Railroads & Depots

Before 1883 every American town kept its own time, set by the sun at noon. When it was noon in Chicago it was a few minutes before or after noon in towns a hundred miles east or west. That was a nuisance for the railroads, and on November 18, 1883, they fixed it themselves by putting the country on standard time zones.

That is the kind of power the railroad had. It decided which towns grew and which faded, how fast news and goods could travel, and even what time it was. The first transcontinental line was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May 1869, and by the end of the century tracks reached nearly every corner of the country.

The depot was the front door of an American town. It was where travelers arrived, where mail and newspapers came in, where the telegraph office was, and where young people left for the city or the war. Big cities built grand union stations as monuments to themselves. Small towns built wooden depots that looked much alike, often from standard plans, because the railroad put them up.

This collection covers the subject from many angles. There are photographs of locomotives, train cars, stations, bridges, crews and passengers, and scenic views along the line. There are railroad maps and bird's eye views that show how the tracks shaped a town. Currier & Ives sold prints of trains racing through the countryside, often with more drama than accuracy. Rail travel posters, timetables and theater posters with train scenes round it out, along with postage stamps honoring the railroad.

The thing worth noticing is how the railroad is drawn compared with how it is photographed. In the prints, trains are always clean, fast and trailing a heroic plume of smoke. In the photographs the rail yards are muddy, the crews are grimy, and the bridges are spindly wooden trestles that look far too light for the job. Both are true in their way.