Aug
15
Having tortured you all with the statistics for the stock and bond prices for the railroads, it seems only appropriate to add to the data the calculations of the changes in physical freight itself. The average freight car in 1860 could handle 5-10 tons; by 1890 the figure was 20-30 tons thanks to Mr. Carnegie's rails that replaced iron with steel.
This is Grok's and my best estimates of the annual tonnage between New York and Chicago over the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of U.S. participation in the Great War.
For Russia the primary corridor is between Moscow and the Urals. They have finished building the M12 3-lane dual carriageway (the equivalent for motor freight of the double tracking between NY and Chicago). A trip that took 30 hours now takes 16.
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