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.When the very first sod was being turned on the Baltimore & Ohio, the president, John Quincy Adams, was doing the same for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal which would soon come into conflict with the new railroad.Waterways were seen by some as more natural, more in keeping with ‘the hand of the Great Architect’, as a government report 34 as late as 1873 put it, than the railroads.There was, too, a similar hostility among many of the railroads’ customers to that in Britain towards rail companies which were seen as exploitative monopolists, a criticism that was, at times, well merited.For example, early passenger fares were high but they soon fell in the 1840s when competition between lines forced them down to around 2.5 to 3.5 cents per mile in the east and no more than 5 cents elsewhere.Where there was no competition however, the railroads were quick to exploit the situation by charging pretty much what they wanted.As well as paying high fares, both passengers and freight shippers suffered from the lack of coordination between rival railroads, even where cooperation would have been mutually beneficial.First, there was the matter of gauge.Many of the early railroads chose the standard gauge because their locomotives came from the United Kingdom but others, such as the Erie Railroad in New York State whose trains ran on a 6ft broad gauge, had deliberately selected a different one in order to prevent loss of traffic to rival lines.In most southern states, the 5ft gauge was common though not universal and, perversely, two early railroads, the Camden & Amboy and the Mohawk & Hudson, chose slightly variant gauges, 4ft 9ins and 4ft 10ins respectively.Ultimately the power of the north-eastern railroads, who had nearly all plumped for standard gauge, prevailed and other lines followed suit.Not, though, before there had been a disaster caused by the pigheadedness of the early engineers.When the New York Express of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern derailed and plunged into a creek in December 1867 near Angola, New York, with the loss of forty-nine lives, the investigators found that the problem was that the trains had been adjusted to ride on both the standard gauge (4ft 8½ins), used by the New York Central, and the 4ft 10ins of the Lake Shore in order to avoid the expense of changing the gauge on one of the railroads.On the wider gauge sections, not all the wheel would ride on the rail which was fine until a stretch of slightly misaligned track caused the disaster.As well as the occasional accident, this lack of coordination between railroads was to cause untold difficulties and expense.The deliberate lack of involvement of the state, together with the competitive nature of the railroad developers, meant that even where two or more railroads terminated in the same town, there would be no rail connection between the two, reflecting another similarity with the UK where even today the legacy of that failure can be seen with unconnected stations in relatively small towns such as Canterbury.In Richmond, Virginia, for example, the map suggests that the town would have been a junction for four separate railroads but, in fact, a more detailed examination shows that there was no local link or branch between them, let alone a unified station such as the Hauptbahnhofen which became the norm in Germany.This was not just a result of lack of planning and coordination but rather there were many vested interests which stood to gain by ensuring that passengers and freight continued to suffer these delays and inconvenience.Local haulage and carting companies were happy to keep on transhipping the goods, while hotels and bars thrived by serving the much inconvenienced passengers.The war would change that: Philadelphia had four unconnected railroads all booming with Civil War traffic and it was only then that two of the companies were embarrassed into making a connection, enabling passengers to travel between Jersey City on the other side of the Hudson river from New York and Washington for the first time without changing trains, a journey which incidentally took nine and a half hours then and two and a half today
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