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Railroads
reshaped the North American environment and reoriented North
American
behavior. "In a quarter of a century", claimed the Omaha Daily
Republican in
1883,
"they have made the people of the United States homogeneous, breaking
through
the
peculiarities and provincialisms which marked separate and unmingling
sections."
(5)
The railroad simultaneously stripped the landscape of the natural
resources, made
velocity
of transport and economy of scale necessary parts of industrial production,
and
carried
consumer goods to households; it dispatched immigrants to unsettled places,
drew
emigrants away from farms and villages to cities, and sent men and guns to
battle.
It
standardized time and travel, seeking to annihilate distance and space by
allowing
(10)
movement at any time and in any season or type of weather. In its grand and
impressive
terminals
and stations, architects recreated historic Roman temples and public baths,
French
chateaus and Italian bell towers-edifices that people used as stages for
many of
everyday
life's high emotions: meeting and parting, waiting and worrying, planning
new
starts or coming home.
(15)
Passenger terminals, like the luxury express trains that hurled people over
spots,
spotlight
the romance of railroading. (The twentieth-Century Limited sped between
Chicago
and New York in twenty hours by 1915). Equally important to everyday life
were
the slow freight trans chugging through industrial zones, the morning and
evening
commuter locals shuttling back ions and urban terminals, and the incessant
(20)
comings and goings that occurred in the classifications, or switching,
yards. Moreover,
in
addition to its being a transportation pathway equipped with a mammoth
physical
plant
of tracks signals, crossings, bridges, and junctions, plus telegraph and
telephone
lines
the railroad nurtured factory complexes, coat piles, warehouses, and
generating
stations,
forming along its right-of-way what has aptly been called "the metropolitan
(25)
corridor" of the American landscape.
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