With a few, minor exceptions, it seems like American railroading split into two separate groups, with neither side willing to venture far beyond that line. Why was that?
Bridges over the Mississippi are kinda expensive and a legal nightmare. (Talk to Abe.)
All I can add to this is to suggest you read a recent book about the building of the Eads Bridge at St. Louis. Wiggins Ferry Co. of E. St. Louis had an exclusive franchise for ferry service across the river and fought hard to keep bridges away. Thus all the eastern roads had to terminate on the east side of the Mississippi.
This is one of the reasons, among many others, why Chicago surpassed St. Louis as the capitol of the Midwest. We were on the wrong side of the river.
Sorry I can’t remember the name of the book, but you can probably Google Eads Bridge. It’s a fairly recent book.
The Western Roads HAD to cross the Mississippi, to get access to Chicago.
The Eastern roads of the official territory, had enough going on trying to better each other, than to take on the western roads. Once they were established in Chicago and St Louis, their priorities turned to building/acquiring feeders.
Engineers of Dreams by Henry Petroski. I bought it upon Mudchicken’s recommendation.
To keep taxi and omnibus drivers busy carrying passengers and luggage traveling from coast-to-coast between Chicago’s six different intercity train stations.[(-D]
…“East is east, and west is west”…and Dina thought so too…Dina Shore…1947-48. {Sorry, had to do it…}.
Well…Que Sera, Que Sera…{We’re even}
Is it not too far out of line, to envision PRR, with it’s great resources, building a feeder line to say-Omaha?
In the nineteenth century, UP headed west from Omaha. GN and NP headed west from Mpls. I’m probably forgetting others, but financially, at least to some extent, these were “land grant” RR co’s – you recall that the fed gov’t gave them land in a checkerboard pattern alternating with homesteadable land. I don’t think that’s anywhere near the whole reason but it might be one factor in the situation we have: break between east and west. - a. s.
Well the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Soo Line crossed above the head of navigation making their task easier.
The line is drawn from Chicago to St. Louis on a diagonal, then follows the Mississippi to St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans. That line is a natural frontier between east and west that has persisted to the present for strong economic and geographic reasons. Only the Wabash significantly crossed this frontier from east to west, and the Milwaukee Road from west to east. The former worked out pretty well because it terminated at an “alternative St. Louis” at Kansas City and Omaha, and the latter worked out pretty bad because Louisville was not much of an articulation point. Not coincidentally the Official Territory for rates and regulatory purposes adhered to the Chicago-St. Louis line of demarkation.
By 1870 it was obvious that Chicago was a natural frontier but it was not obvious 20 years prior.
You have to step back and put yourself into the place of a railroad builder in the 1840s and 1850s. Chicago hardly did not even exist then. No one knew quite how far to build their railroad, or when to stop, and no one could envision the future. Railroads were then an adjunct to water transportation and existed to build inland from cities that did not have a water route leading into the hinterland, e.g., Boston, and from heads of navigation on the Great Lakes and the major rivers. Railroad builders for some time thought Great Lakes harbors such as Sandusky, Buffalo, New Buffalo, and Dunkirk would be their terminus. Cornelius Vanderbilt thought his railroad complete when he reached Buffalo; his son was more presicent and acquired the Lake Shore and the Michigan Southern to reach Chicago. Even for several years after Chicago was clearly established as the great city of the north
There is a modern day example of this situation with the competitive response to the Norfolk Southern’s joint venture with KCS which put NS accross the the traditional Mississippi River east-west line and on to Shreveport.
Another good example of west going east was the Frisco with their line from Kansas City to Birmingham and Flomonton Ala. Don’t know if I spelled that Alabama city correctly or not.
The acquizition of the Frisco gave the BN another route that is today extremely important and much of that line is east of the Mississippi. Not sure if the BNSF operates the Flomonton portion any longer but Birmingham is still on their map. And more importantly the Frisco gave BN a more direct route to St. Louis from the west. It also opened up Oklahoma to the BN although the acquisition of the Santa Fe duplicated much of the Oklahoma trackage.
The point that I neglected to mention earlier is “no railroad will willingly short-haul itself.” If an Official Territory road had reached past Chicago, its line would have been useful only for gathering local traffic in its natural territory (its catch basin) and delivering it to market in Chicago. No Iowa road that independently reached Chicago would have interchanged with it.
In order to gain anything other than local traffic, the eastern road’s granger line would have had to reach across the grain-belt prairies to one or more of the next points of articulation, which are St. Paul, Omaha, and Kansas City – or maybe even Denver or Pueblo – and there effect interchange with a transcontinental road. That would have likely encouraged another competing Official Territory to do the same, and a third, and so forth, and the competitive equilibrium would be re-established at a higher plateau with no net gain to anyone.
By the 1870s the Iowa roads, grossly over-built for the amount of interchange with UP in Council Bluffs and for the local traffic, were in the clutches of a vicious rate war, which rationally gave pause to eastern roads who might have contemplated picking up one of them. By the
The Frisco to Birmingham and Pensacola is very similar to the Wabash to Kansas City. Both are sub-continental points of articulation where traffic is terminated and originated, and shipments broken, marketed, and reconsolidated. Both could interchange with roads that did not parallel between that sub-continental point and the continental point, e.g., Wabash could interchange at Kansas City and Omaha with UP but not Rock Island.
The Birmingham line was of no strategic value to BN – neither was the Frisco in total! (only financial value) – until the appearance of a market for Powder River Basin coal in the southeast circa 1990, and redoubled now with the spectacularly rewarding growth in long-haul intermodal. No one predicted either market much before their appearance. It was planned that new power plants in the Southeast would use Appalachian coal first, and import coal from Colombia and Venezuela or even Poland and South Africa second. The tremendous drop in FOB mine price for PRB coal and productivity growth that enabled railroads to slash rates, thrust PRB coal into this remarkably long-distance overland market.
The other Frisco line of “found value” was Avard-Memphis, the Avard line being a peculiar branch line to nowhere from construction until the 1990s.&
Or more likely (IMO) buying one. Which they eventually did.
I dunno Murph. My thinking on the vitality of the 800 lb gorillas has changed some. Reading I’ve done suggests that much of what PRR acquired, it did so often just to keep (whatever line) from falling into the hands of a rival Some components of the old Panhandle fit that description, just as some parts of what ultimately became NYC were acquired by that line mostly for control, more so than forecast volume.
You look at some of those old eastern lines, imagine “potential” that was never developed, and wonder how powerhouses with such illustrious track records could have “failed” in a particular instance…when perhaps the real carrot on the stick was to thwart access for a rival, more so than to actually grow a business segment.
With a lot of those things going on, it’s not hard to imagine the eastern giants having their plates pretty much as full as they cared to, just trying to out maneuver one another.
Saying the same thing another way, Perhaps PRR could finance a war chest against it’s NYC adversary, and still pay dividends. But could it afford to fight a war on two fronts? NYC in the east, and UP in the west? and still keep it’s stockholders happy?
Perhaps “peaceful co-existence” was a safer strategy for the western front?
I’m sure that PRR must have played around with Santa Fe stock, a time or two. It would be so out of character for them not to have.
I’m probably forgetting others, but financially, at least to some extent, these were land grant RR co’s – you recall that the fed gov’t gave them land in a checkerboard pattern alternating with homesteadable land. I don’t think that’s anywhere near the whole reason but it might be one factor in the situation we have: break between east and west. - a. s.
I’m quite sure the free land AND mineral rights WAS the incentive, ask the C.P.R. in Canada.
A useful book, perhaps the definitive one, on the “natural break” that made Chicago the important center of commerce and transportation, is William Cronon’s, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991). Cronon is a genuine economic historian, and this distinguishes him from railroad historians, who with some notable exceptions generally reject market and economic analysis in favor of hagiography.
You will have to tell me what the Wabash received in revenue through it’s gateways. Milwaukee by 1977 earned 6% of its gross revenue through Louisville. It was one of the very successful Gateway conditions, with traffic originating and terminating as far away as Portland and Vancouver. The revenue component would be the equivalent of a Billion dollars or so on today’s BN.
The Wabash must have done pretty well by comparison.