Any man who should have told these pioneers of the railway world that the United States would possess in the year 1889 a hundred and sixty thousand miles of railroad, enough to belt the world seven times at the Equator, would have been regarded as a lunatic. The ownership of this vast property is represented by stocks and bonds aggregating $9,000,000,000. They receive yearly from the public for carrying passengers and freights the sum of $1,000,000,000 and, after paying the expenses of their operation, including the wages of more than 1,000,000 employés, they have left an available revenue of $415,000,000. More than one of the larger companies has a revenue greater than that of the United States government was thirty years ago. To earn this enormous sum the roads work night and day, seven days a week. Through the darkest and stormiest winter midnight, as well as through the pleasantest summer afternoon, the locomotive fires are kept alight and the wheels revolve unceasingly along the rails. The work they accomplish is something startling in the aggregate. In the year 1887, the latest for which the complete figures are at hand, the railroads of the country carried 428,000,000 passengers, travelling 10,500,000 miles, a distance equal to 450 times around the globe. The freight carried in the same year amounted to 552,000,000 tons, and the distance traversed 62,000,000 miles.
It is a commonplace to speak of what the railroads have done in the way of opening up the country and bringing the blessings of civilization into the wilderness. In the Western country, where the people formerly wore homespun or the coarsest fabrics of Eastern looms, the women now receive weekly fashion plates still damp from the press, and every cross-roads store has in stock the latest patterns, not only from the great cities of our own land, but from the centres of European fashion. The postal system follows along the iron way, the metropolitan newspaper reaches the most obscure hamlet daily, and a chapter might be written upon the growth of the railway postal service alone. The telegraph lines enter new territory with the railway, putting the dweller in the remotest regions within reach of instantaneous communication with all parts of the world.