the 1st transistion era

[Anonymous]

simplistically speaking:
keel boats take six months to drag back upstream. steamboats were able to make the trip in six weeks. railroads do it in six days.

[PBenham]

Well, there is a drawback to some rivers utility as a transportation corridor. The occasional 100% grade, such as in aptly named Niagara Falls NY/ON. What this did was force construction of the Welland Canal (and six major re-buildings). It also led to the construction of the Buffalo & Niagara Falls RailRoad (that's how they spelled it in 1835) and the Niagara Branch Railway on the Canadian side of the river. Both wound up in New York Central's hands by the 1870s, with the B&NF being part of the first merger that created the NYC in 1854. The Canadian line was abandoned mostly during the late 1940s. Amtrak is the prime user of the route nowadays from downtown Buffalo to the falls. As a sidelight, Amtrak trains for the Falls that tie up there, use some of the last active former Lehigh Valley trackage in this area between CP25 (under I-190, where interchange was made by EL,LV and PC, with the Niagara Junction Railway) and the depot, built in the early 1960s for the Valley as a freight house and office building by the New York Power Authority (No doubt it has been mortgaged many, many times by a fiscally too hungry for its own good NYSSR!). No other Amtrak station can claim such a noble heritage!![^]

[Anonymous]

Large rivers provide a steady supply of water, a must for a city, town, or village. Austin, Texas, originally Waterloo, was such a place and ended up as the capital with its name changed.

And even if the river could not handle the larger boats, it was usually an easier land trip than a shortcut over hills and mountains, as the railroads readily knew - better a few extra miles with no grade than a direct route with grades requiring doubling.

Art

[wjstix]

I don't think canals could handle steamboats?? Rivers like the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri and their tributaries were the first gateways into much of the interior of the country (plus the Great Lakes of course). Most major US cities west of the Alleghanies are on rivers, often where two or more rivers join.

[PBenham]

There were too few navigable rivers in too few places. That's the quick answer. The long form answer is that where a river could handle large boats or barges, they are still handling significant tonnage. Canals needed too much maintence, had to be navigated too slowly to be competitive, and froze over in the northern third of the country, and all of Canada. There are canals still handling commercial traffic, most of them in the midwest-Gulf coast corridors.

[wjstix]

Well originally it was kind of "intermodal", steam boats brought and picked up goods from cities along a river like the Mississippi. Early railroads were built from the river to bring goods to connect the riverports to the hinterland. Eventually the railroads realized the riverbanks afforded a nice relatively flat area to build a railroad, and they built lines paralleling the rivers. Once that happened, river traffic declined year by year. But it never went away of course, I work in St.Paul MN and barges with coal etc. still go up and down the river.

[oscaletrains]

i would like to know about how the Railroads took over the steam boat industry. this is kinda a transition.