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The Impact Of The Development Of The U.S. Railroad System On The U.S. Economy
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The Impact of the Development of the U.S. Railroad System on the U.S. Economy
The railroad system has a positive impact on the American economy. It not only benefits the producers but the common people are also getting advantages of the railroad system. The basic reason for this enormous impact is the linkage of America with the entire continent east to west in the 1860s. Rail history is vast in America which started from the railroads that were horse-drawn. Later on, the steam engine made the railroad system more efficient and productive. During 1832-1837, over twelve hundred miles of railroad track were made. The first and most prominent impact of the railroad was the revolution of communication for America with the new territories.
Nations got more opportunities by making easy and reliable travels to different regions. Work became easier and travel time decreased. American investors, shareholders, and producers started to move to the regions where they could earn more profit. In other words, railroads allowed individuals to change their places for the sake of economic interaction and to improve their livelihood. The market of goods gradually expanded as more producers, and investors joined it. For instance, an item produced in New York could easily be sold in the west and to further distant regions. It resulted in a two-sided impact on the economy ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"PGjIi53R","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Khaled et al.)","plainCitation":"(Khaled et al.)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1638,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/F4Z6GSWG"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/F4Z6GSWG"],"itemData":{"id":1638,"type":"article-journal","title":"Train design and routing optimization for evaluating criticality of freight railroad infrastructures","container-title":"Transportation Research Part B: Methodological","page":"71-84","volume":"71","source":"ScienceDirect","abstract":"Freight transportation by railroads is an integral part of the U.S. economy. Identifying critical rail infrastructures can help stakeholders prioritize protection initiatives or add necessary redundancy to maximize rail network resiliency. The criticality of an infrastructure element, link or yard, is based on the increased cost (delay) incurred when that element is disrupted. An event of disruption can cause heavy congestion so that the capacity at links and yards should be considered when freight is re-routed. This paper proposes an optimization model for making-up and routing of trains in a disruptive situation to minimize the system-wide total cost, including classification time at yards and travel time along links. Train design optimization seeks to determine the optimal number of trains, their routes, and associated blocks, subject to various capacity and operational constraints at rail links and yards. An iterative heuristic algorithm is proposed to attack the computational burden for real-world networks. The solution algorithm considers the impact of volume on travel time in a congested or near-congested network. The proposed heuristics provide quality solutions with high speed, demonstrated by numerical experiments for small instances. A case study is conducted for the network of a major U.S. Class-I railroad based on publicly available data. The paper provides maps showing the criticality of infrastructure in the study area from the viewpoint of strategic planning.","DOI":"10.1016/j.trb.2014.10.002","ISSN":"0191-2615","journalAbbreviation":"Transportation Research Part B: Methodological","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Khaled","given":"Abdullah A."},{"family":"Jin","given":"Mingzhou"},{"family":"Clarke","given":"David B."},{"family":"Hoque","given":"Mohammad A."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",1,1]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Khaled et al.). First, producers got a new market to sell their goods and services to the large population of the consumer which increased the supply in the economy. Second, consumers got more goods and services to purchase as huge variety maintained the price level that was suitable for the consumers. This is how railroads put this great impact on the economy of America and made it smoother and growing.
The second great impact of the railroads was the social changes that ultimately affected the economy. Society of America starts changing with the improvement in the railroad system. People from different regions moved to other places for jobs and settlement. For instance, during 1868, Davis settlement near the University of California was started. In addition, transcontinental railroad construction helped European settlements of the west to move near Native Americans living in the plain’s states. This impacted the Native American culture and diversity increased. It results in the need for more markets and economic activities to fulfill the demands of the people ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ZC3OM2mr","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Chopra and Khanna)","plainCitation":"(Chopra and Khanna)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1637,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/ZFQAUGVK"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/ZFQAUGVK"],"itemData":{"id":1637,"type":"article-journal","title":"Interconnectedness and interdependencies of critical infrastructures in the US economy: Implications for resilience","container-title":"Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications","page":"865-877","volume":"436","source":"ScienceDirect","abstract":"Natural disasters in 2011 yielded close to $55 billion in economic damages alone in the United States (US), which highlights the need to reduce impacts of such disasters or other deliberate attacks. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identifies a list of 16 Critical Infrastructure Sectors (CIS) whose incapacity due to disruptions would have a debilitating impact on the nation’s economy. The goal of this work is to understand the implications of interdependencies among CIS on the resilience of the US economic system as a whole. We develop a framework that combines the empirical economic input–output (EIO) model with graph theory based techniques for understanding interdependencies, interconnectedness and resilience in the US economic system. By representing the US economy as a network, we are able to analyze its topology by separately looking at its unweighted and weighted forms. Topological analysis of the US EIO network suggests that it exhibits small world properties for the unweighted case, and in the weighted case, the throughput of industry sectors follows a power-law with an exponential cutoff. Implications of these topological properties are discussed in the paper. We also simulate hypothetical disruptions on CIS in order to identify industrial sectors that experience the largest economic impacts, and to quantify systemic vulnerability in economic terms. In addition, insights from community detection and hypothetical disruption scenarios help assess vulnerability of individual industrial communities to disruptions on individual CIS. These methodologies also provide insights regarding the extent of coupling between each CIS in the US EIO network. Based on our analysis, we observe that excessive interconnectedness and interdependencies of CIS results in high systemic vulnerability. This information can guide policymakers to design policies that improve resilience of economic networks, and evaluate policies that might indirectly increase coupling between CIS.","DOI":"10.1016/j.physa.2015.05.091","ISSN":"0378-4371","title-short":"Interconnectedness and interdependencies of critical infrastructures in the US economy","journalAbbreviation":"Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Chopra","given":"Shauhrat S."},{"family":"Khanna","given":"Vikas"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",10,15]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Chopra and Khanna). The increase in settlements and usage of railroads increased the demand for new jobs and opportunities. Linking businesses of America with other territories, freight railroads have played a vital role in the economic development of the nation for almost 190 years.
Railroads became the reason for money-saving in America. Every year, billions of dollars are saved in the economy by the consumption of railroads for business and domestic use. In 2018, inflation-adjusted revenue per ton-mile that is average U.S. freight rail rates is 44% less than it was during the 1980s. This is because goods and services that individuals use every day are transferred through railroads. For instance, millions of carloads of sugar, birdseed, chickens, animal feeds, flour, beer, and various other food products are transferred to other places for selling in the nation ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"MUNl0k6L","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Donaldson and Hornbeck)","plainCitation":"(Donaldson and Hornbeck)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1639,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/LFLZXHUN"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/mlRB1JqV/items/LFLZXHUN"],"itemData":{"id":1639,"type":"article-journal","title":"Railroads and American Economic Growth: A “Market Access” Approach","container-title":"The Quarterly Journal of Economics","page":"799-858","volume":"131","issue":"2","source":"academic.oup.com","abstract":"Abstract. This article examines the historical impact of railroads on the U.S. economy, with a focus on quantifying the aggregate impact on the agricultural s","DOI":"10.1093/qje/qjw002","ISSN":"0033-5533","title-short":"Railroads and American Economic Growth","journalAbbreviation":"Q J Econ","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Donaldson","given":"Dave"},{"family":"Hornbeck","given":"Richard"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016",5,1]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Donaldson and Hornbeck). Chemicals that package our food, clean our water, protect our health, build our cars and homes, and improve individuals' livelihood is expanded through railroads. Besides, other goods like coal, intermodal, vehicles, lumber, paper, and other metallic products are reached to different markets to increase selling through railroads. Therefore, the American economy grows by increasing selling in less time through the development of railroads.
In a nutshell, the development of railroads has a great impact on the economy of America. It helped to develop new settlements and markets. Producers, as well as buyers, got more opportunities to increase their economic activities. These changes resulted in the positive growth of the American economy.
Works Cited
ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Chopra, Shauhrat S., and Vikas Khanna. “Interconnectedness and Interdependencies of Critical Infrastructures in the US Economy: Implications for Resilience.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, vol. 436, Oct. 2015, pp. 865–77. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/j.physa.2015.05.091.
Donaldson, Dave, and Richard Hornbeck. “Railroads and American Economic Growth: A ‘Market Access’ Approach.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 131, no. 2, May 2016, pp. 799–858. academic.oup.com, doi:10.1093/qje/qjw002.
Khaled, Abdullah A., et al. “Train Design and Routing Optimization for Evaluating Criticality of Freight Railroad Infrastructures.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, vol. 71, Jan. 2015, pp. 71–84. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/j.trb.2014.10.002.
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