carbondale, Pennsylvania , to haul Coal from a mine to the canal at Honesdale . The Baltimore And Ohio Railroad (B&O) was incorporated on February 28 , 1827 , to build a railroad connecting Baltimore, Maryland , and Washington, DC ; among the B&O's founders was Charles Carroll Of Carrollton , the last surviving signer of the Declaration Of Independence . Both of these railroad companies lasted well into the latter half of the 20th Century . Soon, other roads that would themselves be purchased or merged into larger entities, formed. The Camden And Amboy Railroad , the first railroad built in New Jersey , completed its route between its namesake cities in 1834 . The C&A eventually became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad . 1851 - 1900 See Also: First Transcontinental Railroad The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States was built across North America in the 1860s, linking the Railway network of the eastern U.S. with California on the Pacific coast. Finished on May 10 , 1869 at the famous Golden Spike event at Promontory Summit, Utah , it created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West , catalyzing the transition from the Wagon Train s of previous decades to a modern transportation system. Although an accomplishment, it achieved this claim of being the first transcontinental railroad by connecting a myriad of eastern US railroads to the Pacific. Nonetheless, it was not the largest railroad system in the world. The Canadian Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) had, by 1867, already accumulated more than 2,055 km (1,277 miles) of track by connecting Portland Maine and the three northern New England states with the Canadian Atlantic provinces west as far as Port Huron Michigan through Sarnia Ontario. Authorized by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and heavily backed by the Federal Government , it was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line and was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln , completed four years after his death. The building of the railway required enormous feats of Engineering and Labor in the crossing of plains and high mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad , the two federally chartered enterprises that built the line westward and eastward respectively. The building of the railroad was motivated in part to bind the Union together during the strife of the American Civil War . It substantially accelerated the populating of the West by white Homesteader s, led to rapid Cultivation of new farm lands, while contributing to the decline of the Native American s in these regions. The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad combined operations in 1870 and formally merged in 1885; the Union Pacific originally bought the Southern Pacific in 1901 and was forced to divest it in 1913, but finally took it over for good in 1996. Much of the original Right-of-way is still in use today and owned by the modern Union Pacific Railroad , which is descended from both of the original railroads.
1901 - 1970 As early as the 1930s , automobile travel had begun to cut into the rail passenger market, somewhat reducing economies of scale, but it was the development of the Interstate Highway System and of Commercial Aviation in the 1950s and 1960s that dealt the most damaging blows to rail transportation, both passenger and freight. There was little point in operating passenger trains to advertise freight service when those who made decisions about freight shipping traveled by car and by air, and when the railroads' chief competitors for that market were interstate trucking companies. Soon, the only things keeping most passenger trains running were legal obligations. Meanwhile, companies who were interested in using railroads for profitable freight traffic were looking for ways to get out of those legal obligations, and it looked like intercity passenger rail service would soon become extinct in the United States outside a few highly-populated corridors. The final blow came with the loss of Railway Post Office s in the 1960s. 1970 - present See Also: Amtrak ]] Historically, on routes where a single railroad has had an undisputed Monopoly , passenger service was as spartan and as expensive as the market and Interstate Commerce Commission regulation would bear, since such railroads had no need to advertise their freight services. But on routes where two or three railroads were in direct competition with each other for freight business, such railroads would spare no expense to make their passenger trains as fast, luxurious, and affordable as possible, because it was considered to be the most effective way of advertising their profitable freight services. The National Association Of Railroad Passengers (NARP) was formed in 1967 to lobby for the continuation of passenger trains. Its lobbying efforts were hampered somewhat by Democratic opposition to any sort of subsidies to the privately-owned railroads, and Republican opposition to Nationalization of the railroad industry. The proponents were aided by the fact that few in the federal government wanted to be held responsible for the seemingly-inevitable extinction of the passenger train, which most regarded as tantamount to political suicide. The urgency of the need to solve the passenger train problem was heightened by the Bankruptcy filing of the Penn Central , the dominant railroad in the Northeast U.S. , on June 21 , 1970 . Under the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (NRPC) to subsidize and oversee the operation of intercity passenger trains. The Act provided that
While it appeared for some time that President Nixon would veto the legislation, ultimately it was signed into law on October 30 , 1970 . The original working brand name for NRPC was ''Railpax'', but shortly prior to the company's assumption of intercity rail passenger operations, the name was changed to ''Amtrak''. At the time, many Washington insiders, including President Nixon and his aides, viewed the corporation as a face-saving way for the President and Congress to give passenger trains the one "last hurrah" demanded by the public, but expected that the NRPC would quietly disappear in a few years as public interest waned. However, while Amtrak's political and financial support have often been shaky, popular and political support for Amtrak has allowed it to survive long past its expected lifetime. PASSENGER RAIL TECHNOLOGY Car types The basic design of a passenger car hasn't changed much since the middle of the 19th century, but there are several different passenger car types in service around the world. Generally, these can be split into heavyweight versus lightweight cars. Passenger cars, whether heavyweight or lightweight, can be split into several car types (listed in alphabetical order): baggage, coach, combine, diner, Dome Car , lounge, observation, private, Pullman, railway post office (RPO) and sleeper. 19th century: First passenger cars and early development See Also: Passenger car Since the advent of railroads, people have traveled by train. Naturally, the first passenger trains didn't travel very far, but they were able to haul many more passengers for a longer distance than any wagons pulled by horses. As railways were first constructed in England , so too were the first passenger cars. One of the early coach designs was the "Stanhope". It featured a roof and small holes in the floor for drainage when it rained, and had separate compartments for different classes of travel. The only problem with this design is that the passengers were expected to stand for their entire trip. The first passenger cars in the United States highly resembled Stagecoach es. They were short, often less than 10 Ft . (3 M ) long, tall and rode on a single pair of axles. British railways had a little bit of a head start on American railroads, with the first "bed-carriage" (an early Sleeping Car ) being built there as early as 1838 for use on the London And Birmingham Railway and the Grand Junction Railway . Britain's early sleepers, when made up for sleeping, extended the foot of the bed into a boot section at the end of the carriage. The cars were still too short to allow more than two or three beds to be positioned end to end. Britain's Royal Mail commissioned and built the first Travelling Post Office cars in the late 1840s as well. These cars resembled coaches in their short wheelbase and exterior design, but were equipped with nets on the sides of the cars to catch mail bags while the train was in motion. American RPOs, first appearing in the 1860s , also featured equipment to catch mail bags at speed, but the American design more closely resembled a large hook that would catch the mailbag in its crook. When not in use, the hook would swivel down on the side of the car to prevent it from catching on any close clearances. As locomotive technology progressed in the mid- 19th Century , trains grew in length and weight. Passenger cars, particularly in America, grew along with them, first getting longer with the addition of a second truck (one at each end), and wider as their suspensions improved. Cars built for European use featured side door compartments, while American car design favored a single pair of doors at one end of the car in the car's vestibule; compartmentized cars on American railroads featured a long hallway with doors from the hall to the compartments. on the Chicago And Alton Railroad circa 1900 .]] One possible reason for this difference in design principles between American and European carbuilding practice could be the average distance between stations on the two continents. As most European railroads connected towns and villages that were still very closely spaced, American railroads had to travel over much greater distances to reach their destinations. Building passenger cars with a long passageway through the length of the car allowed the passengers easy access to the restroom, among other things, on longer journeys. Dining cars first appeared in the late 1870s and into the 1880s . Until this time, the common practice was to stop for meals at restaurants along the way (which led to the rise of Fred Harvey 's chain of Harvey House restaurants in America). At first, the dining car was simply a place to serve meals that were picked up en route, but they soon evolved to include galleys in which the meals were prepared. 1900-1950: Lighter materials, new car types By the 1920s , passenger cars on the larger Standard Gauge railroads were normally between 60 ft (18.3 m) and 70 ft (21.3 m) long. The cars of this time were still quite ornate, many of them being built by experienced coach makers and skilled carpenters. 's '' Pioneer Zephyr ''. The carbody was made of Stainless Steel in 1934 , it is seen here at the Museum Of Science And Industry In Chicago in 2003 .]] With the 1930s came the widespread use of Stainless Steel for carbodies. The typical passenger car was now much lighter than its "heavyweight" wood cousins of old. The new "lightweight" and Streamlined cars carried passengers in speed and comfort to an extent that had not been experienced to date. Aluminum and Cor-ten were also used in lightweight car construction, but stainless steel was the preferred material for car bodies. It isn't the lightest of materials, nor is it the least expensive, but stainless steel cars could be, and often were, left unpainted except for the car's Reporting Mark s that were required by law. By the end of the 1930s, railroads and carbuilders were debuting carbody and interior styles that could only be dreamed of before. In 1937 , the Pullman Company delivered the first cars equipped with roomettes – that is, the car's interior was sectioned off into compartments, much like the coaches that were still in widespread use across Europe. Pullman's roomettes, however, were designed with the single traveler in mind. The roomette featured a large picture window, a privacy door, a single fold-away bed, a sink and small toilet. The roomette's floor space was barely larger than the space taken up by the bed, but it allowed the traveler to ride in luxury compared to the multilevel semiprivate berths of old. Now that passenger cars were lighter, they were able to carry heavier loads, but the size of the average passenger that rode in them didn't increase to match the cars' new capacities. The average passenger car couldn't get any wider or longer due to side clearances along the railroad lines, but they generally could get taller because they were still shorter than many freight cars and locomotives. So the railroads soon began building and buying Dome and Bilevel cars to carry more passengers. 1950-present: High-technology advancements ]] Carbody styles have generally remained consistent since the middle of the 20th century. While new car types haven't made much of an impact, the existing car types have been further enhanced with new technology. Starting in the 1950s, the passenger travel market declined in North America, though there was growth in Commuter Rail . The higher clearances in North America enabled bi-level commuter coaches that could hold more passengers. These cars started to become common in the United States in the 1960s. While intercity passenger rail travel declined in America, ridership continued to increase in other parts of the world. With the increase came an increased use of newer technology on existing and new equipment. The Spanish company Talgo began experimenting in the 1940s with technology that would enable the axles to steer into a curve, allowing the train to move around the curve at a higher speed. The steering axles evolved into mechanisms that would also tilt the passenger car as it entered a curve to counter the Centrifugal Force experienced by the train, further increasing speeds on existing track. Today, Talgo trains are used in many places in Europe and they have also found a home in North America on some short and medium distance routes such as Seattle, Washington , to Vancouver, British Columbia . Another type of Tilting Train that is seeing widespread use across Europe is the Pendolino . These trains, built by the Fiat Ferroviaria company (now owned by Alstom )), are in regular service in Italy , Portugal , Slovenia , Finland , Czech Republic and now the United Kingdom . Using tilting trains, railroads are able to run passenger trains over the same Tracks at higher speeds than would otherwise be possible. U.S. High-Speed Rail shows a number of proposed high-speed routes in the U.S.]] ]] See Also: High-speed rail in the United States Unlike in most Western European countries, in the United States high-speed rail is more a case of hope than reality. It is possible to trace the development of high-speed railways back to the Streamliner s that criss-crossed the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s which, in turn, can be traced further back to the competing companies operating different routes between London and Scotland , and to railways in Germany and France . However, several factors contributed to the stagnation of rail transport in the U.S., a decline which occurred just as Europe and Japan were pushing forward with new technologies. arriving in Boston South Station on Acela express service is roughly 6 hours and 36 minutes. Subtracting a fifteen minute scheduled layover in New York City , the average speed is 68 mph for the 450 mi (720 km) trip. There has been a resurgence of interest in high-speed rail in the U.S. in recent decades, with many plans being examined for high–speed rail across the country. Current service, however, remains relatively limited, and is usually far more expensive than is reasonable for the average traveller. LIST OF UNITED STATES RAILROADS
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