I’m studying geography and can’t quite grasp the correlation between railtracks and the creation of cities. I get that railtracks can transport natural resources, but I don’t see the connection.
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If you look at the development of America (and many other parts of the world had similar development) the earliest cities are built on water. Coasts and navigable rivers allow trade to develop. And water is necessary for drinking, manufacturing, and agriculture.
The next cities to develop are on roads constructed between these older cities. Usually locations that have enough water and other natural resources to support travelers on the roadways. In the US this is early 19th Century growth as the National Road and other improved roadways developed from public and private investment to open up more of the interior: in Europe good roads date back to Rome. That’s why so many place names in Pennsylvania and Ohio are from the names of inns, as they served these transportation networks and grew with trade. Next came canals, which used existing waterways that were often not navigable in their original state but by digging out a consistent depth and adding locks and towpaths could be used for transportation.
Railroads were just the next evolution in transportation. Early railroads required frequent stops for coal and water, and they were limited in how steeply they could climb so the best routes were located along passes through mountains. But railroads could be built in fairly straight lines between cities, reducing travel times.
Many cities that grew rapidly during the 19th century were at places where the different transportation lines came together. For example, Chicago became a major center of manufacturing and trade because it connected canals, railroads, and maritime shipping through the great lakes.
Cattle were driven overland to Kansas City and other points where the cattle trails intersected with railroads, then put on trains for Chicago. At Chicago, the cattle were slaughtered and processed into meat products that could be put on ships and sold to the East Coast and Europe. Other raw materials (like Cyprus lumber from Arkansas) were transported by rail to be turned into products (like sewing machine cabinets) that could be distributed by rail or ship to far flung markets.
Old Steam engines needed to stop to take on water/coal. Given the sheer scale of the United States some of these stops would be in the middle of nowhere. Eventually people started building bars, inns and stores for the passengers and crew. Eventually these grew into turns and then into cities.
Similar things happened with the US highway system, small towns popped up around serving tourists traveling along the highways.
One reason is that trains have their own infrastructure and support needs.
Steam locomotives: You need water replenishment, fuel replenishment, engine maintenance. This means workers, and workers need housing.
Cargo: most cargo was moved by rail. This means a storage depot for each station, cranes, and of course workers to man all of those.
Postal: yes postal service was train based so each station serves as a postal hub. This requires workers too.
Result: a small town station is already feeding 5-10 families.
On top of this, most trade offices will move next to the train station to have a quicker access and therefore better revenues and more customers.
This will feed some 2-5 families.
Now, it seems little but adding 10-20 families to a town, is huge. Comparatively, that’s 10-20 farms equivalent of wealth and people.
Then there’s industry that will build as close as possible to rail, this will move 10-100 families from the farms to the town.
Factoring in the people that can thrive by selling services to those families, a station can grow a farmer’s town from 500 to 1000 people. And this is in the very short term.
Then the industry will require a school, then the place become a good source of skilled workers, more industry comes and the town snowballs. While the towns without railway access keep losing population as their citizens are carried away by the more interesting opportunities of the railway town.
Railways create a source of communication with the rest of the world at the time of the first railways roads were in poor condition and expensive to move goods along a railway could transport anything not just natural resources, it could be cloth and clothes, or pottery, or pots and pans etc. Along the side of the tracks telegraph wires were laid enabling messages to be sent, people could also travel to establish a new home in the new city making the stuff in the new city.
I live in a rural area. Maybe 1/4 mile behind my house is a grain silo for loading grain onto railroad cars.
In the early days, it would simply have just been a centrally located grain silo stop for the local farmers. Slowly, over time, people would move close to it, probably starting with the people working at the silo and slowly expanding from there. The village i live in has around 1400 residents with a nice housing development, slowly expanding.
It starts with a location people can use to transport goods to sell in a bigger market or to have a way to transport resources from a remote location. If it was, say, a mining operation, the workers would likely live there. They would need support businesses, like a general store, so someone would move there to run that. Then maybe a tavern and a barber shop. As more people move into the area, to support the users of that train stop, you need more and more support services. Then, slowly over time, that area grows into a city.
It depends on the time an place.
In places like Europe Railways were built to connect cities that had existed for a long time.
In place like the American West frequently cities sprung up alongside railways.
In North America you have to separate out towns and cities that were founded before Railways were a thing, while they were the primary mode of long distance transportation and after they were replaced too a large degree by trucks and cars.
In the days before rail was wide spread, large cities tended to spring on costs and rivers, because humans need water and because boats and ships were a way to transport goods in bulk before the railway was a thing.
In the US in the beginning rivers like the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries (the rivers the flow into it and are big enough to allow boats to move though them) form a natural transportation network and many cities have sprung up around it.
The American West lacked such convenient natural transportation networks. When the railway was built to connect the East coast to the west coast it naturally passed by many existing settlements that grew because goods and people could now easily get there.
Some new settlements sprung up around the railway where none existed before, to take advantage of the railway.
If you have heard of the Donner Party or the Oregon Trail you may have some idea that traveling to the west coast over land was a long and difficult thing, that a person might do once in a life-time.
Before the railway was built to connect the east coast to the west coast, the easiest way to transport people from for example Los Angles to New York was to take a ship down to Panama travel across that country over land and take another ship up to the east coast of the US.
The railway made direct travel from one part of the US to another much easier cheaper, faster and safer.
If you were on the railway you were part of the country and could ship goods out to elsewhere and receive goods from elsewhere.
It wasn’t until the US highways system was built that transporting over the road was a viable alternative.
Railtracks do not just transport natural resources, they transport all resources. Before railroads and canals the only way to transport goods was by horse and carrige. This was quite a costly and slow way of transporting things. The railway was the “Amazon Prime” of its day. Cities with rail would grow a lot bigger as factories and other industry would use the railway to deliver goods and order goods from all over the continent. This was just not feasable in cities without railways.
Even today the railway is responsible of carrying a huge part of the worlds mail, including Amazon packages. Huge warehouses have rail spurrs to them allowing them to receive entire trains with packages. But most factories today will have a truck pick up or dropp off the goods, but the truck would often drive to the rail yard to have its trailer loaded onto a train or its container loaded onto the train for long distance transport. The exception to this is the US where, despite it being profitable for the rail companies, individual loads is not prioritized.
Also, for what its worth, steam trains needed stopping points to take on water and fuel. Towns would have sprung up around these stopping points.
You already have the core of it in your own question so why don’t you just extrapolate a bit. What is a railroad? It’s transportation infrastructure. What does transportation infrastructure do? It moves resources (as you pointed out) and *people.* What do cities need to grow? Resources and people. Places that were once remote were now readily and easily accessible by rail. When you have people and things passing along that route, that route is going to become a hub, or in other words, a city.
Lets start longer ago, Citys have been build along Rivers or next to the oceans. Simply because it was far easier to transport stuff this way.
Then with existent Citys Railroads have been build from city to city.
Then since there was a transport option new citys have been build along the railroads.
That was Europe
In America, well i am no historican, but i think that the Railway from East to west coast was necessary to transport the build material. And after the railway have been build it happened the same as in europe, and new Citys along the railroad made sense.
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