Cootner argues that railroads responded to rather than instigated demand and business cycles, but he does not address the issue of the transcontinentals. It is hard to see what demand they were addressing in the 1860s and 1870s
Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization, 45-46, 50, 96.
Fogel, Union Pacific, 58-60, 97.
Here I have followed the argument of Horace White, an attorney for the bondholders of the Kansas Pacific.
"Arguments of Horace White... House Committee on the Pacific Railroad, Union Pacific Railroad Discriminations," 45th Congress, 2nd session, 1878, 1-3, copy in C.B. & Q, 63, 1870, 6.8, Pacific Railroad File, no. 29.
Add local planning and regulation book. Such schemes had a considerable ante-bellum history, and both the American Congress and the Canadian Parliament had learned that although running a railroad through the public domain changed the value of land, rising prices would not necessarily accrue to the government, and so they sought to capture part of the increased value by retaining part of the land near the tracks.
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 50-52.
Lloyd Tevis, one of the great landholders of California, estimated that the Southern Pacific doubled the value of surrounding lands.
Henry George, Our Land And Land Policy, in The Complete Works of Henry George (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1904, original edition 1871) 8: 24.
Tevis to Huntington, Jan. 29, 1878, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 14.
The most detailed account of the railroad grants comes from Public Aids to Transportation Table 13. Table 13 actually is two tables, with one table reflecting adjusted grants (that is with forfeited grants subtracted) for some railroads and another table reflecting unadjusted grants, where the amount lost by forfeiture or errors was not clear. Among the roads with adjusted grants, the Union Pacific received 11.4 million acres; the main line of the Central Pacific received 7.88 million acres, and the Kansas Pacific got 7.09 million acres. For those roads with unadjusted grants, the Northern Pacific got 39.4 million acres over its entire system.