It seems that railroads and ports are pretty well tied together in today’s transportation system. With the possible exception of KCS(?), it seems all the major roads now count ports as major destination/origin points. Historically, were there very many major railroads that weren’t tied into a port? DRG is the only one that comes to mind.
IIRC terminus of the main line of Kansas City Southern is New Orleans, which is very much a port.
Would premerger CB&Q count as a non-port road?
Historically the relationship between railroads and ports was different. Railroads went to ports not necessarily to exchange freight with ships, but because that’s where the people were. When oceans and rivers were the only inexpensive means of transportation, economic activity had no choice but to concentrate along their banks. More subtle, but much more important, is that economic activity tends to occur at modal handoffs. It’s at these points where it becomes meaningful to aggregate or disperse shipments, to make markets, to store, to trade, to manufacture, to mill, to refine, to smelt, to machine, to buy and sell. This is why railroads hubbed at Chicago and not, for example, Danville, Illinois, because at Chicago there was a signficant modal break.
Historically bulk commodities being exported from the U.S. went to water at the first possible point, and railroads served to collect bulk commodities from landlocked points and deliver it to a river, canal, or ocean, and to return with high-value manufactured goods too valuable to tolerate a slow boat. Export commodities long-hauled by rail to ports was not huge on the Atlantic Seaboard until 1900, because so much of it went into the Erie Canal, the Mississippi River System, and to the Great Lakes, and was almost of no significance on the West Coast until 1940 as there was very little demand in the Orient for U.S. commodities except for lumber (which was cut at tidewater mills and saw very little or no rail haul). A significant exception was coal moving to Hampton Roads and Baltimor
No. The CB&Q used to rendezvous with cargo ships along the Chicago River south of Union Station. The freight houses are long gone.
In addition to New Orleans and Port Arthur which others have mentioned the KCS also serves the major Gulf Coast ports of Gulfport, MS and Mobile, AL. Its subsidiary, Panama Canal RR serves both Colon and Panama which, respectively, are Atlantic and Pacific ports at either end of the Canal.The KCSdeM serves Lazaro Cardenas on the Pacific coast of Mexico which is being developed as a major container port for shipments from Asia. The KCSdeM also serves the Gulf cities of Tampico and Veracruz but I don’t know whether or not either of these are of any consequence as shipping ports.
Mark
RWM -
Thanks for that very informative, insightful, and well-written essay (monograph ?) for early Saturday morning reading. It’s an excellent distillation of a lot of history, economics, and politics into a few thoughtful paragraphs, a good amount of which I didn’t know or hadn’t thought about that deeply. I also liked your turn of phrase “just as if the Atlantic Ocean was a river running north-south”.
Just to emphasize/ reiterate a couple of your points: The Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River and its principal tributaries, the Ohio River and to a lesser extent the Missouri River, also hosted significant ports or functional port equivalents, mainly as a result of the St. Lawrence River navigation system and the Army Corps of Engineers improvements, like them or not. For the Great Lakes, think Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo (but not Odgensburg !), as well as Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, among others. For the Miss/ Ohio system, think St. Louis, Memphis, Cincinnati, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh, again among others - a lot of smaller terminals along the Ohio and Missouri.
Again, thanks.
- Paul North.
Good Morning Paul
You are absolutely correct about the Great Lake Ports except you forgot several very important ones such as Detroit, Windsor and Hamilton.
Al - in - Stockton
RWM: Thank you for the geography/history lesson. [tup] That’s a lot better reading than my morning newspaper.[xx(]
Are the port connections more important to railroads now, than in the past?
One more addition to the Great Lakes ports is Sodus Point, NY. That was the terminus of PRR’s Elmira branch, which carried coal from Williamsport, PA for export to Canada. The coal was transloaded onto ships to cross Lake Ontario, bound ultimately for nearby power plants. Little remains of the Elmira branch today, although some of it may still serve as parts of regional or local lines. Maybe someone can shed some light on that.
Given the rise of container traffic, I would think ports are much more important than ever.
That’s a more complicated question to answer than to pose, and it depends on how “port” is defined and which railroad we’re referring to. Almost all initial railroads were conceived to bring commodities to a river, lake, or ocean, and carry manufactured goods inland, but the traffic that actually made the transfer between water and rail may not have been significant in all of these railroads carloadings in comparison to local (on-line origination and destination) traffic inland.
But for some railroads the rail-to-water transfer was overwhelming in their tonnage totals, dwarfing everything else. Consider the case of the anthracite roads – D&H, Jersey Central, Reading, Lackawanna. All of them were built to carry coal to water, though the water haul may have only been across a harbor or downriver 50 miles. Later as their territory industrialized they each built up a sizeable traffic in commodities and manufactured goods moving local to themselves or in interchange with the New England roads or the Official Territory trunk roads.
Similarly, the Pocohontas coal roads – N&W, C&O, Virginian – were built initially to carry bituminous coal to tidewater, but again only in order to move it coastwise northward to New York and New England. Later the C&O and N&W built westward to move coal into the Ohio River system and the Great Lakes. Again the emphasis was on putting the coal into the hold of a barge, boat, or ship. Thus in the case of these roads and similar roads such as the B&O and WM, if “port” meant “any place where rails met water and transferred coal,” then without question ports were essential to their traffic base.
This relationship of bulk commodities moved from a landlocked point to water was the pattern followed by the Mesabe Range iron-ore roads, an
The point should be made that Chicago did not grow and prosper specifically because of its water connections. The Chicago River’s flow wasn’t reversed until the early 20th Century; before that it was just a non-navigable (by anything big, at least) stream that flowed ino Lake Michigan. (Now, with canal and Illinois river connections, you can go from near Chicago all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.) Nor was Chicago a big hub for commercial shipping either before or after the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened in 1959.
Gary, Indiana, now that’s a different story. It was a planned city and transportation (as opposed to, say, climate) was key to the town’s location and setup. It was (and perhaps still is) where iron ore freighters from upper Minnesota met coal trains coming up from the Appalachians.
Don’t want to belabor the obvious among this crowd, but Chicago is a great transportation crossroads–for trains and then later for roads. Draw an “X” across North America with the downstroke beginning at Winnipeg and the end at Savannah, GA. Make the other stroke run from New York to San Francisco. The crux of the “X” is just below Chicago. The industry didn’t bring the railroads so much as the railroads brought the industry. - a.s.
The point should be made that Chicago did not grow and prosper specifically because of its water connections. The Chicago River’s flow wasn’t reversed until the early 20th Century; before that it was just a non-navigable (by anything big, at least) stream that flowed ino Lake Michigan. Nor was it a big hub for commercial shipping either before or after the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened in 1959.
Gary, Indiana, now that’s a different case. It was specifically designed so that ore freighters from the Mesabi Range (northern MN) intersected with Appalachian coal trains up from the South. Note that Gary, like the Chicago River’s reversal, requires at least an early-20th Century level of technology.
Not to belabor the obvious, but Chicago grew rapidly in the late 19th / early 20th Century more for its rail connections than anything else. It’s a great Continental transfer point. Check this out: draw an “X” with the first downstroke beginning in Winnipeg and ending in Savannah, GA. Make the other half of the “X” start at New York City and end in San Francisco. Note where the crux of the “X” falls!!
In Chicago it was the trains brought the industry, not the industry that brought the trains. And much of this happened with very limited navigation resources.
Thank for hearing me out. Hope it wasn’t too OT. - al
Al - I have never read any geographer or historian who advances the claim that railways made Chicago rather than Chicago made the railways. While it’s true that today Chicago lies at a rail crossroads for the nation, that did not occur until the very late 19th century, and the traffic patterns of today that flow long-haul through Chicago did not occur in large volume until the 1970s. Nor was it possible for railway builders of the mid-19th century to conceive that Chicago would become the dominant articulation; in contrast, many railway builders got it wrong and built to someplace other than Chicago, to later realize that geography is deterministic of the fortune of railways and railways do not trump geography. Harold Mayer and James Vance, the two most prominent geographers in the U.S. in the last half of the 20th century, both specifically stated Chicago was placed where it was because of its location at the head of navigation on the Great Lakes at the furthest west/furthest south location and its proximity to the Illinois River system, which gave Chicago a tremendous natural advantage of a modal break point in patterns of commerce no other location could match. The location of Chicago made Chicago the natural destination for railways building from the east and the natural origin for railroads building toward the west. And water carriage of commodities on the Great Lakes was extremely important by the 1850s, and did not diminish. Much of the grain moving into Chicago by rail moved by boat to Buffalo, as did the lumber. Chicago attracted the railways, not the railways a Chicago. See Mayer’s “Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis”; William Cronon, “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West;” James Vance, “The North American Railroad: It’s Origin, Evolution, and Geography”.
Arthur M. Wellington, in “The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways,” makes the cogent point that the New York Central and Pennsylvania railways were made great because </
While they may not qualify as major ports, a number of small villages along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River were indeed visited by railroads. In some cases the emphasis was more on people than freight (which is one reason they don’t go to most of those places any more).
Oswego was the northern terminus of the NYO&W - once again to haul coal for loading into ships.
Sackets Harbor (Sacket’s Harbor & Ellisburg, then Carthage, Watertown, and Sackett’s Harbor), Cape Vincent (original terminus of the Rome and Watertown, later RW&O), and Clayton (Utica and Black River) were also visited by railroads and enjoyed a booming business for at least a while.
The Chicago River certainly was navigable before 1900. They began channeling and straightening the Chicago River back in the 1830s. At that time Chicago had already beome a bustling trade center. Goods were being loaded and unloaded to/from lake boats at docks on the river at least a dozen years before the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad laid tracks from near the Chicago River to towns to the west (1848), but the tracks did not extend much further initially than what is today the Oak Park area. And obviously did not connect with any other railroad.
Fairly large lake freighters were moving freely up and down the river by the Civil War. Here is a photo of activity at the Rush Street bridge prior to the Chicago Fire (1871). Read more.
The Illinois Michigan Canal also opened in 1848, providing steamships and barges access to the Mississippi River. The Chicago River was reverse
Which is why we probably won’t see any profitable lines going to Mexico’s Pacific Coast. And didn’t the Monon, in some of our lifetimes, attempt to make a great coal-loading port at Michigan City? No such port was ever built–and the railroad withered away at this point, too.
Maybe this is why I’m doubtful of the whole CN Prince Rupert plan.
Isn’t this a case of the traffic being there already (Far East to Midwest, by way of ship>West Coast port>railroad), and a railroad trying to steal that traffic from a competitor? How would this be any different than a CNW or a DM&E trying to steal PRB coal traffic?
Good question.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 18 years handicapping Greyhound races. To predict what a dog is going to do in this race you look at how she/he has done in past races. Unless a dog has done well at this level of racing, at this distance, and from this starting box; it’s probably not going to do well this time. Now, if you can spot a factor that will make a difference then the whole thing changes.
Same here with Prince Rupert. As Wellington basically said “this hasn’t ever worked”. So I look for a factor at Prince Rupert that will make a difference and I don’t see one. Maybe it will work. Maybe I’m missing something.
But the way I see things is that Prince Rupert has one, and only one, thing going for it. It’s a shorter distance between Asia and North America if the ship goes to Prince Rupert. If the shortest distance from Asia was the controlling factor then Seattle/Tacoma/Van
You’re partly correct in that Southern California has a large local market. Probably even more important is that LA/LB has access to a huge warehousing infrastructure roughly centered around Colton. Nothing like this exists near Prince Rupert.
One other advantage of LA/LB is that there are three routes to Chicago (AT&SF, LA&SL-UP, Sunset-Golden State route) plus a direct route to Texas and the south (Sunset Route).
My understanding is that the energy costs for container ships are pretty significant - easily equivalent to the energy cost shipping an equivalent distance by rail. Labor and capital costs are quite a bit lower though.