![]() ![]() 6 The resulting “Report on Avoiding Collisions and Governing Employees” called for a system of clearly defined responsibilities and lines of communication. In 1841 a tragic collision of two trains on the Western Railroad in Massachusetts killed a conductor and passenger and injured seventeen others, making urgent the need to create and adhere to exact timetables. Passengers, employees, nearby buildings, livestock, and pedestrians could fall victim to the violent force of locomotive trains running at unprecedented speeds or to the hazardous sparks they emitted. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have given rise. ![]() Coordination of functions became not a choice but a necessity in order for the railroads to perform even the most basic services of running on time and avoiding catastrophic accidents. Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. The federal government exercised a light hand over industry at that time, assisting the expansion of railroads with land grants (until 1871) and little oversight. Farmers and ranchers came to rely on trains to get their goods to market. They grew at a rapid pace after the Civil War. With the establishment of the transcontinental lines, shared technological systems among state railroads began to emerge. Railroads were the first big business in the United States. By mid-century, the rails moved people, raw materials, and goods around the country relatively quickly, cheaply and, for the most part, in all seasons and weather. As an Atchison and Pike’s Peak Railroad report of 1866 noted, “So considerable is the existing commerce, and so rapidly on the increase that competent railway authority expresses the belief that within less than the five years from the opening a single track will be inadequate to the business flowing to it.” 5 The first vehicles to exceed the speed of a horse, locomotives compressed weeklong journeys into days. ![]() A multitude of organized interest groups emerged to lobby the various levels. From eastern terminals, American railways grew at an astonishing pace: from 23 miles of track in 1830 to 240,000 miles by 1910. Part of the difficulty arises from the vastness and complexity of the U.S. In the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, the railroads linked port cities to outlying areas, and, by the 1850s, they pushed westward and helped settle the frontier. ![]()
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