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Geology &Trains: An Intertwined History
By Dr. Ben Burke
As a lead up to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) annual convention and exposition (ACE) in 2018 in Salt Lake City and 2019 in San Antonio, RMAG members and fellow travelers enjoyed a scenic geologic field trip via train. The RMAG Geotrain trips are not simply geologic cruises on steel wheels: they are the intersection of geographic and geologic exploration, energy transitions, scientific progress, and modern convenience. This article explores the threads of transportation, energy, and scientific development that have interwoven geoscience and railroads from the early nineteenth century onwards, from the beginning of both railroads in their current form and geoscience as a distinct physical science.
FIGURE 1: Ruby Canyon, Utah, near the Colorado border in 1900 by American photographer William Henry Jackson. The Detroit Publishing Company’s special photo train is in the foreground. The 2018 Geotrain passed through this canyon between Denver and Salt Lake City.
(Library of Congress LOT 3888, no. 28)
The railroad, as defined by steam locomotion and iron rails, was invented in England in the early nineteenth century, although tracked tramways are recorded in the historical record back to ancient times. In the United States, the first railroad, Baltimore & Ohio, was chartered in 1827 and began operations in 1830 first carrying freight. The 1830s were a busy time in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern US as many regional railroads began operations, connecting ports and population centers. Railroad development in the eastern United States increased through the 1840s and 1850s. During that time, railroads were the fastest way for passengers to travel between both regional and national destinations. During that same timeframe, many roads were poorly surfaced, frequently rutted, and impacted by poor weather. Road travel also moved at the pace of the horse until the invention of the automobile in the late 1800’s.
FIGURE 2: Original Description: “Map of routes for a Pacific railroad, compiled to accompany the report of the Hon. Jefferson Davis, Sec. of War. This is a hurried compilation of all the authentic surveys and is designed to exhibit the relations of the different routes to each other: the topography represents only those great divides which form summits on the profiles of the routes.”
By G. K. Warren, 1857 (Library of Congress G3701.P3 1857 .W31)
Throughout the nineteenth century, as engineers innovated steam locomotion to haul increasingly heavy loads over ever-longer distances, growth in the geographic, geologic, and biological sciences was fueled by U.S. government support of expeditions into the western regions of North America. These expeditions were tasked to map, document, and explore those regions poorly understood by the young nation based on the east coast. Jeremy Vetter, in his recent book Field Life, traces the development of field sciences, particularly biosciences, throughout this time through the lens of transportation and communication development, and from east coast-centric centers of academic and governmental knowledge to a more geographically distributed knowledge base. Dr. Vetter points out that prior to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, scientific expeditions took many months to years. Travel was slow, particularly in untracked areas west of the Mississippi River, moving either entirely on foot or with wagons. Infrastructure to support travelers was non-existent, and, where present, was often provided by the U.S. military at forts or at Native American and fur trapping settlements. Communication, if available at all, was restricted to the written word and was extremely slow. Shipping collections and finds, such as dinosaur bones and casts, was either impossible or extremely laborious, and prone to loss.
Consequently, expeditions into the western territories were only possible with significant U.S. government support, of which the 1804–1805 expedition of Lewis and Clarke is probably the most well-known. By the 1850s, a series of government-supported expeditions for the express purpose of scouting and surveying a transcontinental railroad route added considerably to our geologic knowledge of the mountain west. This is the first direct connection of geology and railroads, and uniquely so, where the potential for the railroad was the cause for the expedition rather than simply a means of transport.
The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 with the connection of the Western Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroads on the windswept high plain at Promontory, Utah. Other transcontinental routes, both across the northern and southern tiers and in Canada, soon followed throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Telegraph wires paralleled the railroad tracks. Scientific travel now could occur during the summer season, with large finds and heavy loads moving quickly by train back to academic and government centers in the east. Slow, overland travel was relegated to what twenty-first century society calls the “first mile/last mile problem” and urgent communications could now be sent and received quickly by telegraph at low expense. Increasingly, proximity to stations and rail lines prompted nearby scientific documentation and collecting.
Railroads and resources, as well as the geologic understanding of those resources, transformed North America after the 1870s. Mr. Vetter, in Field Life, points out how the development of fossil fuels, primarily coal, allowed trains to travel further and with greater consistency than when running on biomass (wood). Biomass supplies were also limited in many parts of the western United States, thus coal tenders replaced wood tenders behind the boilers on locomotives. The specific energy density of bituminous coal is 24-35 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg), versus 11-18 in an equivalent volume of softwood, according to the Biomass Energy Foundation. Access to water for steam locomotives was still an issue. In the western United States, this explains why railroads established settlements every 8-10 miles for rewatering trains. An example of this is the consistent 8-10 mile distances between the cities of Broomfield, Loveland, Berthoud, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Ultimately, the lack of need for rewatering, as well as the increased energy density of diesel fuel (46 MJ/kg) versus coal, drove the shift from steam to diesel, just as it had driven the same change in how naval fleets around the world were powered in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Coal, both as a marketable resource in general, and as a fuel source specifically, drove the development of railroads from the beginning of the industrial revolution. Coal was therefore a very important target of early geologists and mapmakers. As described in the Simon Winchester’s 2001 book, The Map That Changed The World, William Smith, the English mapmaker and geologist, noticed repeating coal seams exposed along the Somersetshire Coal Canal in the late 1790s. Smith’s seminal finding was that the coal seams were not unique individual horizons, but rather different outcrops of the same seam which were shaped by tectonic processes following initial deposition in the late Paleozoic era.
In the pre-railroad era, canals were the preferred method for transporting coal from interior mining regions to and between end users in coastal areas. The hegemony of canals did not last long, however. In the eastern United States from the 1820s through the 1870s, canal barges hauled coal at the lowest shipping rates until railroad trackage extent and locomotive innovation, specifically the invention of the air brake, allowed railroads to undercut the canal companies. A good example of this economic tension is the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal connecting Washington D.C. with Cumberland, Maryland. The canal opened for traffic in stages from Washington to Cumberland between 1830 and 1850. Operated first as a tollway traversed by independent barge operators, then as a closed waterway by coal company barges, the canal lost its economic edge when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad lowered its haulage rates below that of the canal in the mid-1870s, according to William Davies in a guide to the engineering and geology of the canal published in 1999. Following catastrophic flooding in 1889, the B&O Railroad purchased the bankrupt canal company, leaving only the Western Maryland Railroad as its competition.
The single biggest connection between railroads and energy resources was the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 (12 Statutes at Large, 489) with subsequent legislative additions each year between 1863 and 1866. This piece of legislation is an early example of what now would be called a “public-private partnership.” The U.S. Government incentivized railroad companies to risk massive capital and debt outlays in exchange for surface and subsurface land grants and royalty interest in a checkerboard pattern on either side of the tracks. Now, railroads were in the real estate and resource business—an involvement that would last through much of the twentieth century. The Union Pacific Railroad, a partner in the first transcontinental railroad, and a major freight railroad today, spun off its resource business as Union Pacific Railroad Resources. That company was later acquired by Anadarko, and the “in perpetuity” subsurface royalty interests are now part of Occidental Petroleum. In a similar manner, Burlington Northern Railroad spun off Burlington Resources in 1988. That company was acquired by ConocoPhillips in 2006.
The transcontinental railroads initially ordained Cheyenne as the major train town of the Front Range, but its primacy did not last long. In the Rocky Mountains, resource development drove settlement of the Kansas Territory with the founding of Denver in 1858 during a gold rush. With the discovery of near-surface coal between Boulder and Denver, as well as clay and bentonite resources near Morrison and Golden, narrow gauge and standard gauge tracks soon criss-crossed Colorado as well as other western states in order to carry these resources to market. Along the Front Range, different railroad companies vied for the easiest way over the Rockies to the Pacific, consistent with transcontinental ambitions. Routes along waterways usually offered the gentlest grades, since trains that were not on some sort of traction system, such as a cog, could rarely traverse persistent grades steeper than 4%. The physics of motive traction of steel on steel precludes anything steeper.
Up until the late nineteenth century, the interconnection of geoscience and trains revolved around railroads as a motive for exploration as transcontinental routes were scouted and laid, as well as a tool for academic and government exploration of the western U.S. Following the completion of transcontinental routes, as well as the development of western population centers containing a rising middle class that had leisure time available for touring, passenger train trips evolved from a means of transport into a form of entertainment. The creation of national parks in the western United States provided new and remarkable destinations for pleasure travel.
FIGURE 3: An example of geotourism in the early 20th century: the author’s grandfather, a Philadelphia lawyer, touristing on the rear observation car of the Union Pacific Yellowstone Express, at Reas Pass, West Yellowstone, Montana, 1929.
Between 1915 and 1922, the U.S. Geological Survey published a Guidebook of the Western United States in five parts, Bulletins 611 through 614 and Bulletin 707. These were the Roadside Geology guides of their time, describing the geology and geography of the landscapes of four transcontinental rail routes as well as the California coast rather than presenting geology state by state. The final installment of these guidebooks was Bulletin 907, the geology of the Alaska Railroad, published in 1940.
“These books are educational in purpose, but the method adopted is to entertain the traveler by making more interesting what he sees from the car window. The plan of the series is to present authoritative information that may enable the reader to realize adequately the scenic and material resources of the region he is traversing...”
With that, geologic tourism by train, which had begun informally in the 1880s, was formalized. An example of Victorian-style geologic and outdoor tourism, combined with resource extraction is the now defunct rail line from Denver to Silver Plume via Clear Creek, along a route now traversed by Route 6 and Interstate 70. Prior to the financial Panic of 1893 and subsequent removal of the silver standard by the Sherman Act, the Georgetown and Silver Plume areas were a silver and gold mining hub. Following the initiation of rail service in 1884, freight trains hauled ore from various mines to mills in Idaho Springs and Denver, and all the while, day trippers could leave Denver’s Union Station and have lunch on mountain peaks above Silver Plume, returning to Denver in time for dinner, as detailed in the images and captions of Allan Lewis’ 2004 book, Images of Rail: Colorado & Southern Railway Clear Creek Narrow Gauge. Unfortunately, the line was abandoned and removed in 1941.
Likewise, the Strontia Springs Resort along the South Platte River southwest of Denver entertained tourists in Victorian outdoors fashion. The trip from Denver involved a short ride up Waterton Canyon, a trip that today can be done by bicycle up the old rail grade that is maintained by Denver Water. The ruins of the resort site is now submerged under the waters of Strontia Springs Reservoir.
Throughout the twentieth century, automobile usage increased. Passenger travel by commercial aircraft eclipsed train-based passenger travel in the late 1950s. For example, in 1916, 98% of intercity commercial travel occurred on railroads. By 1940, railroads’ market share had dropped to 67%, further down to 46% by 1950, and 32% by 1957, according to John Stover in his book, American Railroads. Through the 1960s, the increase in commercial passenger aviation and the buildout of the Federal Interstate Highway network doomed rail as a primary form of passenger transport in the United States. It was likely during this time that geologic field work switched to being automobile based from rail based. The death knell for privately run passenger rail in the United States was the 1967 decision by the US Postal Service to switch from rail-based to truck-based mail transport. Railroads that previously ran mandated passenger service as a condition of the mail contract filed for passenger route abandonment en masse, having lost what was effectively a Postal Service subsidy. By 1970, the Federal government deregulated passenger rail and created Amtrak in order to relieve the railroads of their newly unprofitable passenger operations. Today, Amtrak has a quasi-monopoly on long distance passenger rail, although a private operator in Florida now runs a higher speed line between Miami and West Palm Beach that will soon extend to Orlando. Private operators are also in early stages of building true high speed rail in Texas and California.
Today, RMAG continues to support the interconnection of geology and railroads with the 2018 Geotrain trip between Denver and Salt Lake City on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and the 2019 trip from Fort Worth to San Antonio on Amtrak’s Texas Eagle.
The 2018 trip was a cross section of the entire Rocky Mountains, including the Front Range, Colorado’s western slope, the grand staircase, and the Wasatch Front, exposing riders to numerous tunnels, canyons, and areas both next to and away from any roads, as well as the resource development of the North Park, Piceane, and Uintah Basins. Stephen Hodgetts presented a talk via the railcar intercom on Cretaceous paleoenvironments. Dr. Tim Ruble presented a talk on resource development of the Uintah Basin and the role short line railroads played in the extraction of gilsonite.
The accompanying guidebook drew on many sources of information, USGS Bulletin 707, the 1922 Denver and Rio Grande Western route guide between Denver and Salt Lake City, in particular. Today, the Zephyr traverses much of the same trackage covered in Bulletin 707, with the major exception being the route through the Moffatt Tunnel connecting the Front Range to Winter Park, Colorado, which had not yet been completed. In 1922, trains had to go south to Pueblo, Cañon City, up the Royal Gorge, and over Tennessee Pass near Leadville.
The 2019 trip traversed more geologically subtle country of central Texas from the southern end of the Fort Worth Basin and then along the eastern edge Edwards Pleateau. It crossed surface exposures of the Eagle Ford Formation, the limestones of the Edwards Aquifer, and exposures of other production oil and gas bearing formations in the Eagle Ford trend to the southeast of the rail line. This route variously followed trackage laid originally in the late nineteenth century that has been in use ever since. Texas railroad routes were never chronicled by the U.S. Geological Survey bulletin series.
A potential May 2020 trip from New Orleans to Houston, the location of the AAPG 2020 ACE, an eight hour ride, has not yet been planned. A Geotrain trip from Denver to Grand Junction, Colorado, also an 8 hour ride, is under consideration as a field trip for the September 2020 Rocky Mountain Section AAPG meeting.
The intersection of geoscience and railroads is a diverse mix of the history of science, energy, transportation technology, and communication. In the western United States in particular, one can still see the landscape passing from train windows just as early geoscience and resource pioneers did starting 150 years ago.
