| Railroads by Regions |
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| Written by Paul Marston | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 18 March 2008 10:01 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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REGIONAL RAILROAD TRACK CONSTRUCTION 1826-1850
Click on the name of the region to see details
The Census data shown is for the year 1850 as reported in the 1860 Census. See www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1860e-06.pdf (pages 230-231). As you can see, the biggest changes we had to make were in the Mid-Atlantic states, particularly in Pennsylvania because the Census Bureau ignored most of the so-called "Anthracite" railroads hauling only coal. Another source of change was not counting any of the railroads built before 1830. The most changes were due not to changing the mileage report by the Census Bureau but assigning the mileage back to the railroad company that actually built the tracks from any successor railroad. Just click on the name of the region in the table individually to be directed to the justification for the changes we have made state by state and railroad by railroad.The policy of assigning all of the mileage of a railroad to the state where it was headquartered if the preponderance of the mileage was in that state has much less effect in an entire region. Most of the corrections were due to moving some railroad mileage from the state where the railroad was headquartered to the state where the track was actually located. Unlike the analysis of the various states, there are fewer differences between our figures and the 1860 Census to explain in an entire region. This tended to happen between the states in a given region and not between the regions where the boundary line was much shorter than the accumulated miles of borders between states in a region. The following table summarizes why our figures differ from those of the U.S. Census Bureau for 1850 as given in the 1860 Census:
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 19:28 |