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Wisconsin | Rails aren't pavement. It wasn't that big a deal to lift and add more ballast under the ties to straighten the rails. They didn't even use ballast originally, just raw logs, so they weren't looking for permanent the first time through.
Just read through the Little House on the Prairie series to get an idea of what the railroad meant for westward expansion across America. WI, OH, NY had rivers to bring immigrants and some freight with keel boats, then canal boats in the east, then steam powered paddlewheelers. But the railroads were so much faster and cheaper that they made lots of new small towns and made winners and losers of the ones that were already there. Railroads drove upper Mississippi River traffic to nearly nothing by the 20's, before the construction of the lock and dam system. RR's boomed, overbuilt, went bankrupt, and pulled out all the way to the present.
I didn't know about RR deregulation in '80, but it makes sense with ICC and airline deregulation. Hard to believe these days that the ICC had the power it did in those days. RR and airlines are a little more logical "public utilities". | |
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Railroads in Iowa?
