Did the South have many railroads before 1860?

Answer 1

Compared to the north, no, and sufficient to be of great value in the war, no. Most of the railroads in the entire world were in the US, but 90% of the tracks were in the north. There were only two railways linking the eastern and western portions of the Confederacy, and within the first year one of those was permanently interrupted by Yankee incursions. When the decision was taken in 1863 to send one of the three corps of General Lee's army to assist the western army (in the Civil War "the west" meant the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River) near Chattanooga, Tennessee, the journey took days, because the Yankees had just interrupted the other east-west connection by capturing Knoxville, and so the reinforcements had to go a long, round about way through Atlanta, and missed the first day of the Battle of Chickamauga because they were still on the trains. There were no factories in the south capable of building locomotives, and only about two iron foundries capable of producing rails (and one of those in Nashville fell into Yankee hands in February 1862). By the end of the war, while southern soldiers (and their Yankee prisoners) starved, food was rotting on railroad platforms, awaiting the creaky, barely functioning remaining railroads eforts to move it where it was needed. The north had a very able railroad man in Herman Haupt, who ran the US Military Railroad, building tracks to support the armies. The south never did anything comparable, and was reluctant to use the power of the government to force the railroads to cooperate with one another and to do what the government needed doing, because, after all, the south was fighting for the idea of a not too powerful central government.