Railroads In The 1900s (1900–1910): Facts, Statistics, History

Last revised: September 2, 2026

The first decade of the twentieth century was the last great building decade of the American railroad and the first great decade of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1900 the country owned 193,346 miles of first track. By 1910 that figure was 240,293. The all-time peak, 254,037 miles in 1916, still sat ahead. What changed in these ten years was not only the map. Steel rail was already the standard. Interurbans exploded and then froze. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft wrote the rate law the industry would live under until 1980. New York Central put the 20th Century Limited on the Water Level Route in 1902. Pennsylvania opened a station in Manhattan in 1910. Milwaukee and Western Pacific drove last spikes in 1909. The automobile was still a rich man’s toy when the decade opened. The Model T was in production when it closed.

This page is 1900 through 1910. The war, the United States Railroad Administration, the streamliners, and Amtrak have their own articles. The history hub is the whole arc.

Baltimore and Ohio local train at Raven Rock West Virginia depot and water tank early 1900s

A Baltimore & Ohio local at the Raven Rock, West Virginia, depot and water tank, early 1900s. The CSX main is still here. The depot and tank are not. Author’s collection.

On this page: At a glance · Mileage and steel · Elkins, Hepburn, Mann-Elkins · Safety law · Northern Securities · Interurbans · Century, steel cars, Penn Station · Last transcontinentals · What came next

At a glance

Item	Detail
Miles of first track owned, 1900	193,346 (ICC / Stover). Poor’s 1890 figure of 163,597 is the previous census point
Miles of first track owned, 1910	240,293. About 47,000 miles added in the decade. The 1916 peak of 254,037 is the next decade
Interurban miles, 1900	2,107 (Hilton and Due)
Interurban peak	15,580 miles, 1916. Most of the building was 1901–08
Rate law	Elkins Act (Feb. 19, 1903); Hepburn Act (June 29, 1906); Mann-Elkins Act (June 18, 1910)
Safety law	Safety Appliance Act 1893, tightened 1903; Hours of Service Act March 4, 1907; Accident Reports Act 1910
Antitrust	Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 1904. Hill–Harriman combination broken
Flagship train of the decade	New York Central 20th Century Limited, June 1902. Pennsylvania answered with the Pennsylvania Special the same year (renamed Broadway Limited in 1912)
Manhattan	New York Central electric into Grand Central, 1906. Pennsylvania Station opened 1910
Last new Pacific roads of the decade	Lucin Cutoff 1905; Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension and Western Pacific, both 1909

Mileage is ICC first-track owned, the Stover atlas series used on the history hub. Interurban figures are George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America. Information compiled September 2, 2026.

A map that was still growing

By 1900 the railroad was no longer a novelty. It was the country’s freight machine and its passenger machine. Rails reached county seats that would never see another form of common carrier. John Stover, in The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads, put 193,346 miles in 1900 against 163,597 in 1890. The 1900s added almost as much again as the 1890s had. The new miles were not the empty-west construction of the 1880s so much as fill-in: branches, cutoffs, second track, and a few last transcontinentals. Steel rail, which had been winning since the Bessemer mills of the 1860s and 1870s, was by 1900 what a main line was laid with. Iron survived in odd corners. It was no longer the standard.

What the numbers hide is density. The Northeast and the Midwest were already webbed. The South was still converting its 5-foot memory into a standard-gauge network. The West was still punching shortcuts. Harriman’s Lucin Cutoff put Southern Pacific across Great Salt Lake on January 1, 1905, and took Promontory off the Overland main. The Milwaukee Road went to Puget Sound without land grants and drove a last spike at Garrison, Montana, on May 19, 1909. The Goulds’ Western Pacific finished the Feather River route the same year. Those three jobs are the decade’s western signature. After 1910 the country would add miles to the 1916 peak and then spend the rest of the century taking them up.

The freight was coal, grain, lumber, meat, and merchandise, in that order in most annual reports. Anthracite still moved east from the hard-coal fields on the Reading, Lehigh Valley, Lackawanna, and Jersey Central. Bituminous filled the B&O, Pennsylvania, Norfolk & Western, and Chesapeake & Ohio. The 1902 anthracite strike put Roosevelt in a mediation room with operators and John Mitchell’s union; the railroads that hauled the coal were in the argument whether they sat at the table or not. Heavier cars and the new Safety Appliance hardware made longer freights possible. The 2-8-2 Mikado and 4-6-2 Pacific, still new types at the start of the decade, were catalog items by the end of it.

Ohio River Rail Road camp car and workers, circa 1894. The 1900s inherited a finished river railroad and spent the decade regulating and rebuilding it rather than locating it. Author’s collection.

The Commission learns to set a rate

Congress had created the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 because the public was tired of rebates, long-and-short-haul abuse, and the men who ran the trunk lines. For fifteen years the Commission had more dignity than power. The Supreme Court trimmed it. Railroads kept paying the big shippers under the table. Theodore Roosevelt, sworn in on September 14, 1901, after William McKinley was shot, made the railroads a Progressive target. Stover is right that he was no admirer of their political weight. The statutes of this decade are his, and then Taft’s.

The Elkins Act of February 19, 1903, made the rebate a crime and put the shipper in the dock with the railroad. That was the easy one. Everyone could be against secret discounts. The Hepburn Act of June 29, 1906, was the real grant of power. It let the ICC set maximum rates, extended jurisdiction over sleeping-car companies, express companies, and pipelines, and required a uniform system of accounts. Railroads could still propose a tariff. The Commission could now say no, and mean it. The live memory of Hepburn as a ban on any rate change without prior permission is a later compression. The 1906 text was a maximum-rate statute. The next step did the rest.

William Howard Taft, who thought even less of railroad management than Roosevelt did, signed the Mann-Elkins Act on June 18, 1910. The Commission could suspend a proposed increase, often for months, while the carrier proved the hike was just and reasonable. The long-and-short-haul clause of 1887, which the courts had gutted, came back. Telephone and telegraph went under the ICC for a time. From 1910 until the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, a railroad that wanted to raise a rate went to Washington first. That is the cage. Whether it was too tight is the argument of the history hub and of every bankruptcy in the 1970s. In 1910 it looked like reform.

Air brakes, knuckles, and the clock

The other federal story of the decade is safety, and it started late in the last century. The Railway Safety Appliance Act of 1893 required automatic air brakes and knuckle couplers on cars in interstate traffic, with years of grace. An amendment in 1903 tightened the noose. By the 1900s a main-line freight was no longer a string of link-and-pin cars that killed brakemen on every fill. Jim Boyd put that hardware at the center of the modern freight train, and he was right. The Hours of Service Act of March 4, 1907, put a statutory lid on how long an engineman or a dispatcher could work. The Accident Reports Act of 1910 made wrecks a federal paper trail. None of this made railroading safe by later standards. It made it less medieval.

Hill, Harriman, and Northern Securities

The names on the letterheads were still the names of the 1880s and 1890s: Harriman on Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, Hill on Great Northern and, after the Northern Pacific fight, on the Burlington as well, the Vanderbilt estate on New York Central, the Pennsylvania as a corporation that behaved like a state. Jay Gould was dead (1892). Collis Huntington died in 1900. The fights did not die with them.

The Northern Securities Company was the test. Hill, J.P. Morgan, and Harriman had stuffed Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Burlington stock into a New Jersey holding company so no one else could raid the properties. Roosevelt’s Justice Department sued. The Supreme Court, in 1904, ordered the combination dissolved. It did not destroy the railroads. It announced that a railroad empire assembled as a trust was no longer invisible to the Sherman Act. The tycoons page is the biography. This decade is when the government started winning the argument.

Baltimore and Ohio Low Yard Parkersburg West Virginia circa 1915 freight cars and steam

Baltimore & Ohio Low Yard, Parkersburg, West Virginia, circa 1915. The decade’s freight machine at the Ohio River, five years into the next one. Author’s collection.

The interurban decade

If the steam railroad was already built, the electric interurban was what the 1900s actually invented as a network. George Hilton and John Due remain the book: The Electric Interurban Railways in America. They counted 7 miles in 1889, 2,107 in 1900, 3,122 by 1901, and a peak of 15,580 in 1916. Construction came in flurries. More than 5,000 miles went in between 1901 and 1904. The Panic of 1903 slowed it. Another 4,000 miles went in from 1905 to 1908. The Panic of 1907 all but ended new money except in pockets. Hilton and Due: by 1912 the American interurban network had taken its final shape. A marked decline set in about 1918. In the decade 1928–1937 the industry was virtually annihilated. By 1960 no trace of it remained in its original form.

They were sold as clean, frequent, high-speed cars between neighboring cities, a better local passenger train than the steam road would run. Many were never engineered for the speeds in the prospectus. Grades were steep. Curves were sharp. The cheap right-of-way was a public road or a city street. Freight was an afterthought except on the few lines built to a railroad standard. Henry Ford’s Model T, in production from 1908, did not wreck them in this decade. Dirt roads and a $850 price tag still kept the automobile in its place. The wrecking came later, when the car was cheap and the pavement was in. Hilton and Due’s verdict, that most of these companies should never have been built, is an economist’s verdict. It is also, after 1918, hard to argue with. The lines that lasted—South Shore, a handful of others—did so as freight railroads. That story is on the interurbans page.

The Century, steel cars, and a hole under the Hudson

Passenger service in 1900 was already a specialized business. Wood cars were on the way out. Iron experiments went back to the 1850s; Dr. B.J. LaMothe’s patented iron car of 1854 is the curiosity August Mencken records in The Railroad Passenger Car. What mattered in this decade was steel. After a string of wooden-car wrecks, the Pennsylvania ordered all-steel coaches. The P70, 1907, became the standard heavyweight coach of the East. Pullman, having taken in the Wagner Palace Car Company in 1899, was the sleeping-car name that mattered. It did not literally own every competitor on earth. It owned the one that had mattered.

On June 2, 1902, New York Central put the all-Pullman 20th Century Limited on New York–Chicago via the Water Level Route. Eighteen hours before long. Barber, valet, stenographer. The Pennsylvania answered the same year with the Pennsylvania Special, renamed Broadway Limited in 1912. That rivalry is the passenger story of the East for the next sixty-five years. The later names that get listed as “Golden Age” trains—Capitol Limited (1923), Santa Fe Chief (1926) and Super Chief (1936), Milwaukee Hiawatha (1935), Great Northern Empire Builder (1929), the streamlined Daylight (1937, after a heavyweight Daylight Limited of 1922), Southern Crescent Limited (1925), California Zephyr (1949)—belong to later decade pages and to the streamliners hub. This decade’s contribution was the limited as a brand.

So was the terminal. Lackawanna opened Hoboken Terminal in 1907. New York Central, after the Park Avenue tunnel wreck of January 8, 1902, electrified into Grand Central on 660-volt third rail; electric service began in 1906. The present Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, just over the line into the next decade. Pennsylvania drove tunnels under the Hudson and the East River and opened Pennsylvania Station in 1910: Long Island trains on September 8, Pennsylvania trains on November 27. It was the largest building Americans had yet put up for a railroad, and it lasted fifty-three years. Chicago Union Station (1925), Denver Union Station (1914), and Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (1939) are later. The 1900s put the two New York monuments on the drawing board and opened one of them.

Motive power followed the same logic. Heavier rail and heavier cars wanted bigger engines. The 2-8-2 Mikado and 4-6-2 Pacific were becoming standard articles. Baltimore & Ohio put the first American Mallet, Old Maude, to work in 1904. Electrification was no longer a toy: New Haven as well as New York Central, and Pennsylvania’s New York terminal plant behind the new station.

Baltimore and Ohio 4-6-2 5133 passenger train near Wheeling Benwood West Virginia

Baltimore & Ohio 4-6-2 #5133 (class P-3) southbound toward Parkersburg near Wheeling/Benwood, West Virginia. The Pacific is a 1900s idea; the photograph is a generation later, likely the 1930s or 1940s. Author’s collection.

1909: two more Pacifics, and a lake instead of Promontory

The first transcontinental was forty years old in 1909. The 1900s added to it rather than repeating it. Harriman’s Lucin Cutoff, opened to regular traffic January 1, 1905, put the Overland Route across Great Salt Lake and left Promontory a branch. Milwaukee’s Pacific Extension, privately financed, reached Tacoma in 1909 on a line engineered shorter than Great Northern or Northern Pacific. Western Pacific gave Gould a Pacific terminal at Oakland the same year, down the Feather River. None of those projects needed a new Pacific Railway Act. They needed capital, and in Milwaukee’s case they needed more capital than the traffic would ever quite repay. The transcontinental page is 1862–69. This decade is the last time Americans laid a new Pacific main line from scratch.

1910 is not the peak

It is easy to read 1910 as the summit because the law was in place and the map looked full. The miles kept rising until 1916. Intercity freight and passenger shares were still overwhelming; Stover’s often-quoted 98 percent of commercial intercity passengers and 77 percent of intercity freight is a World War I-era reading, not a 1900 snapshot, but the direction is right. The automobile had not yet taken the local passenger. The truck had not yet taken the LCL. The airplane was a curiosity. St. Petersburg–Tampa’s airboat line of January 1914 is usually called the first scheduled commercial airline in the United States. It is the next decade.

What 1910 did set was the political settlement. Rates went to the Commission. Hours went to the statute book. Combinations went to the Sherman Act. When the United States entered the war in April 1917 the railroads were large, regulated, and not a single machine. The USRA took them on December 28, 1917, and gave them back on March 1, 1920. That story is the USRA page and 1910–1920. The streamliners of 1934, the second war, the passenger collapse, Amtrak in 1971, and Staggers in 1980 are later chapters. The 1900s did not cause all of that. They wrote the rate law those later chapters had to live with, and they laid the last of the Pacific rail.

Baltimore and Ohio passenger train loading mail and luggage New Martinsville West Virginia 1940s

Baltimore & Ohio loading mail and luggage at New Martinsville, West Virginia, 1940s. Passenger service on the Ohio River Branch ended the following decade. The 1900s built and regulated this railroad; this is what it still looked like a generation later. Author’s collection.

Sources

John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999). ICC first-track owned: 163,597 (1890); 193,346 (1900); 240,293 (1910); 254,037 (1916)
Interstate Commerce Commission, Statistics of Railways in the United States; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1918 and 1932 mileage tables
George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960)
Elkins Act, Feb. 19, 1903; Hepburn Act, June 29, 1906; Mann-Elkins Act, June 18, 1910; Hours of Service Act, March 4, 1907; Safety Appliance Act, 1893, amended 1903
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904)
August Mencken, The Railroad Passenger Car
Jim Boyd, The American Freight Train (Osceola: MBI, 2001)
William D. Middleton, The Interurban Era (Milwaukee: Kalmbach, 1961)
Michael Bezilla, Electric Traction on the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1895–1968 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980)
American-Rails.com: 20th Century Limited (/20th.html); Broadway Limited; Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension; transcontinental / Lucin Cutoff

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