Anerica's railroads: a disappearing act.

• Author: Schwieterman, Joseph P.

IN THE U.S., railroad tracks are being abandoned at a staggering rate. At the height of the American rail system in 1916, 254,000 miles of track crisscrossed the nation. Today, scarcely half remains, leaving without a single mile of track some relatively large cities such as Huntington Beach, Calif; Key West, Fla.; and Lakewood, Colo. It is possible to build a railroad circling the globe three times with the amount of track tom up since the Golden Age of Railroads.

The American landscape once had an abundance of convenient and potentially high-speed railroad lines situated between major cities. During the 19th century, magnates like Comelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, and Jay Gould vied for supremacy by selecting only the best and fastest routes for their trains. Although a few companies sought an advantage by building meandering rail lines, hoping to serve as many different shippers as possible, many built lines bisecting the countryside with few curves, thus allowing for the fastest possible running times. This often meant bypassing out-of-the-way cities and embarking upon enormous earth-moving projects, employing vast numbers of immigrant laborers to construct bridges, tunnels, and embankments.

The busy freight route between Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., built by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad exemplifies this point. To allow for the fastest service of any carrier on this route, the planners of the Santa Fe made it a veritable straight line between these two end points. This century-old decision gives contemporary transportation planners a 450-mile railroad route that is considerably shorter than associated interstate highway distances (542 miles) and only slightly longer than air-travel distances (403 miles). So attractive is this route that the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, now part of the Burlington Northem Railroad, spent millions to complete its Centennial Cutoff near Bloomington, Mo., in 1953--one of the last major railroad construction projects in the U.S. The Burlington still was not satisfied. It remained so impressed with the entire Santa Fe operation west of Chicago that, four decades later, it would seek to acquire the carrier--a controversial move that dominated newspaper headlines in October, 1993. Efficient routes like the Santa Fe's are essential if railroad services are to compete effectively with trucking companies for time-sensitive traffic.

Not all U.S. cities had such attractive intercity rail links. Those in the vast expanse between the western Great Plains and those in the Sierra Nevada range had only sparse populations when rail construction ebbed in 1920. Accordingly, direct rail lines never were built along many frequently traveled routes, including Phoenix-Albuquerque; Las Vegas-San Francisco; and San Jose-Bakersfield, Calif. Nearly a century later, the decision not to build lines in these corridors continues to haunt railroad companies, forcing them to follow circuitous routes between these cities.

In some corridors, the rough topography was to blame for the uneven patterns of rail construction. Due to the...