Railroads
Definition
A railroad is a track or set of tracks made of steel rails along which passenger and freight trains run. Railroads were instrumental in the industrial development and westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century.
Analogy
Think about railroads as veins in our body. Just like veins carry blood from one part of our body to another, railroads transport goods and people from one place to another.
Related terms
Transcontinental Railroad: This was a 1,912-mile continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network with the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay.
Industrialization: This is a process by which an economy is transformed from primarily agricultural to one based on manufacturing goods. Individual manual labor is often replaced by mechanized mass production, and craftsmen are replaced by assembly lines. Railroads played a key role in this process in America.
Manifest Destiny: This was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. The construction of railroads greatly facilitated this expansion.
"Railroads" appears in:
Subjects (2)
Study guides (4)
Practice Questions (5)
- What was one major impact of railroads on American society during the Mexican-American War period?
- What role did railroads play in promoting westward expansion in the mid-to-late19th century?
- How did the introduction of railroads affect westward expansion during the mid-19th century?
- How did railroads contribute to development of the middle class in late-19th-century America?
- How did innovations such as railroads contribute to changes in economic systems during the late nineteenth-century industrial expansion?
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