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I should preface this by saying that a complete answer would require about 100,000 words. I am not exaggerating. Here is the short answer, which leaves out so many important aspects it's probably completely worthless. I have more than 100 books on railroad rates and regulations on my home bookshelves, but none provide a simple answer. (I looked.) The only thing that is easy to define is the boundary of the Official Territory. Moving counterclockwise, it was bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the international boundary with Canada, a line generally south of the Santa Fe from and including Chicago through Streator and Joliet, to and including Peoria, to and including St. Louis, the north bank of the Ohio River, and generally the lines of the C&O to North Kenova, Ohio, and the N&W through Roanoke to and including Norfolk, Va. The Official Territory dates to the practice of pooling and traffic associations, which were formed by railroads in order to maintain rates, provide uniformity and predictiblility to shippers and railroads, and avoid ruinous competition. (First was the Iowa Pool, of 1870.) Following a rate war in 1877, the four Trunk Lines (which by definition are the New York-Chicago principal routes), the Erie, NYC, PRR, and B&O, formed a pool. These are called trunk lines, by the way, because at first they were almost pure through routes to Chicago, with hardly any branch lines. The feeders that ran essentially perpendicular to the trunk lines, intersecting them at numerous small towns in route, were at the time largely independent. Like the trunk of a tree, the trunk lines gathered and distributed, and ran unbranched in a straight line from one end to the other. While the ICC Act of 1877 outlawed pooling, it did NOT outlaw collective ratemaking, so the rate bureaus already set up by the railroads continued. The first territory to be acknowledged by the ICC was the Eastern Trunk Line Territory, to which was added the New England and some other territories, and by being acknowledged became the "Official" Territory. The other principal territories were the Illinois, Southern, and Western. Each of these was further subdivided into as many as five or six territories. Territories came about to provide a pricing method for all the commodities hauled by rail between the some 75,000 origin-destination pairs of the era. The U.S. was divided into about two dozen classification territories, and in each territory the railroads ran a rate bureau that classified all of the possible commodities (e.g., pickles, in jars, in boxes not to exceed 100 jars each, etc.) and placed them into a rate group. Rates were often set to avoid discrimination between towns, regions, and commodities, but by so doing actually created all sorts of discrimination. There were numerous problems this created, which in turn required armies of clerks and bureaucrats to administer it all. Deregulation abolished most of this, though collective ratemaking, discrimination between locales, and violations of the long-haul, short-haul principal are by no means dead. All deregulation really did was acknowledge that the small shipper either had vanished or might as well vanish, and that railroads were primarily movers of bulk commodities or consolidated merchandise shipments, which didn't need such an elaborate rate-making structure to ensure fairness. Nevertheless, there's plenty of people who feel that railroad rates are plenty unfair. (Just ask farmers in mid North Dakota what they think.) The other groupings used in the Mountain Railroad issue aren't exactly ICC groupings, save for the Pocohontas. They do follow ICC groupings, because we used a similar logic in that we grouped railroads that were essentially doing the same thing on more or less parallel routes. The Pacific Coast lines grouping has no parallel in the ICC groupings -- because there WAS no Pacific Coast rail traffic to speak of until post World War II, as coast-wise shipping had it all. In truth, the Pacific Coast routes are all east-west routes that turn corners once they get west of the Sierra Nevada-Cascade Ranges. Today, there isn't much pure Pacific Coast rail traffic, either -- trucks have most of it. The Official Territory designation no longer has any legal meaning. But it's still in common usage among railroaders because it instantly identifies a specific geographic place with practical meaning, just as the routes into Chicago are almost never referred to by their current names today, but by their ancient names. Recently I sat in a meeting of all the Chicago railroads and the various government agencies responsible for transportation there, and when the bottleneck at Brighton Park was mentioned, someone what routes crossed there, and the answer was "the Alton, the Panhandle, the B&OCT, and the CR&I." Not CN, CSX, and NS!
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