Historic Railroad Stations: A Selected Inventory

The development of the railroad and its monuments, the railroad stations, coincided with the growth of the United States and was, in large part, responsible for the economic expansion that began shortly before the Civil War and continued well into the twentieth century. The completion of the great transcontinental lines in the decade following the Civil War, the invention of the Pullman sleeping car, the Westinghouse air brake, the safety coupler, and the refrigerator car helped to insure the supremacy and prosperity of the railroad for decades. The network of railroad lines crossing the continent not only provided an efficient means to market grain and livestock, but more importantly brought settlers into the newly opened territories. The termini and junction points of the great transcontinental lines--Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific, and the Santa Fe--which were either small villages or nonexistent before the Civil War, became cities within thirty years after rail link-up. Cities like Omaha, Kansas City, Duluth, Oakland, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma owe their initial growth and ensuing prosperity to the railroad.