Rails, Spurs and the Truck

How the railroad reached every small town by a side track, how a cheap motor truck and a free highway took the freight away, and how a car came within reach of the people who built it.

1 · The rail map, then and now

At its peak in 1916 the United States had about 254,000 miles of railroad, more than any country on earth. Almost every county seat and farm town had a depot, and from the main lines ran short spurs: a few hundred yards of track to a grain elevator, a lumber mill, a coal tipple, a cannery or a factory loading dock. Today the big freight railroads run about 92,000 route miles, and most of the spurs are gone.

What the map shows: the Bureau of Transportation Statistics' North American Rail Network file. Black is the main network in use, gold is spurs and industrial leads, dashed red is track the file still records as out of service, abandoned or converted to a trail. The file keeps only part of what was torn up, so the red is the visible edge of a much larger loss: about 160,000 miles have left the map since 1916.

The network year by year

Pick a year. Each map shows the rail network as it stood then; the card gives the route miles and what changed since the date before.

How to read the maps. 1850–1910 are drawn from dated line data: Jeremy Atack's historical railroad file records the year each line was in operation (checked against maps from 1850 to 1911). For 1920–1995 no dated line file exists, so those maps are labeled approximations and the route miles in the card carry the true size. 2025 is today's network from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. "Counties reached" uses today's county lines.

2 · Why the spurs died

1. 1912Ford sells a Model T delivery car, a closed body on the car's frame, for shops and dairies.
2. 1917Ford's Model TT one-ton truck chassis, about $600. The buyer adds a flatbed or a stake body. Local delivery, not the passenger car, is where the motor vehicle first earned its keep.
3. 1926The TT is down to $325; about 1.3 million are built by 1928. A farmer or a merchant can now haul without the depot.
4. 1916–1930sRailroads begin abandoning thin branch lines; paved state roads reach the same towns.
5. 1956The Federal-Aid Highway Act (29 June) funds 41,000 miles of Interstates, paid for by fuel taxes. The road is free to the trucker at the point of use; the railroad pays for its own track and taxes.
6. 1960s–70sTrucks take most short-haul and high-value freight; Penn Central, the largest railroad merger, goes bankrupt in 1970.
7. 1980The Staggers Act deregulates railroads. They shed unprofitable branches and spurs, and concentrate on long, heavy hauls: coal, grain, containers.
8. TodayMany old grades are rail-trails; some spurs survive as short lines feeding one plant or elevator.

3 · The price of a car, in a worker's days

Prices "seem to be going up, but they're really staying the same in the terms of the value of money": the fair way to compare is to ask how many days a worker had to labor to buy one. Henry Ford's moving assembly line (Highland Park, 1913) and his $5 day (January 1914) pushed the Model T toward the people who built it.

Year	Model T price	What a Ford line worker earned	Days of work to buy one
1908	$850 (touring car)	about $2.34 a day, industry average	≈ 360
1914	$440 (runabout)	$5 a day (the "five-dollar day")	≈ 88
1925	$260 (runabout)	$6 a day (raised 1919)	≈ 43

By 1927, when the line stopped, Ford had built about 15 million Model Ts. In today's money the 1908 car cost roughly the price of a new small car now; by 1925 it cost less than a used one.

The shakeout

The early motor car was a crowd: about 253 American makers in 1908. Mass production, standard parts and the money to build huge plants wiped most of them out: only about 44 were left by 1929. William Durant founded General Motors in 1908 by buying up brands (Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland); Walter Chrysler built his company from the old Maxwell in 1925 and bought Dodge in 1928. By the end of the 1920s the "Big Three" made about four of every five American cars.

4 · The city's own rails

1. 1832Horse-drawn streetcar on New York's Bowery (the New York and Harlem). Boston follows in 1856, Baltimore in 1859.
2. 1885Baltimore runs one of the first electric streetcar lines in regular service (the Daft line to Hampden, 10 August).
3. 1888Frank Sprague's electric trolley system in Richmond, Virginia, the model that spread to almost every American city within a decade.
4. 1892Chicago's first elevated line opens.
5. 1897Boston's Tremont Street subway (1 September), the first in America.
6. 1904New York's first subway line (27 October).
7. 1920s–50sBuses and private cars replace streetcars in most cities.
8. 1963Baltimore's last streetcar runs. Its Metro subway opens in 1983 and light rail in 1992, each mostly north–south.

Field note to test (Dr. F, from Baltimore memory): the city's transit grew along the old turnpikes running out from the harbor, the Bel Air and Harford pikes on the east side and their partners on the west, and very little ever joined east to west. Northern Parkway and Moravia Road carried the cross-town load until the Beltway (I-695, finished 1962) went around the city instead of through it. Use the close-up map to check it: which way do the lines run?

5 · Fast rail, and what it is not

The fast-rail layer on the 1995 and 2025 maps uses three words carefully. Higher-speed rail means trains up to about 125 mph, usually on track shared with freight: Brightline in Florida and most of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. High-speed rail means trains of about 150–220 mph on track built for them alone, fenced and without road crossings, as in Japan, France and Spain; Brightline West and California's line are planned that way. The Vegas Loop is neither: it is short tunnels where human-driven Tesla cars carry riders, so the map draws it as a dot in a different color.

Train	Top speed	Typical average, end to end	Why the gap
Acela (NextGen), Washington–New York	160 mph	≈ 80 mph (226 mi in about 2 h 50 min)	Top speed only on short stretches in New Jersey; old curves, bridges and tunnels, and stops in Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia slow the rest.
Acela, New York–Boston	160 mph	≈ 65 mph (231 mi in about 3 h 35 min)	The Connecticut shore line was laid in the 1800s: tight curves and drawbridges.
Brightline, Miami–Orlando	125 mph	≈ 67 mph (235 mi in about 3 h 30 min)	Shared freight track and grade crossings along the coast; 125 mph only on the new Cocoa–Orlando line.

Times are typical published schedules, rounded; check the current timetables. The point for the classroom: a train's top speed sells tickets, but its average speed, set by the track it runs on, decides whether it beats the car and the plane. Toggle the fast-rail layer on the 2025 map and compare with the 1995 Metroliner.

6 · Rail now: research and news

Updated 1 Nov 2026, 10:49 am (refreshed daily). Titles, dates and links only; follow a link to read the original.

Sources

• Bureau of Transportation Statistics, North American Rail Network Lines (in the Urbanicity research database).
• Association of American Railroads, Freight Railroads in the United States (route miles, Class I network).
• Jeremy Atack, historical railroad GIS file (lines with the year in operation, 1826–1911), Vanderbilt University: my.vanderbilt.edu/jeremyatack/data-downloads; loaded from the public copy hosted by Michigan Technological University.
• U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Series Q 284 (miles of road operated, 1850–1960); 1975, 1995 and 2025 route miles are rounded from ICC and AAR summaries and flagged to check.
• John F. Stover, American Railroads (2nd ed., 1997): the 1916 peak and branch-line abandonment.
• David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (1984): Highland Park and Model T prices.
• The Henry Ford museum, "Ford Motor Company's $5 Workday" and Model T and Model TT histories.
• Steven Klepper, "The capabilities of new firms and the evolution of the US automobile industry," Industrial and Corporate Change 11 (2002): counts of makers.
• Federal Highway Administration, "Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956"; Staggers Rail Act of 1980.
• Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (1990): horsecar, trolley and subway dates.
• Baltimore Streetcar Museum, history of the Daft line and the end of streetcar service (1963).
• Lines added by hand to the dated maps (completion dates): Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World (2000) and the National Park Service, Golden Spike (1869); Keith L. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (1974); Milwaukee Road Historical Association and the Western Pacific Railroad Museum (1909); Florida Memory and Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise (2002) for the Overseas Railroad (1912–1935).
• Fast rail status (read 1 November 2026): Eno Center, Acela NextGen: A Year in Review (7 Aug 2026); RailwayNews on Brightline Florida (updated 21 May 2026); Brightline West; Railway Journal on California's federal funding; KERA on Texas Central (15 Apr 2025); Axios on Cascadia (30 Jun 2025); Vegas Loop.

Next door: Two Seasons: winter, road construction and who pays, where the road miles grow while the rail miles on this page shrink. Its long-run toggle uses the same years.

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