13 ms·

How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s?

211 points by MikeCapone 14y ago

arbuge 14y ago
The 1930s railroad map is about the same as what you'd experience doing a road or rail trip today. It's air travel that has improved since then. Concerning air travel, the situation there regarding travel time hasn't improved much in the last 40 years or so ever since commercial jet service first appeared. Costs have of course come way down.
- cstross 14y ago
  Note, however, that it's rail travel in North America that has been static since 1930 -- if you applied the same exercise to Western Europe you'd see dramatic improvements in surface travel times since 1960, with the spread of electrification and in-cab signaling and then the expansion of the TGV, LGV and ICE networks.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    Indeed. Although there would be little point for the distance involved (compared to air travel), a cross-US high-speed rail line using the best existing technology on a non-stop trip would go through in ~15h (the Wuhan–Guangzhou line non-stop service averaged 194mph station to station, although non-stop service has ended and the best average commercial train service has gone back to the french LGV Est with 174mph)
    - jeltz 14y ago
      For traveling from coast to coast there would be little point, but for shorter distances within the US high-speed rail should beat air travel.
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
        I dunno. 15 hours in relative comfort might win sometimes over 4 hours of crampedness and annoyance. The bigger question would be price, which I suspect would be higher than average air fares.
        dalke 14y ago
        I've tried both, for the Sweden<->Germany route. I've usually been disappointed that the train was more expensive than a flight. The train has much fewer luggage restrictions, but lugging lots of luggage around when changing trains is also a hassle, while with flights they do that for you. With 4 hours of travel, you don't need to worry about food. With 15, you do. Though you can bring a full meal, including drinks and a knife, on the train. Plus, there's AC power for the laptop. My break-even point is at about 6-8 hours by train, vs. a plane. That gets me to Hamburg.
      - masklinn 14y ago
        > For traveling from coast to coast there would be little point, but for shorter distances within the US high-speed rail should beat air travel. Absolutely, which is why I pointed out that for the distance it wouldn't be a good idea: cross-continental high-speed rail makes little sense, the sweet spot currently tops out around 1000 miles (and even then it depends, it works well in Europe because train stations can be in the city center — where things happen and mass transportation is developed — versus airport being much further out in the suburbs or countryside, I do not know if it'd work as well in the US where the most affluent segments of the population tends to live in the suburbs rather than the city and cities are more often designed around car travel).
    - aneth4 14y ago
      Don't forget, cross-country air travel generally requires at least an additional 3 hours of travelling outside the city to and from the airport, checkin, security, taxiing, unloading, etc. A five hour cross country flight really takes 8 hours, so a 15 hour train between city centers doesn't sound so bad. At half the distance, a 7 hour train vs a 5.5 hour plane excursion, sounds delightful.
      - potatolicious 14y ago
        This is true, but also applies to high speed rail. There are tremendous space requirements applicable to HSR that don't apply to regular rail. Look at HSR developments in China, Taiwan, etc, most of which have stations located well outside densely populated areas (except at points of extreme political/economic importance). Getting to a HSR station will be non-trivial also, not unlike getting to an airport today. HSR directly into a place like Midtown Manhattan is unlikely.
        desas 14y ago
        There's HSR right into the middle of London. Big cities can have HSR.
    - jzwinck 14y ago
      I think there would be tremendous value in a train service departing NYC after work, stopping in Philadelphia and DC, then offering a decent dinner and breakfast and reaching LA before lunchtime the next day. This is possible with speeds similar to the French TGV.
  - newbie12 14y ago
    Hardly static, passenger rail has been in collapse in the U.S. The eastern US is dotted with shuttered train stations and the Amtrak monopoly can barely keep its lights on.
blackhole 14y ago
A few months ago my friend saw an ad in his university newspaper for a hackathon that was scheduled to start the next day. I happened to not have anything scheduled that weekend, and he asked me if I could team up with him to participate. The thing was, he lives in California, and I live in Washington. He found one last remaining seat on the last flight headed out that night and bought a ticket for me. By 9 PM, I was stepping off an airplane roughly 1600 miles from home. When I woke up that morning, I had no idea I'd sleep on a couch in a dorm room at SJSU. We seriously live in the future.
- melling 14y ago
  I live 4 miles from work. I left my house at 8:20am and arrived in my office at 9:25am. Try to grab a train from San Francisco to LA. That's about 400 miles. How long would you expect that to take in this future of which you speak?
  - blackhole 14y ago
    For reference, the plane flight itself was 2 hours. I didn't know I was going until 3 PM.
  - rachelbythebay 14y ago
    Perhaps the future isn't evenly distributed. Regarding the article, I'd like to see them plot the rate-of-change: how long it took to go from a month to a week to a day and so on, and then continue it into the present day. I think we've hit something of a cap on speed.
    - pyre 14y ago
      Not necessarily. IIRC, outside of the East Coast corridor, the rails only allow the trains to go ~35mph. There are also high-speed / bullet trains as well, none of which are available in the US (for now).
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
bane 14y ago
I think it's worth it for anybody to take a long haul passenger rail trip at least once. I took one that lasted about 80 hours (about 40 each way) and it really was a struggle to keep yourself engaged the entire way. On a side note, provisioning long haul rail in the age of steam must have been an incredible logistics exercise, on-top of that moving mail and other information around the country. Imagine not knowing that a new law was passed for 6 weeks!
- lmm 14y ago
  Last year I went from London to Shanghai by rail, taking two weeks. For the first stretch we were spending each day in a new capital; by the time we got to Moscow the best part of three days on a single train was just what we needed. It was a lot of fun, although I actually found Japan (where we caught a ferry to from Shanghai) more interesting.
  - bane 14y ago
    That sounds like an awesome trip. Definitely more interesting than the drab Amtrack trip from D.C. to Miami I took. No stops, lots of industrial and abandoned residential blocks (and sound walls) the entire trip. This was of course before the internet was available and laptops were yet the expensive convenience of the industrious business man. I played lots of card games though.
- alexkus 14y ago
  I've done two 24 hour (one way) train journeys, they're fantastic. Paris to Lisbon (for honeymoon) changing trains to Iberian gauge at Irun/Hendaye. And Viedma to Bariloche with the desolation of the pampas and the stunning views as you approach the mountains. I've also done a 3 night 4 day ferry through the Chilean Fjords from Puerto Montt down to Puerto Natales (in order to go do the "W" in Torres del Paine). So much stunning scenery to look at (and a bar at night!). Travelling in Argentina many people use coaches to go long distances between cities as air travel is so much more expensive. You can get a coach from Puerto Iguazu to Ushuaia if you've got a spare 60 odd hours. The coaches are surprisingly comfy with big reclining seats that are not far off being full beds. We mainly did 12-14h overnight trips between cities so we got some sleep and saved on a night's accommodation.
mmanfrin 14y ago
I wish there were a 1848 date in there -- before the gold rush. The difference in time between 1830 and 57 are dramatic, and I think most of that happened in the few years after the rush.
jnsaff2 14y ago
"As you can see in the map above, in 1800, it took a whole day to barely get outside of the city" Considering the traffic, not much has changed for people with four wheels.
tolos 14y ago
Original page: http://imgur.com/Mokjd http://imgur.com/Mokjd from "Atlas of the historical geography of the United States" (1932) Page here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001/390?view=image http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001/390?view... ToC: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001?view=toc http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001?view=toc
arscan 14y ago
I've seen a couple of these kinds of visualizations over the years. I think they are really fascinating... here's one that shows how long it will take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000: http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world There are definitely still some very remote places on this planet.
jetti 14y ago
The thing that amazes me is that the map hasn't really changed if you are going by rail. My grandma lived in Colorado Springs and my mom and I used to drive there to see her for Thanksgiving because flights were too expensive. Leaving out of Chicago, it would take about 15 to 18 hours of driving to get to Colorado Springs. We would try to make the trip all at once and as a tall teen, it would be miserable being stuck in the passenger seat of a smaller two door convertible for so long. I asked my mom why don't we take the train and her response shocked me. Not only was the train from Chicago to Colorado Springs more expensive than flying, it was a 24 hour trip as well. If you look at the map from 1930, it it shows as about 1 day from Chicago to Denver/Colorado Springs area.
- dalke 14y ago
  By itself that isn't so surprising. After all, the trip by horse-drawn coach hasn't improved much either. Cars are point-to-point. Berlin to Paris by train is about 12 hours. By car it's about 10, because there's no need to stop and change. While Frankfurt->Paris is 4 hours by non-stop ICE, and 5 by car.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    This is a great point, and one the maps sort of gloss over, which is you step from transportation system to transportation system you get faster, walking to horse drawn wagon, to train, to car, to plane. And as some have mentioned to the Internet which can eliminate the need to travel at all if you exploit it well. My wife and I took the California Zephyr from Oakland to Chicago and then the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington DC. It took several days (we overnighted in Chicago as the chances of making the connection there on Amtrak are effectively zero). It was a lot of fun, and quite relaxing, but clearly cross country trains sort of peaked in the late 40's early 50's and haven't moved a whole lot since in this country.
    - dalke 14y ago
      They should also have mentioned that the telegraph "can eliminate the need to travel at all if you exploit it well." :)
chernevik 14y ago
Very interesting. But the focus on New York probably skews the analysis a lot, particularly in early years when rivers and canals would have been important routes. Notice the bend of the 1800 curves up the eastern NY border, and into southeastern Pennsylvania? I bet those reflect the use of the Hudson and Delaware rivers for travel, and possibly linkage to other rivers like the Ohio, Susquehanna and Potomac. Likewise I suspect that in 1830 Chicago was probably closer to New Orleans, on the Mississippi, than it was to New York. Likewise the transport of goods, rather than passengers, was probably more important in forming perceptions of distance, as that's what would drive commerce and thus ongoing relationships. Attention to goods and other point pairings probably matter a lot when you get to 1857. I expect internal communications, of goods, in the South reflected high proximity to the nearest port, and that NY was essentially on the other side of the moon. Whereas the North was probably much more homogenous in its travel times (proportionately more railroad, less river) -- but largely isolated from the South. Which would have done a lot to foster disunion among the two geographies. That view would probably also say a lot about the border states, I bet that would show these were essentially islands unto themselves.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  That's not really a skew so much as a reflection of the realities of the time, though. If you were lucky enough to want to go somewhere along a canal route, you traveled fast; otherwise you traveled slow. (Which meant most trips were slow.) Attention to goods and other point pairings probably matter a lot when you get to 1857. I expect internal communications, of goods, in the South reflected high proximity to the nearest port, and that NY was essentially on the other side of the moon. Whereas the North was probably much more homogenous in its travel times (proportionately more railroad, less river) -- but largely isolated from the South. You might be surprised. Antebellum New York actually had strong commercial ties to the South, primarily from acting as a distribution center for Southern cotton to the rest of the North. These ties were so strong that Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City during the secession crisis, actually led a short-lived movement to take New York out of the Union and establish it as a neutral "free city" so that it could continue in the cotton trade. (See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-carolina-then-new-york/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-... for a good account of this period.) There was actually a fair bit of support in the city for Wood's plan until the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, setting off a wave of pro-Union support in the North that swamped it.
johngalt 14y ago
Travel infrastructure seems like a 'chicken or egg' problem. Why build a rail line to the middle of nowhere? Conversely how will towns develop if people can't reach them? Much of the development of the heartland US was bootstrapped by the transportation/rail needs between the east and west coasts. I wonder how different the US would be today without the CA gold rush. Or if the gold rush had been somewhere closer to the eastern seaboard like the Appalachians.
tazzy531 14y ago
I just finished reading the book "Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869" (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1863-1869/dp/0743203178 http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-18...). It talks about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad greatly changed the shape of the country due to the fact that within a span of a few years, travel times across the country dropped from months to a week. What is particularly interesting about this was how similar the methodology that they used was to the Lean Startup methodology. With the way that the Railroad Act was structured, there was significant award for moving fast. While they were in the wilderness, it was rather difficult/expensive getting supplies. They used lower quality cottonwood ties to build out fast knowing that once the railroads were built, higher quality replacements could be brought in for far cheaper. Anyways, I'd highly recommend this book for those of you in the startup scene.
michael_miller 14y ago
It's depressing how little travel time has changed in the past several decades. The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, and we're still traveling at around Mach 0.85. In the past four decades, we haven't made any significant improvements to travel time. How sad is that, when in the span of 3 decades in the 1830s, rail travel time doubled? I think (hope) that we're on a path to change this in the near future. The main reason for our lack of advancement in travel time is the cost of gasoline. The Concorde demonstrated that supersonic transport was technically possible, but economically impossible. What will change the landscape is electric planes. This is not a fantasy - there are several companies with (somewhat) viable piston planes being engineered right now. The first company is Beyond Aviation (www.beyond-aviation.com) which is producing an electric varient of the venerable Cessna 172 (most popular plane produced, the default trainer option for pilots). It's not a perfect plane -- only 2 people can ride in it, and it's designed for flight schools, not for cruising around, but it's a big step forward for aviation. The second company is Pipistrel, which is developing the Panthera (http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data). The Panthera Electro is a huge step in the right direction. Although it only seats 2, and cruises at 118 knots, it can go for 215NM. This is just shy of NYC -> DC. Imagine if you could travel between these cities for essentially free (solar power). On the more viable replace-business-jets route, Elon Musk has stated that he wants to build a VTVL electric jet. From what he's stated, it sounds like his main approach to overcoming the lack of energy density is flying higher. Current jets are limited to efficient operation at ~35k feet because the oxygen density any higher is too low for an ICE to operate. Current li-ion batteries, however, don't need oxygen to operate! So they can go to 50,60,70,80k feet for reduced drag and operate just as efficiently as if they were at 35k feet. Musk has stated that he thinks battery density needs to double before this jet can become a reality (and has shown that battery density doubles once every ~10 years historically). I'm extremely optimistic about the future of aviation. As soon as we can hook up cheap (nuclear, coal, wind, solar) and efficiently generated (~2x efficiency gains at large plants) power to planes, the cost of flying will take a huge drop.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Speaking of Musk, there's the Hyperloop. Not sure why he hasn't announced it yet.
brudgers 14y ago
The correctness of attributing of the improvement in speed of travel between 1800 and 1830 to railroads is dubious. This shows the extent of common carrier rail lines in 1835: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRail1835.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRail1835.jpg What improved travel was the National Road, the Federal Roads, and the Military Road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road_%28United_States%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road_%28United_States%... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Cherokee_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Cherokee_lands%... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Creek_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Creek_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%27s_Military_Road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%27s_Military_Road
- codewright 14y ago
  http://railroads.unl.edu/views/sources/1850%20Expansion.jpg http://railroads.unl.edu/views/sources/1850%20Expansion.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/19-century/railroads-1870.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/19-century/railroads-187... Probably the railroads.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    That's 1850. Between 1800 & 1830 much of the Southeast was still Native American nations, e.g. the portion of Alabama between Montgomery and the Georgia was the last part of the Creek Nation ceded in 1832. The Federal and National Roads allowed stage travel, and that's what improved speed...for those who weren't walking. By 1850, other than the Seminoles, the Native American nations in the East had been conquered and rail road motive power had advanced.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Really no. The first railroad companies, with total individual rights of way typically of 10-30 miles, were just starting to get organized and begin operations in 1830. It wasn't for another 10-20 years that significant contiguous trackage existed. The world was very different in 1850 than it was in 1830.
- 14y ago
mnemonicsloth 14y ago
Two Words: Donner Party They did eventually get where they were going. So worst-case travel times have improved even more than these common-case data suggest.
robwgibbons 14y ago
Very fascinating find. Having just finished reading Empire of the Summer Moon, I would not have wanted to be anywhere near the Southern Plains areas in 1857.
smacktoward 14y ago
For another interesting look at the subject of travel times, check out Stanford's ORBIS (http://orbis.stanford.edu/#map http://orbis.stanford.edu/#map), which lets you estimate travel times from one point in the Roman Empire circa 200 AD to another, based on several common modes of travel. What's fascinating is how little transportation changed between 200 and 1800. Sixteen hundred years pass and the basic means of getting around are still the same: foot, horse, cart, boat. Then in the hundred years after that there comes an explosion of new options: bicycle, rail, automobile, airplane. Gives some perspective on how relatively new the travel technologies we take for granted today actually are.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Most of our newfound forms of travel depend on engines, which haven't been around long. That's the reason travel was fairly stagnant for so long, IMO. Bicycles on the other hand have been around for a while. Why didn't they see more prolific use in Europe between 200 and 1800? I speculate lack of good enough roads. An oxcart road would not be the most pleasant place to ride an old-fashioned bicycle.
  - guelo 14y ago
    For bikes, I'm sure the metal manufacturing processes invented during the industrial revolution helped. It was probably really hard to produce a metal sprocket and chain before the 1800s.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Metalurgy and vulcanization. The former for frames and components, the latter for tyres.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > Most of our newfound forms of travel depend on engines, which haven't been around long. That's the reason travel was fairly stagnant for so long, IMO. Indeed, the work source was a major factor: before the 18th century, there was no efficient and mobile source of work... outside of people and beasts. > Bicycles on the other hand have been around for a while. Nope. The first recorded and verifiable ancestor to the bicycle dates back to the early 19th century: Baron Karl von Drais's Laufmaschine in 1817. It had two wheels in-line and could be steered. But users ran on it, propelling it by pushing the ground with their feet (hence the name "running machine"). Oh, and it was solid wood (22kg) The next elements we associate with an actual bicycle only appeared in 1863: cranks and pedals attached directly to the front wheel. And in 1885, the "rover" with its chain drive to the back wheel and equally-sized wheels would be the first one you'd recognize as a modern bicycle.
berkay 14y ago
Improvements between 1857 and 1930 is truly impressive (6 weeks to 3 days from NY to CA). The lack of progress since then (1930 to 2013, almost the same amount of time) is stark; it still takes 3 days to get to CA from NY by train. Almost no investment in railroads since US started building highways.

211 points by MikeCapone 14y ago

The 1930s railroad map is about the same as what you'd experience doing a road or rail trip today. It's air travel that has improved since then. Concerning air travel, the situation there regarding travel time hasn't improved much in the last 40 years or so ever since commercial jet service first appeared. Costs have of course come way down.

cstross 14y ago
Note, however, that it's rail travel in North America that has been static since 1930 -- if you applied the same exercise to Western Europe you'd see dramatic improvements in surface travel times since 1960, with the spread of electrification and in-cab signaling and then the expansion of the TGV, LGV and ICE networks.
- masklinn 14y ago
  Indeed. Although there would be little point for the distance involved (compared to air travel), a cross-US high-speed rail line using the best existing technology on a non-stop trip would go through in ~15h (the Wuhan–Guangzhou line non-stop service averaged 194mph station to station, although non-stop service has ended and the best average commercial train service has gone back to the french LGV Est with 174mph)
  - jeltz 14y ago
    For traveling from coast to coast there would be little point, but for shorter distances within the US high-speed rail should beat air travel.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      I dunno. 15 hours in relative comfort might win sometimes over 4 hours of crampedness and annoyance. The bigger question would be price, which I suspect would be higher than average air fares.
      - dalke 14y ago
        I've tried both, for the Sweden<->Germany route. I've usually been disappointed that the train was more expensive than a flight. The train has much fewer luggage restrictions, but lugging lots of luggage around when changing trains is also a hassle, while with flights they do that for you. With 4 hours of travel, you don't need to worry about food. With 15, you do. Though you can bring a full meal, including drinks and a knife, on the train. Plus, there's AC power for the laptop. My break-even point is at about 6-8 hours by train, vs. a plane. That gets me to Hamburg.
    - masklinn 14y ago
      > For traveling from coast to coast there would be little point, but for shorter distances within the US high-speed rail should beat air travel. Absolutely, which is why I pointed out that for the distance it wouldn't be a good idea: cross-continental high-speed rail makes little sense, the sweet spot currently tops out around 1000 miles (and even then it depends, it works well in Europe because train stations can be in the city center — where things happen and mass transportation is developed — versus airport being much further out in the suburbs or countryside, I do not know if it'd work as well in the US where the most affluent segments of the population tends to live in the suburbs rather than the city and cities are more often designed around car travel).
  - aneth4 14y ago
    Don't forget, cross-country air travel generally requires at least an additional 3 hours of travelling outside the city to and from the airport, checkin, security, taxiing, unloading, etc. A five hour cross country flight really takes 8 hours, so a 15 hour train between city centers doesn't sound so bad. At half the distance, a 7 hour train vs a 5.5 hour plane excursion, sounds delightful.
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      This is true, but also applies to high speed rail. There are tremendous space requirements applicable to HSR that don't apply to regular rail. Look at HSR developments in China, Taiwan, etc, most of which have stations located well outside densely populated areas (except at points of extreme political/economic importance). Getting to a HSR station will be non-trivial also, not unlike getting to an airport today. HSR directly into a place like Midtown Manhattan is unlikely.
      - desas 14y ago
        There's HSR right into the middle of London. Big cities can have HSR.
  - jzwinck 14y ago
    I think there would be tremendous value in a train service departing NYC after work, stopping in Philadelphia and DC, then offering a decent dinner and breakfast and reaching LA before lunchtime the next day. This is possible with speeds similar to the French TGV.
- newbie12 14y ago
  Hardly static, passenger rail has been in collapse in the U.S. The eastern US is dotted with shuttered train stations and the Amtrak monopoly can barely keep its lights on.

blackhole 14y ago

A few months ago my friend saw an ad in his university newspaper for a hackathon that was scheduled to start the next day. I happened to not have anything scheduled that weekend, and he asked me if I could team up with him to participate. The thing was, he lives in California, and I live in Washington. He found one last remaining seat on the last flight headed out that night and bought a ticket for me. By 9 PM, I was stepping off an airplane roughly 1600 miles from home. When I woke up that morning, I had no idea I'd sleep on a couch in a dorm room at SJSU. We seriously live in the future.

melling 14y ago
I live 4 miles from work. I left my house at 8:20am and arrived in my office at 9:25am. Try to grab a train from San Francisco to LA. That's about 400 miles. How long would you expect that to take in this future of which you speak?
- blackhole 14y ago
  For reference, the plane flight itself was 2 hours. I didn't know I was going until 3 PM.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Perhaps the future isn't evenly distributed. Regarding the article, I'd like to see them plot the rate-of-change: how long it took to go from a month to a week to a day and so on, and then continue it into the present day. I think we've hit something of a cap on speed.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Not necessarily. IIRC, outside of the East Coast corridor, the rails only allow the trains to go ~35mph. There are also high-speed / bullet trains as well, none of which are available in the US (for now).
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago

bane 14y ago

I think it's worth it for anybody to take a long haul passenger rail trip at least once. I took one that lasted about 80 hours (about 40 each way) and it really was a struggle to keep yourself engaged the entire way. On a side note, provisioning long haul rail in the age of steam must have been an incredible logistics exercise, on-top of that moving mail and other information around the country. Imagine not knowing that a new law was passed for 6 weeks!

lmm 14y ago
Last year I went from London to Shanghai by rail, taking two weeks. For the first stretch we were spending each day in a new capital; by the time we got to Moscow the best part of three days on a single train was just what we needed. It was a lot of fun, although I actually found Japan (where we caught a ferry to from Shanghai) more interesting.
- bane 14y ago
  That sounds like an awesome trip. Definitely more interesting than the drab Amtrack trip from D.C. to Miami I took. No stops, lots of industrial and abandoned residential blocks (and sound walls) the entire trip. This was of course before the internet was available and laptops were yet the expensive convenience of the industrious business man. I played lots of card games though.
alexkus 14y ago
I've done two 24 hour (one way) train journeys, they're fantastic. Paris to Lisbon (for honeymoon) changing trains to Iberian gauge at Irun/Hendaye. And Viedma to Bariloche with the desolation of the pampas and the stunning views as you approach the mountains. I've also done a 3 night 4 day ferry through the Chilean Fjords from Puerto Montt down to Puerto Natales (in order to go do the "W" in Torres del Paine). So much stunning scenery to look at (and a bar at night!). Travelling in Argentina many people use coaches to go long distances between cities as air travel is so much more expensive. You can get a coach from Puerto Iguazu to Ushuaia if you've got a spare 60 odd hours. The coaches are surprisingly comfy with big reclining seats that are not far off being full beds. We mainly did 12-14h overnight trips between cities so we got some sleep and saved on a night's accommodation.

mmanfrin 14y ago

I wish there were a 1848 date in there -- before the gold rush. The difference in time between 1830 and 57 are dramatic, and I think most of that happened in the few years after the rush.

jnsaff2 14y ago

"As you can see in the map above, in 1800, it took a whole day to barely get outside of the city" Considering the traffic, not much has changed for people with four wheels.

tolos 14y ago

Original page: http://imgur.com/Mokjd http://imgur.com/Mokjd from "Atlas of the historical geography of the United States" (1932) Page here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001/390?view=image http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001/390?view... ToC: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001?view=toc http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001?view=toc

arscan 14y ago

I've seen a couple of these kinds of visualizations over the years. I think they are really fascinating... here's one that shows how long it will take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000: http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world There are definitely still some very remote places on this planet.

jetti 14y ago

The thing that amazes me is that the map hasn't really changed if you are going by rail. My grandma lived in Colorado Springs and my mom and I used to drive there to see her for Thanksgiving because flights were too expensive. Leaving out of Chicago, it would take about 15 to 18 hours of driving to get to Colorado Springs. We would try to make the trip all at once and as a tall teen, it would be miserable being stuck in the passenger seat of a smaller two door convertible for so long. I asked my mom why don't we take the train and her response shocked me. Not only was the train from Chicago to Colorado Springs more expensive than flying, it was a 24 hour trip as well. If you look at the map from 1930, it it shows as about 1 day from Chicago to Denver/Colorado Springs area.

dalke 14y ago
By itself that isn't so surprising. After all, the trip by horse-drawn coach hasn't improved much either. Cars are point-to-point. Berlin to Paris by train is about 12 hours. By car it's about 10, because there's no need to stop and change. While Frankfurt->Paris is 4 hours by non-stop ICE, and 5 by car.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  This is a great point, and one the maps sort of gloss over, which is you step from transportation system to transportation system you get faster, walking to horse drawn wagon, to train, to car, to plane. And as some have mentioned to the Internet which can eliminate the need to travel at all if you exploit it well. My wife and I took the California Zephyr from Oakland to Chicago and then the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington DC. It took several days (we overnighted in Chicago as the chances of making the connection there on Amtrak are effectively zero). It was a lot of fun, and quite relaxing, but clearly cross country trains sort of peaked in the late 40's early 50's and haven't moved a whole lot since in this country.
  - dalke 14y ago
    They should also have mentioned that the telegraph "can eliminate the need to travel at all if you exploit it well." :)

chernevik 14y ago

Very interesting. But the focus on New York probably skews the analysis a lot, particularly in early years when rivers and canals would have been important routes. Notice the bend of the 1800 curves up the eastern NY border, and into southeastern Pennsylvania? I bet those reflect the use of the Hudson and Delaware rivers for travel, and possibly linkage to other rivers like the Ohio, Susquehanna and Potomac. Likewise I suspect that in 1830 Chicago was probably closer to New Orleans, on the Mississippi, than it was to New York. Likewise the transport of goods, rather than passengers, was probably more important in forming perceptions of distance, as that's what would drive commerce and thus ongoing relationships. Attention to goods and other point pairings probably matter a lot when you get to 1857. I expect internal communications, of goods, in the South reflected high proximity to the nearest port, and that NY was essentially on the other side of the moon. Whereas the North was probably much more homogenous in its travel times (proportionately more railroad, less river) -- but largely isolated from the South. Which would have done a lot to foster disunion among the two geographies. That view would probably also say a lot about the border states, I bet that would show these were essentially islands unto themselves.

smacktoward 14y ago
That's not really a skew so much as a reflection of the realities of the time, though. If you were lucky enough to want to go somewhere along a canal route, you traveled fast; otherwise you traveled slow. (Which meant most trips were slow.) Attention to goods and other point pairings probably matter a lot when you get to 1857. I expect internal communications, of goods, in the South reflected high proximity to the nearest port, and that NY was essentially on the other side of the moon. Whereas the North was probably much more homogenous in its travel times (proportionately more railroad, less river) -- but largely isolated from the South. You might be surprised. Antebellum New York actually had strong commercial ties to the South, primarily from acting as a distribution center for Southern cotton to the rest of the North. These ties were so strong that Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City during the secession crisis, actually led a short-lived movement to take New York out of the Union and establish it as a neutral "free city" so that it could continue in the cotton trade. (See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-carolina-then-new-york/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-... for a good account of this period.) There was actually a fair bit of support in the city for Wood's plan until the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, setting off a wave of pro-Union support in the North that swamped it.

johngalt 14y ago

Travel infrastructure seems like a 'chicken or egg' problem. Why build a rail line to the middle of nowhere? Conversely how will towns develop if people can't reach them? Much of the development of the heartland US was bootstrapped by the transportation/rail needs between the east and west coasts. I wonder how different the US would be today without the CA gold rush. Or if the gold rush had been somewhere closer to the eastern seaboard like the Appalachians.

tazzy531 14y ago

I just finished reading the book "Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869" (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1863-1869/dp/0743203178 http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-18...). It talks about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad greatly changed the shape of the country due to the fact that within a span of a few years, travel times across the country dropped from months to a week. What is particularly interesting about this was how similar the methodology that they used was to the Lean Startup methodology. With the way that the Railroad Act was structured, there was significant award for moving fast. While they were in the wilderness, it was rather difficult/expensive getting supplies. They used lower quality cottonwood ties to build out fast knowing that once the railroads were built, higher quality replacements could be brought in for far cheaper. Anyways, I'd highly recommend this book for those of you in the startup scene.

michael_miller 14y ago

It's depressing how little travel time has changed in the past several decades. The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, and we're still traveling at around Mach 0.85. In the past four decades, we haven't made any significant improvements to travel time. How sad is that, when in the span of 3 decades in the 1830s, rail travel time doubled? I think (hope) that we're on a path to change this in the near future. The main reason for our lack of advancement in travel time is the cost of gasoline. The Concorde demonstrated that supersonic transport was technically possible, but economically impossible. What will change the landscape is electric planes. This is not a fantasy - there are several companies with (somewhat) viable piston planes being engineered right now. The first company is Beyond Aviation (www.beyond-aviation.com) which is producing an electric varient of the venerable Cessna 172 (most popular plane produced, the default trainer option for pilots). It's not a perfect plane -- only 2 people can ride in it, and it's designed for flight schools, not for cruising around, but it's a big step forward for aviation. The second company is Pipistrel, which is developing the Panthera (http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/panthera/technical-data). The Panthera Electro is a huge step in the right direction. Although it only seats 2, and cruises at 118 knots, it can go for 215NM. This is just shy of NYC -> DC. Imagine if you could travel between these cities for essentially free (solar power). On the more viable replace-business-jets route, Elon Musk has stated that he wants to build a VTVL electric jet. From what he's stated, it sounds like his main approach to overcoming the lack of energy density is flying higher. Current jets are limited to efficient operation at ~35k feet because the oxygen density any higher is too low for an ICE to operate. Current li-ion batteries, however, don't need oxygen to operate! So they can go to 50,60,70,80k feet for reduced drag and operate just as efficiently as if they were at 35k feet. Musk has stated that he thinks battery density needs to double before this jet can become a reality (and has shown that battery density doubles once every ~10 years historically). I'm extremely optimistic about the future of aviation. As soon as we can hook up cheap (nuclear, coal, wind, solar) and efficiently generated (~2x efficiency gains at large plants) power to planes, the cost of flying will take a huge drop.

w1ntermute 14y ago
Speaking of Musk, there's the Hyperloop. Not sure why he hasn't announced it yet.

brudgers 14y ago

The correctness of attributing of the improvement in speed of travel between 1800 and 1830 to railroads is dubious. This shows the extent of common carrier rail lines in 1835: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRail1835.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRail1835.jpg What improved travel was the National Road, the Federal Roads, and the Military Road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road_%28United_States%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road_%28United_States%... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Cherokee_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Cherokee_lands%... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Creek_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Road_%28Creek_lands%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%27s_Military_Road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%27s_Military_Road

codewright 14y ago
http://railroads.unl.edu/views/sources/1850%20Expansion.jpg http://railroads.unl.edu/views/sources/1850%20Expansion.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/19-century/railroads-1870.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/19-century/railroads-187... Probably the railroads.
- brudgers 14y ago
  That's 1850. Between 1800 & 1830 much of the Southeast was still Native American nations, e.g. the portion of Alabama between Montgomery and the Georgia was the last part of the Creek Nation ceded in 1832. The Federal and National Roads allowed stage travel, and that's what improved speed...for those who weren't walking. By 1850, other than the Seminoles, the Native American nations in the East had been conquered and rail road motive power had advanced.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Really no. The first railroad companies, with total individual rights of way typically of 10-30 miles, were just starting to get organized and begin operations in 1830. It wasn't for another 10-20 years that significant contiguous trackage existed. The world was very different in 1850 than it was in 1830.
14y ago

mnemonicsloth 14y ago

Two Words: Donner Party They did eventually get where they were going. So worst-case travel times have improved even more than these common-case data suggest.

robwgibbons 14y ago

Very fascinating find. Having just finished reading Empire of the Summer Moon, I would not have wanted to be anywhere near the Southern Plains areas in 1857.

smacktoward 14y ago

For another interesting look at the subject of travel times, check out Stanford's ORBIS (http://orbis.stanford.edu/#map http://orbis.stanford.edu/#map), which lets you estimate travel times from one point in the Roman Empire circa 200 AD to another, based on several common modes of travel. What's fascinating is how little transportation changed between 200 and 1800. Sixteen hundred years pass and the basic means of getting around are still the same: foot, horse, cart, boat. Then in the hundred years after that there comes an explosion of new options: bicycle, rail, automobile, airplane. Gives some perspective on how relatively new the travel technologies we take for granted today actually are.

sliverstorm 14y ago
Most of our newfound forms of travel depend on engines, which haven't been around long. That's the reason travel was fairly stagnant for so long, IMO. Bicycles on the other hand have been around for a while. Why didn't they see more prolific use in Europe between 200 and 1800? I speculate lack of good enough roads. An oxcart road would not be the most pleasant place to ride an old-fashioned bicycle.
- guelo 14y ago
  For bikes, I'm sure the metal manufacturing processes invented during the industrial revolution helped. It was probably really hard to produce a metal sprocket and chain before the 1800s.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Metalurgy and vulcanization. The former for frames and components, the latter for tyres.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > Most of our newfound forms of travel depend on engines, which haven't been around long. That's the reason travel was fairly stagnant for so long, IMO. Indeed, the work source was a major factor: before the 18th century, there was no efficient and mobile source of work... outside of people and beasts. > Bicycles on the other hand have been around for a while. Nope. The first recorded and verifiable ancestor to the bicycle dates back to the early 19th century: Baron Karl von Drais's Laufmaschine in 1817. It had two wheels in-line and could be steered. But users ran on it, propelling it by pushing the ground with their feet (hence the name "running machine"). Oh, and it was solid wood (22kg) The next elements we associate with an actual bicycle only appeared in 1863: cranks and pedals attached directly to the front wheel. And in 1885, the "rover" with its chain drive to the back wheel and equally-sized wheels would be the first one you'd recognize as a modern bicycle.

berkay 14y ago

Improvements between 1857 and 1930 is truly impressive (6 weeks to 3 days from NY to CA). The lack of progress since then (1930 to 2013, almost the same amount of time) is stark; it still takes 3 days to get to CA from NY by train. Almost no investment in railroads since US started building highways.