How Did The Railroad Affect The Economy

Railroad is born in the early 1830s and actually starts out very slowly and then grows rapidly. Baltimore & Ohio was the first American line and was built in 1830. In 1840, the U.S had about 3328 miles of track, it is double the railroad mileage of Europe. Some early problems with railroad include it was not organized systematically and encountered engineering issues sych as steep grades and sharp curves. Later, the problems were solved and by 1860, the country had 30636 miles of track and four lines built tracks from eastern coast to interior valley. Before 1860, three-fourths of the money invested in railroads came from private investors. Nonetheless, much of the capital came from local merchants and businessmen.Moreover, railroad has became the first business and the first national corporations in the U.S. Railroad can be built almost everywhere,and it can be built really fast. Once you build them, you can move goods and people at a very rapid pace. These advantages made it a very good business because business is all about time and money. Companies were organized to deal with this big business. The companies adopted a corporate form of organization and

The most significant example was the the biggest export before Civil War,cotton business in the Deep South. Cotton was one of luxury commodities and it fed the textile revolution in the United States.Initially, cotton was planted in South and farmers had no way to distribute the cotton to other areas. When the railroads were bulit, it united rural farmers with distant ports and markets. All cottons that being grown in the Southern states can be moved either across the Atlantic Ocean to New England by steamboats or up into the American Northeast, where all the texile factoreis located. The rise of railroads has enable the distribution of cotton to urban areas and not limited in Southern