![[OC] I needed one railroad for my game and ended up mapping every major line in North America, section by section, 1830–1900](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/y5pmyu09shrh1-1024x576.gif "[OC] I needed one railroad for my game and ended up mapping every major line in North America, section by section, 1830–1900")
I'm a solo developer, and this started small. My game, Salt and Soil, follows one family across North America from 1607 to 1900, and its Sacramento scenario needed exactly one railroad: the Central Pacific climbing into the Sierra. Once that line was on the map, the rest of the continent looked wrong without its own. So I kept going.
I set myself one rule, and it turned out to be most of the work: no line that merely looks plausible. Each section appears where and when it actually opened to traffic. A cell on my map is about 20 miles across, and by 1900 the US alone had about 193,000 miles of track, so I draw only trunk and through routes, the way an atlas draws only major rivers. That came to 175 lines and 578 dated sections, from the Baltimore & Ohio to Newfoundland and Cuba.
The US routes follow a dataset I'm very grateful for: Jeremy Atack's historical GIS of American railroads. He's an economic historian at Vanderbilt who mapped every US railroad from 1826 to 1911, and with co-authors used it to show that railroads may account for half or more of the growth of Midwestern cities in the 1850s. Before putting it into a commercial game I emailed him, half expecting no answer. He wrote back that it was fine, asked for a copy of the game when it's done, and he's now in the credits. That reply made my week. Canada and Mexico follow the US DOT's North American Rail Network, and the opening dates come from railroad chronologies, section by section.
What surprised me when I first watched it run was how lopsided it is. The 1880s alone laid more than a third of all the track on this map, and the West fills in within two decades of 1869.
In the GIF each section flashes white in the year it opens, then settles into the colour of its decade. Watch the Central Pacific creep east from Sacramento through the 1860s while the Union Pacific races west from Omaha; they meet in Utah in 1869.
If you know the railroads of your region, I'd love to hear what's missing or which section opens in the wrong year. I'll fix it in the game.
Posted by wizzard_rick
10 Comments
**Sources**
* US routes: Jeremy Atack, *Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of U.S. Railroads, 1826–1911*, Vanderbilt University, revised 2023. Used with the author’s permission. [https://my.vanderbilt.edu/jeremyatack/data-downloads/](https://my.vanderbilt.edu/jeremyatack/data-downloads/)
* Canadian and Mexican routes: North American Rail Network, US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics / Federal Railroad Administration [https://geodata.bts.gov/datasets/usdot::north-american-rail-network-lines/about](https://geodata.bts.gov/datasets/usdot::north-american-rail-network-lines/about). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada (Natural Resources Canada). Mexican data: Fuente: INEGI.
* Opening dates: C. T. Baer’s PRR chronology (Hagley Museum & Library), the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, railroad historical societies and national libraries. A date means opening to regular traffic, not a ceremony or last spike.
* Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Newfoundland have no usable route geometry, so those lines run station to station over land.
**Tools**
Python (pyproj, Shapely, Pillow). Each section is routed along the source network between its dated stations, reprojected into the game’s North America Albers projection and rasterized onto its 216×540 grid. Colours show the decade each section opened. The terrain is the game’s own map.
**Limitations:** Canadian and Mexican lines follow modern track, so a few 1880s alignments are approximate. A section that closed and reopened on the same cells (Texas & New Orleans, 1868–1876) still shows as open.
Shame they got rid of most of it
I’ve been following your game. It’s a real achievement. Thank you for the dedication
As a developer, I love the dedication!
I love this project as an idea.
Awesome, man! East coast vs everything looks quite interesting, and your dedication to keep it historically accurate gives you a lot of credit
There’s one in northern Missouri that opens in 1859 that doesn’t appear to connect to anything at all for many years and never connects to the east. Is that correct or is something missing?
One should add that data to openstreetmap as start and end date (for some lines)
Crazy how some of them just “poof” and appear in several years when they’re massive lengths of rail like half the country long.
I love this! Any chance you have a version that progresses slower as well? Yours really captures the explosion well, but I’d appreciate being able to watch it in slower motion to be able to process the growth better before my lizard brain gets distracted by the next section filling in.