Confederate Railroads in the Trans-Mississippi: A Cursory Glance

One of my favorite pastimes is visiting the university library and browsing. It’s fun to take down books and flip through them; part of the excitement is that you never know where this will lead! For example, on my latest library adventure I spotted a copy of Vital Rails: The Charleston & Savannah Railroad and the Civil War in Coastal South Carolina (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008) by H. David Stone, Jr. While thumbing through it, I noticed a map depicting railroads in the Confederacy; this map was originally published in Robert L. Black’s book, Railroads of the Confederacy (1952), the major source on the topic. Judging from the map, railroads were in the infant stage of development in the trans-Mississippi South when the war started. There was an interesting complex of railroads in the Houston and Galveston area as well as near Little Rock, New Orleans, westward from Vicksburg, and in the area between Marshall, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana. Although I had previously done some research on trans-Mississippi railroads while working on my Civil War books, it dawned on me that actually I know very little about railroads in the trans-Mississippi. After my library visit I conducted a search on the internet and came across an interesting website constructed by David L. Bright about Confederate railroads. Mr. Bright has a brief history of every Confederate railroad plus data about each railroad’s locomotives and other equipment. He even includes transcriptions of documents that relate to each railroad. Now I’m eager to dig in and look for scholarly articles and other materials relating to trans-Mississippi railroads. All of this from browsing through one book…