In a purely American sense, during the 19th century the railroads established the western half; towns grew where the railways made them, and roads would have been an afterthought, the first ones built to service those stations with produce and travellers.
Generally speaking, railroad “right of ways” (the strip of land on which the rails and other infrastructure are built) are considered private property of the railroads and fall under applicable State and Federal law. So legally speaking, a town can’t just decide to put a rail crossing wherever it feels like any more than it could, for example, decide to build it’s own on-ramp to the Interstate.
I think the “why” of it has a lot to do with rail being more or less national infrastructure, even if privately owned. And because of the nature of railroad operations, there are a lot of complex implications to haphazardly adding crossings.
In Pierre Berton’s book “The Last Spike”, he mentions that the Canadian Pacific Railway builders moved their main stop, and hence the town of Brandon, Manitoba, by about 10 miles when they built the railroad, because speculators had bought up the land where they guessed the stop would be. Instead, the principals in the railroad company bought the land at the new stop themselves and made a killing.
Basically, the railroads were given special rights because negotiating for a strip of land 30 feet wide and several hundred miles long would be impossible without some form of eminent domain or government backing. It may have been simple unoccupied land grants in the west, but think of the fun in building on the east coast, or worse yet, Europe.
One novel I read years ago talked about land grants for a railroad company trying to build into Florida, and mentioned that they were allowed to take any land that they surveyed from a boat (i.e. swamp). So they loaded a boat into a wagon and surveyed from that.
In Britain where it all started the weird combination of parliamentary democracy, gentry rule and raw capitalism meant each proposed line had to get an individual parliamentary bill authorizing it — leading to an orgy of bribery, shares, corruption, strong-arming, and inefficient overall planning known as the Great Railway Boom [ think George Hudson ].
However, the further east from Dover you got, the decision got simpler and more efficient. In in France commercial co-ordination for the good of the État was prime, in the German states the greatest consideration was future military usage, until in Russia the Tsar just said “Do it.”
I’m not disagreeing with you - and it would be stupidly hypocritical of me to do so since I love studying Rome - but the reason I specifically called out Macadamized roads was that they were cheap. Traditional roads, some of which were still made roughly according to the Roman design, were extremely expensive in material and manpower. Hence it was extremely costly to move goods to rail centers - or it would have been so, except that the new road building technique had been enthusiastically adopted in much of the western world, allowing for far faster and more extensive road building. The United States in particular needed this, since we had a much short historical period in which to build infrastructure.
Incidentally, even today roads are mostly built, at least in the United States, using a modified and improved version of the Macadam design.
I would be suspicious of this claim except in some fairly remote areas, and for a very narrow definition of “west”. Rail didn’t exist in the Western United States until the late 1860’s, after the region had been opened to settlement for a generation. The Homestead Act was well in effect by then, but even beforehand there were cities and towns around many, if not quite all, of the major urban centers. Certainly for some of these roads weren’t a major priority, and railroads spurred more development and settlement since they obviously made it easy to trade with eastern markets. However, very little country was “empty” until the rail came by, and that mostly applies to the far west, with large desert areas.
You’d be mistaken.
Read md2000’s post. This was the way railroad towns were established. Even if there was a pre-existing town in the area, the railroad would plat their own town. This would be sold by a related corporation (with similar owners to the railroad), which maximized the railroad builders profits. For instance, where I grew up in North Dakota, there was a pre-existing town at the crossing of the Mouse River, Burlington. When the Great Northern Railway built west in the 1880s, Burlington expected to be a division site (if for no other reason than that the river gave a source of water for steam locomotives). Nope, the Great Northern ignored Burlington and established a division point in their own town site of Minot. Burlington still exists, but often the bypassed town would pull up stakes and move its buildings to the new railroad-established site.
Railroads used their power to place a depot, to extort concessions from existing towns on their routes.
The Southern Pacific Railroad (“the Octopus”) built a railroad through the San Joaquin Valley. It passed through then-existing towns along what is now State Route 99. The railroad demanded concessions or subsidies from those towns.
Some towns agreed. SP would then put a depot in the town, and the town would typically prosper.
Other towns told SP to go take a hike. So SP did: Instead of putting a depot in the town, they would put a depot some miles down the line, well away from the town, out in the middle of nowhere. But that was good enough: Before long, a town would arise and develop around that depot, while the original town would typically dry up and blow away.
(I learned all this from reading this book: Iron Wheels & Broken Men: The Railroad Barons and the Plunder of the West by Richard O’Connor, which I found in a library in Santa Clara 30-some years ago. So I don’t remember specifically which towns were mentioned, but that they were some of the well-established towns along Route 99 to this day.)
Googling, I see that book is available on 14 day loan by logging in at Archive.org.
Never really understood ebook loans, and Archive became too ugly to use a few years back, but someone may be interested.
And from the Google page I also see there were Hell-On-Wheels towns, just for the Union Pacific, separate from the other deliberate founding phenomenon, although some towns still endure.
*The first “Hell on Wheels” town began near Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory, in August 1866, when the Union Pacific line met Dobeytown, a settlement that existed to provide for the soldiers’ more earthy needs. Fort Kearny (later just Kearney) and North Platte, Nebraska; Julesburg, Colorado; Cheyenne, Laramie, Green River City, and Benton, Wyoming; and Bear River City and Corrine, Utah, were among the primary towns.
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**Encyclopedia of The Great Plains
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Wiki merely suggests it was always the same town, travelling.
As the end of the line continually moved westward, Hell on Wheels followed along, reconstructing itself on the outskirts of each town that became, in turn, the center of activity for the Union Pacific’s construction work