History 479B

Devine

Fall 2012

Railroad Study Questions

 

“James J. Hill and the Transcontinental Railroads”

 

  1. The government awarded subsidies to railroad builders based on how fast they worked and how much track they laid. Why did this incentive system end up producing badly run railroad lines that often went bankrupt?

 

  1. Why was James Hill able to build a profitable railroad line without government subsidies?  What were the “secrets of his success”?

 

  1. Why did Henry Villard fail to build a profitable railroad line?

 

  1. How did James Hill insure ahead of time that once his railroad was built, there would be customers and goods to fill the trains?

 

  1. How did the “strings attached” to government subsidies end up hurting the railroad lines that accepted these subsidies?

 

  1. Railroad owners asked for government subsidies in order to stimulate foreign trade.  Hill refused subsidies but developed an extensive foreign trade with Asia. Why did he succeed in doing so? Why did his competitors fail?

 

  1. What was Hill’s business model?  How would you sum up his basic approach to building and running an efficient and profitable railroad?

 

  1. How did government regulations (the Hepburn Act, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act) aimed at reforming poorly run railroads instead end up hurting Hill’s well-run railroad?

 

“Railroads and the Reorganization of Nature and Time”

 

  1. Unlike earlier transport systems (lakes, rivers, canals, mud roads), how were railroads “liberated” from the limits imposed by both geography and climate?

 

  1. How did the railroads change people’s perception of space and time?  How did they decrease the cost of distance and increase the value of time?

 

  1. How did the coming of the railroad change the process of farming?

 

  1. How did railroads change the ways in which travelers interacted with the surrounding environment?

 

  1. How did the railroads literally come to dictate what time it was in any given location?  Why did this happen?

 

  1. Why does the author say that the railroads created a whole new class of professionals?

 

 

“Main Line to E Pluribus Unum”

 

  1. Summers observes, “Railroad building led to everything.”  Why was this the case?  Why did the railroads become the “wiring” of the new industrial economy?

 

  1. What significant innovations occurred in the railroad industry during the 1880s? 

 

  1. How did the railroads change farming and encourage the development of latent resources in the West?  Why was the railroad the prerequisite for these changes?

 

  1. How did the railroads change the daily lives, consumption patterns, and even diets of both rural and urban Americans?

 

  1. How did the “big business” of the railroad contribute to new methods of financing and the “management revolution”?

 

  1. Why was the railroad strike of 1877 a significant moment in Gilded Age history?