Transportation of Food: Railroads

The earliest experimental railroads were constructed in England and France in the mid-eighteenth century, but the first American line was the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which connected the city of Baltimore with the Ohio River. When the B&O’s steam engine Tom Thumb went into operation in August 1830, there were only 23 miles of railroad track in the United States. Within a decade, this had increased to 2,800 miles of track. The expansion of the railroads meant that market gardeners and dairy farmers who did not live near a canal or navigable river could still ship fresh produce into cities daily, and businesses in cities that manufactured comestibles—such as flour, sugar, and alcohol—could sell them in rural areas. By 1833 the cost of freight transportation by rail averaged 8 cents per ton per mile; that was almost one-third the cost of wagon transportation at the time. On some lines, costs were as low as 1.6 cents per ton per mile. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that railroad rates became competitive with canal freight rates.