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Environmental History of American Railroads

Railroads' Impacts on the Environment

Noise can be a direct impact on the natural environment as a result of railroads. Trains contain many different parts that have the potential to be thundering. Wheels, engines and non-aerodynamic cargo that actually vibrate the tracks can cause resounding sounds. Noise caused from directly neighboring railways has the potential to actually lessen value to property because of the inconveniences that railroads provide because of a close proximity. In order to combat unbearable volumes resulting from railways, US diesel locomotives are required to be quieter than 90 decibels at 25 meters away since 1979. This noise, however, has been shown to be harmless to animals, except for horses who will become skittish, that live near it.

Royal Gorge Bridge, Canon City, Colorado

Pollution is another direct result of railroads on the environment. Railroads can make the environment contaminated and unnatural because of what trains carry. Railway pollution exists in all three states of matter: gaseous, liquid, and solid. Air pollution can occur from boxcars carrying materials such as iron ore, coal, soil, or aggregates and exposing these materials to the air. This can release nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, or hydrocarbons into the air. Liquid pollution can come from railways contributing to a runoff into water supplies, like groundwater or rivers and can result from spillage of fuels like oil into water supplies or onto land or discharge of human waste in an unhealthy manner.

Visual Disruption of railroads is defined as a railway changing the way that a previously undisturbed, pristine sight of nature looks. When man chooses to build a railway into the wilderness, he is forever changing the environment firstly by mere sight alone; a viewer will never be able to see the original scene again, and the builders of the railway often alter the landscape around the railway to allow it to ride. Frequent cuttings, embankments, dikes, and stilts are built which will change the way that landscape will look forever.

An example is the Royal Gorge Bridge in Canon City, Colorado. This bridge stands 955 feet above the Arkansas River and stretches 1,258 feet across. This bridge that now uses aerial trams is an unforgettable part of this Colorado landscape.

Environmental History of Railways

Railways also disrupted the natural tendencies of the environment through an increased capacity for transportation. Railroads throughout the United States allowed quicker, more efficient transport of goods and people that were previously unavailable. Agriculture, animals, soldiers, goods, and natural resources were now able to move large distances in much shorter amounts of time. As a result, things that were not harvested before like certain tracts of arable land or animal populations were now being used.

Galena and Chicago Union Railroad

A current map showing Chicago, Galena, and St. Louis

The Galena and Chicago Union Railroad was the first railway to be built from Chicago. It never reached Galena, Illinois, but it reached Clinton, Iowa, and Freeport, Illinois. This railroad marked the beginning of Chicago's economic dominance in the Midwest though transportation of goods such as agriculture and bison hides. Railroads affected the American environment by opening up unexplored, immense tracts of the American wilderness for settlement commercialization.

The idea behind a railroad to Chicago was to steal Midwestern agricultural business from St. Louis, Missouri and Madison, Wisconsin. The area around Chicago was ideal for a railroad because it was flat and grassy. Citizens of Chicago believed they could use their environment for commercial gain by actually buying goods grown from the land as well as increasing the value the value of adjacent land neighboring the railroad. The Galena and Chicago Union railroad underwent construction in March of 1848 to have the railroad run through Chicago, a booming Midwest town. In order to fund this, local Illinoisans pledged together to build a railway because of the potential economic prosperity. William Cronon writes, ”By the following April [1849], over twelve hundred people had pledged to buy stock hypothetically valued at about $350,000, though they had paid only about $20,000 in actual cash.” Farmers were enamored with the idea of a railroad because transporting crops and goods became much easier and more effective than traveling on dirt roads that could easily become muddy or impassable, so they pledged a lot of their money towards the venture. The process of local funding was stock installments.

By 1852, the Galena and Chicago Union railroad supplied Chicago over half of its wheat. This statistic changed the way people thought about the environment and its railways because railways through the countryside provided Chicagoans with increased wealth; railways became a symbol of mastery over land by being able to transport anything across terrain. This mastery coupled with a aligning of railroads with prosperity and wealth changed the way Chicagoans saw railways. It was a beacon of hope and deliverer of goods.

Impact of Railroads on Buffalo Population

A buffalo hide yard in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878

During the first half of the 19th century, herds of buffalo were plentiful throughout the Midwestern states of America, but the American people through Manifest Destiny drastically changed the American landscape. Before the Civil War, 8 million buffalo roamed free, but only 4-6 million remained after the war because their hides had become valuable throughout the country and domestic horses and cattle had begun to occupy the same space and graze the same land as the bison. William Hornaday, an influential zoologist and student of the American bison, wrote, "as soon as the railways crossed the buffalo country, the slaughter began." Railroads gave rise to the consumption of buffalo because hunters and businessmen could transport parts of the buffalo to distant parts of the country where demand was high. Before, it was not plausible to commercialize the buffalo because the hide, meat, and bones since it would take so much longer to get to their destination. Since railroads made transportation much quicker, it was now plausible for people to make money off the seemingly endless resource in the plains of the Midwest: the buffalo. So extreme was the mass hunting of buffalo thanks to the new railroads that wolves could not consume all of the carcasses that were left behind by hunters. There were so many rotting, pungent, bison corpses that nature's scavengers did not have enough manpower to consume.

Willam Hornaday, a leading conservationist of the 19th century

Through this massacre, however, the landscape did affect man in an economic way through the creation of jobs. Many men acquired jobs hunting and skinning bison on the plains as well as maintaining railroads and boxcars that carried these valuable bison hides. At the end of the line, men were required to sell the bison when they had finally reached their destination. Through manipulating the environment, the American people were able to subjugate nature to their will to make a profit.

Railroads in popular culture

In 1967 Gordon Lightfoot, a Canadian folk singer, released a song called, "Canadian Railway Trilogy" which documents the way he sees nature and how nature has changed because of increasing railways going through North America. He describes the pristine wilderness "long before the white man and long before the wheel" and before pioneers started to build mines, mills, and factories in the verdant land. Because of the optimism for wealth and adventure, Lightfoot claims, "The railroad men grew restless for to hear the hammers ring." He also describes the cost this industry had on nature by penning the line, "Open her heart let the life blood flow." He describes nature's heart as being bled by the workers' dreams, which could not be stopped, "Into the muskeg and into the rain." Because man wants to be in control of nature and conquer it, he wants to be able to say,

"On the mountain tops we stand

All the world at our command thumb|The Way I Feel, containing "Canadian Railway Trilogy" We have opened up the soil

With our teardrops and our toil"

Through hard work technology, pioneers and businessmen adapted the environment for their own commercial needs and quest for power.