Maps for the WW&F?

[Stephen Piwowarski]

Hello Everyone,

I was fooling around a bit with some map programs today and thought of a nice idea that could be added as an adjunct to our web presence or potentially incorporated into some sort of exhibit.

My original concept was to have users plug in a zip code or city, state into a mapping application. The result would be a route, travel times, and distances to Sheepscot Station during three different eras: c.1810, before the railroad existed; c.1910 during the railroads heyday; and today. Visitors would be able to clearly visualize how the railways improved and revolutionized transportation in the United States using a technology that they understand and interact with on a regular basis.

I've already had several people express curiosity in making this happen, however I have no idea how to bring this idea to fruition! If any of you are familiar with mapping software or have any suggestions for how this might be accomplished, I would appreciate your input! Some friends have suggested that inputing all of the required data would make this prohibitive and difficult, but if you have any suggestions they would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve Piwowarski

[Dave Buczkowski]

Hi Steve;
Hopefully our moderator will pipe in. He has some degree of experience in computer mapping...
Dave

[Ed Lecuyer]

Hi All,

Yes, I have *some* experience with this.

The software application that I am Product Manager of (see http://www.terrainnavigator.com) is a mapping product, but would not be suitable for this exercise.

That said, you would need a pile of data plugged into a heavy-duty (read: expensive and hard to use) GIS software product to get the sort of results you would need. Basically you would need, just for the 1910 example, all of the railroad timetables for all zip codes that you intend to support. These would have to be entered into a database of some sort. Then you would have to program an algorithm to parse the data in such a way to come up with a trip time.

I'm not even sure you could do this for 1810. Maybe just speed of a horse, times distance, with breaks for multi-day journeys, and add a fudge factor for non-straight roads, weather conditions, etc. would provide some sort of approximation.

In short, this would not be easy to accomplish.

If we wanted to do this, I suggest doing it "by hand" using a few known starting points (Boston MA, Portland ME, Augusta ME, Bath ME, etc.) just to provide some comparable information. Then putting it in some sort of interactive map/exhibit.

[Wayne Laepple]

I'm thinking it would be more interesting to interpolate how long it would take to get from Albion or North Whitefield to Wiscasset (or vice versa) walking or on horseback or with a wagon and compare that to the WW&F. If we are trying to interpret for modern folks how the WW&F changed lives in the Sheepscot Valley, that's a piece of information that would be useful. And, as Ed has noted, doing it from Philadelphia or Rochester or Hartford would be rather difficult.

[Philip Marshall]

Overland travel times for 1810 or thereabouts can be found in stagecoach timetables (yes, such a thing existed then, though they were necessarily imprecise -- really just approximations). These were often printed in almanacs and newspapers, though more often for major routes like Boston-New York, Boston-Portland, or Boston-Montreal, etc. than rural areas like the Sheepscot Valley -- though Wiscasset was a pretty important town in the pre-railroad era. Was there a stagecoach route between Wiscasset and Gardiner perhaps?

[John McNamara]

On page 7 of the May/June 2012 WW&F Newsletter, there was an article that covered some aspects of transportation. It was entitled "Changing Times." Here it is:

One does not have to be very “far along in years” to feel that technical progress has changed our lives substantially in the past few decades. Who would have dreamt of airplanes like the Airbus A380 that carry 500 passengers around the globe? The recent death of Steve Jobs inspired retrospectives showing the first Apple computers, which look exceedingly crude by today’s standards. Many of us now have fiber optic lines directly to our homes, and many of our children carry around computers with more capabilities than those that filled rooms a few decades ago. This all seems like dazzling progress that changes our lives in unprecedented fashion. However, similarly life-changing events took place somewhat more than 100 years ago with the introduction of railroads.

In a recent posting on http://forum.wwfry.org, Stewart Rhine recounted comments by the late Harry Percival. In talking to a visitor, Harry had said, “This railroad ran from a major tidewater town through some rural areas, so the line operated in a varied landscape and conditions. When this railroad was planned and built, most people (unless they lived in a major town) traveled as they did in the time of Christ. Walking or riding a horse was the only transportation, and goods were freighted over muddy or snow covered roads. Most work was done by hand. By the 1930s, many things had changed. The roads were improved, and people were traveling in autos, hauling things with trucks, and listening to news from all over the world by radio. Power lines and telephone circuits spread out from the major population centers, and even though many areas didn’t have electric service until later, people had local DC power circuits to power lights and radio sets. The state went from the newspaper era into the electronic mass communication age, and the WW&F played an important part in the transformation.”

In a subsequent post, Bill Reidy reported that he had been studying railroads on Cape Cod. He said “I have spent hours searching through the Cape’s newspapers of the mid to late 1800s. They tell a very similar story. In the mid-1840s, the quickest communication between the Cape and Boston was via packet ship or horseback, and took most of a day. In 1848, the railroad reached Sandwich, and it reached Hyannis in 1854. When the telegraph came to the Cape in the early 1850s, the lines followed much of the rail route. One could now travel to Boston, spend a few hours, and return later the same day. News that had formerly taken a day to arrive was now nearly instantaneous!

The changes that Sheepscot Valley residents and Cape residents experienced more than a century ago were no less revolutionary than the changes we’ve seen in our lives today.

[Stephen Piwowarski]

Hi Everyone,

I've continued to think about this topic since I first posted it and appreciate all of the responses. I found a cool set of maps while researching that I believe could be the basis for something neat!
Take a look here:
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/how-fast-could-you-travel-across-the-us-in-the-1800s

Enjoy,
Steve

[Wayne Laepple]

Well, that article needs some fact-checking, Stephen. According to what I found, in 1830 there was only 75.4 miles of railroad in the entire country, and the longest line, the Delaware & Hudson, extended only 16.5 miles. There was no such thing as interconnecting lines at that time. In 1857, while there was nearly 3,700 miles of railroad, the longest line was only 241 miles, from New York to Buffalo, but there was some opportunity to take connecting trains or travel by other means between railroad routes.

The reason for the increase in travel speed between 1800 and 1830 was improvements in roads, canals and the invention of the steamboat. The McAdam (macadam) paving process was developed during this time, which mean that roads didn't turn into mudholes whenever it rained and dustbowls when it was dry. Stagecoach companies came into being, and scheduled stages ran between cities and towns.  Packet boats pulled by teams of horses on the canal system operated overnight between cities, which was gave an advantage over stages, which usually stopped overnight somewhere. And steamboats on navigable rivers also operated overnight.

Until the 1870's, trains didn't operate much faster than 25 or 30 mph due to track conditions, and as vast as this country is, at that speed, it took along time to get anywhere. In addition, until there was an economic need for a railway, it didn't get built. People were still reduced to travel by horse or stage to reach the vast majority of this country, and even at best, 15 mph was top speed for such conveyances. (In Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley, the towns are spaced almost exactly 11 miles apart, the distance early settlers could easily travel in one day on horseback or by wagon.)

[Ed Lecuyer]

Carl Soderstrom emailed me and asked to post the following:

On the subject of stage travel. in Eric Sloane's "Our Vanishing Landscape"
On page 58 he describes a stage coach ride from Holland House NYC leaving
at 5:55 AM arriving Philadelphia 3:20 PM returning to NYC at 3:36 AM using
78 horses. He also discussed NYC to Boston.

[Stephen Piwowarski]

Thanks Ed. Also Wayne, quite right about the article. I think the article itself is questionable, but the maps themselves, which I believe came from the University of Nebraska are accurate. I believe these maps came from an atlas published around 1930. There is a lot more information on the U Nebraska site here: http://railroads.unl.edu/

Steve