How many miles of train tracks had been laid by 1860?

By 1860, 30,000 miles (49,000 km) of railroad tracks had been laid, with 21,300 miles (34,000 km) concentrated in the northeast. The Baltimore and Ohio railroad was the first chartered railroad in the United States and was built to increase the flow of goods between Baltimore and Ohio.



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The building boom peaked during the 1880's, during the height of the Gilded Age. As historian John F. Stover notes in his book, The Routledge Historical Atlas Of The American Railroads, a staggering 70,400 miles was laid down between 1880 and 1890 with total mileage growing from 93,200 to 163,600!

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How fast was a train in the 1860s? On straight and level track, they could go up to sixty miles per hour. Going up grade, or around curves would limit their speeds. Track conditions were the real limiting factor for wood fired steam locomotives.

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The mileage of U.S. railroads expanded rapidly during the latter-half of the nineteenth century and into the first few decades of the twentieth century. For instance, in 1880 there were 70,000 miles of railroad tracks, but by 1890 the number of miles increased by 84,000, and by 1900 had jumped to 193,000.

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Soon joining the B & O as operating lines were the Mohawk and Hudson, opened in September 1830, the Saratoga, opened in July 1832, and the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, whose 136 miles of track, completed to Hamburg, constituted, in 1833, the longest steam railroad in the world.

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The immensity of the American rail system can be illustrated by one fact. The Civil War was fought between two sides that controlled the largest and third largest railroad system in the world. The largest was the Union at 21,000, miles followed by Britain at 10,000 miles and third was the Confederacy at 9,000 miles.

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Great Britain, a small island, had well over 60 percent of railroads in Europe in 1840, but a much smaller percentage, even though its absolute amount of track increased tenfold, by 1900.

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Stung by the Union Pacific's record of eight miles of track laid in a single day, the Central Pacific concocted a plan to lay 10 miles in a day. Eight Irish tracklayers put down 3,520 rails, while other workers laid 25,800 ties and drove 28,160 spikes in a single day.

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By 1850, 9,021 miles (14,500 km) of railroad had been constructed in the northeast, with some lines laid towards the west. The federal government wanted to establish further railroads across the west, connecting the seaports of the Atlantic with the middle west and the Pacific seaboard.

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