Buisness Of the Railroad essays

Buisness Of the Railroad essays One of the first big business of 1850s started with the development of the railroad. Before the civil war was the trunk line railroads, witch controlled 500 miles of track each, and had hundreds of employees. The late 1860s and early 1870s the New York central and many other railroads ran through the west. A major accomplishment was set fourth when entrepreneurs completed the first Transcontinental line, and construction was a hard and exspecive task. ( Even the largest textile mills employed fewer than a thousand people , and a handful were capitalized at more than 1 million dollars.) (pg 53) Railroads were growing rapidly across the country all over the United States. In the 1880s there was an average of 8,000 miles of track being layed that the Americans had built, and by the time of 1890the entire nation had already had 166,000 miles of track. And with big railroad improvement and passage ways came growing cities and even more businesses that people could benefit off of. Then in 1916 constuction of more than254,000 miles had been completed. So in result it was a complete system by 1916. (even by the end of the 1880s, an intergrated, nationwide railroad network was available to farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and passangers.)(pg53). Because railroads grew so fast problems came up faster than expected such as they were so big there was not enough employees to go around. This served as a big problem. And as people found out in the railroad business problems that would come up were much more complicated than say a factory on the north shore having problems. When making decisions about a problem or any other complications that may come up wile running a railroad , deciding and making rash decisions effect lives of the passangers and also affect the employees on the trains, so decisions have to be made fast and precise. The most common problems of the Railroad is problems of financing expansion an ...