Railroads During World War I: Ports, Car Shortage, Troops & Federal Control

Last revised: September 8, 2026

American railroads fought the First World War twice: first as private companies hauling export freight east after Europe went to war in the summer of 1914, then as a rented national machine after President Wilson placed them under the United States Railroad Administration. The United States declared war on April 6, 1917. By November the car shortage stood on the order of 158,000. Wilson’s proclamation is dated December 26, 1917. Federal control began at 12:01 a.m. on December 28. The roads came back on March 1, 1920.

Compared with the Second World War, this story has had less ink. The plant was already at its greatest extent. The Interstate Commerce Commission already held the rates. Empty cars did not come back west. Eastern terminals filled, and the government took the keys. What follows here is the wartime railroad: export traffic, Atlantic ports, the Railroads’ War Board, troop trains to camps and embarkation piers, how the roads performed under federal control, and the locomotives and cars shipped to France. Peak mileage, the Adamson eight-hour day, and the Transportation Act that closed the decade are on Railroads In The 1910s. Organization, compensation, and the standard locomotive types are on the USRA page. The second war is Railroads In World War II. The national arc is the history hub.

Rail service in Washington D.C. circa 1917 wooden boxcars Harris and Ewing

Rail service in the nation’s capital, circa 1917. Wooden boxcars with partial metal or wood construction remained common. Harris & Ewing.

On this page: At a glance · Export traffic, 1914–1917 · Declaration and the Railroads’ War Board · Ports, yards, and the car shortage · Troop trains · Federal control · What the roads actually moved · Interurbans · Locomotives and cars for France · Return to private operation

At a glance

Item	Detail
European war	Summer 1914. American roads already moving export freight east
U.S. declaration	April 6, 1917
Railroads’ War Board	April 11, 1917. Fairfax Harrison (Southern Railway), chairman. Private attempt to run as one system
Car shortage	About 148,600 on April 30, 1917; about 158,000 by November 1917
Takeover authority	Army Appropriation Act, August 29, 1916
USRA	Proclamation December 26, 1917; control December 28, 1917, 12:01 a.m. William G. McAdoo. Walker D. Hines from January 11, 1919
Federal Control Act	March 21, 1918. Return required within 21 months of a peace treaty. Roads returned March 1, 1920
Rates under McAdoo	Freight up 25% in the South and West, 40% in the East. Coach fares 3 cents a mile
1918 vs. 1917	About 2% more ton-miles under federal control than 1917 under private operation (Cunningham: 1.8%), with fewer train-miles
Average freight car	41.6 tons capacity. Average train 565 tons, 37.4 cars, 11.5 mph
Passenger service	53,941 cars; 1.085 billion passengers a year; average trip 39.33 miles
Soldiers by rail	Period tables print about 5 million movements in 20 months. About 4.7 million served. About 2 million of the AEF went overseas
USRA equipment	On the order of 2,000 locomotives and 100,000 freight cars. Types on the USRA page
Shipped to France	About 1,791 Consolidation 2-8-0s and about 27,000 standard-gauge freight cars (War Department / Ayres)
Interurban miles	15,562 (1917). Peak 15,580 in 1916
First-track peak	254,037 miles in 1916. See the 1910s

Operating averages are period tables. Mileage is the Stover / ICC first-track series. Information compiled September 8, 2026.

Export traffic, 1914–1917

The network that entered the war was the largest the country would ever own. John Stover, in The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads, put 254,037 miles of first track in 1916. About 1.7 million people worked for the railroads. Operating revenues were about $3.353 billion, with some $21 billion invested in the plant. Stover’s wartime shares—about 98 percent of commercial intercity passengers and 77 percent of intercity freight—describe this era. The automobile had not yet taken the local passenger. The truck had not yet taken less-than-carload freight.

It was not a solvent map. Costs had been rising faster than rates since 1900. After Hepburn (1906) and Mann-Elkins (1910), the Interstate Commerce Commission held the tariffs. A requested increase was denied; a 5 percent allowance did not cover. Average freight sat about 0.73¢ a ton-mile. By 1915 more than 40,000 miles sat in default or receivership, among them the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; St. Louis–San Francisco; New York, New Haven & Hartford; and Wabash.

Europe went to war in midsummer 1914. Munitions, grain, and steel for the Allies moved west to east and stacked up at the Atlantic. The Allies would order on the order of $3 billion in American supplies. Cars sat as rolling warehouses on the piers. Empties did not go home. The shortage was already building before Congress voted for war.

Passengers wait for a Baltimore and Ohio train at the depot in Zaleski Ohio circa 1913

Passengers wait for a Baltimore & Ohio train at Zaleski, Ohio, circa 1913. Small-town depots like this still defined the map when Europe went to war. Author’s collection.

Declaration and the Railroads’ War Board

Congress declared war on April 6, 1917. Five days later, on April 11, the executives met in Washington. The American Railway Association vested power in a Special Committee on National Defense and centered it in an executive committee of five, the Railroads’ War Board. Fairfax Harrison of the Southern Railway was chairman. The others were Samuel Rea of the Pennsylvania, Howard Elliott, Julius Kruttschnitt of the Southern Pacific, and Hale Holden of the Burlington. Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio sat ex officio for the Council of National Defense; Edgar E. Clark sat for the ICC.

The board tried to do what the USRA later did, without taking title: pool cars, ignore ownership when empties were needed, regulate grain for export, and move the first million men to the thirty-two National Army and National Guard camps. Willard reported that a car shortage of about 148,600 on April 30 had been cut to about 33,800 by August 1. Hospital and troop equipment was organized. Tidewater coal and lake ore were pooled. It was voluntary cooperation against the Sherman Act. It was not a single railroad. The hard winter of 1917 finished the job the summer had started.

The brotherhoods of engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen had already won an eight-hour wage basis. Wilson signed the Adamson Act on September 3 and 5, 1916. It took effect January 1, 1917, and the Supreme Court upheld it in Wilson v. New on March 19, 1917. That statute is treated on the 1910s page. The roads entered the war with a new wage bill and old rates.

Ports, yards, and the car shortage

Most wartime freight still moved from west to east. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hampton Roads, and Boston took the ships. Hoboken and Newport News took the troops. Priority orders for Army freight filled the terminals. Cars that should have gone back west stayed on the waterfront. By November 1917 the shortage stood on the order of 158,000 cars.

The roads were large, regulated, and not a single system. Willard, sitting on the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, had already argued that they should be operated as one. Private pooling ran into the antitrust statutes. Wilson used the Army Appropriation Act of August 29, 1916, which had given the president power to take transportation in wartime, and reached for an administrator instead of another tariff case.

Troop trains

The wartime Army moved by rail. Recruits went from hometowns to camps, from camp to camp, then from camp to the embarkation ports. Period tables print about 5 million soldiers carried in a twenty-month stretch. That is movements, not unique heads. About 4.7 million served in the armed forces. About 2 million of the American Expeditionary Forces went overseas, and every one of those men reached a pier by train.

Pullman furnished sleepers for a large share of the overnight hauls. Special trains of a dozen or more cars became ordinary as the draft filled. Peaks ran to tens of thousands of men a day. The work was the same work the roads would do again a generation later, at a larger scale. The Second World War troop-train record is on Troop Trains.

Federal control

Wilson’s proclamation of December 26, 1917, named William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, Director General of Railroads. Control began at 12:01 a.m. on December 28. Jim Boyd, in The American Freight Train, is right that the government did not take title. It rented the roads and paid compensation. Stover put the rental at “the average of the net operating income for the three years between June 30, 1914, and June 10, 1917.” Those were lean years, and owners felt it.

The Federal Control Act of March 21, 1918, wrote the bargain into statute: compensation, a promise to hand the properties back in at least as good condition, and return within 21 months of a peace treaty. It also suspended the antitrust and anti-pooling laws for the duration. McAdoo centralized shops and terminals, cut passenger trains that did not serve the war, embargoed freight that clogged the ports, and ran the corridors as one machine. Competition among the companies stopped. Managers feared the arrangement would become permanent.

McAdoo found the same rate problem the private roads had. He raised freight 25 percent in the South and West and 40 percent in the East, and, as George W. Hilton and John F. Due note in The Electric Interurban Railways in America, authorized a 3-cent coach fare per mile. Wages went up as well. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, McAdoo resigned. Walker D. Hines, formerly of the Santa Fe, became Director General on January 11, 1919. Both men asked Congress to keep federal control for five more years as a test. Congress said no. How the USRA was staffed, how each road was paid, and the locomotive diagrams themselves are treated on the USRA page.

What the roads actually moved

Federal control is often remembered as the moment the government finally made the railroads work. The tonnage record is quieter. William J. Cunningham, writing on government operation, put the 1918 increase at 1.8 percent more ton-miles than 1917, which had already been the heaviest year on the books. That gain came with fewer train-miles and fewer car-miles. Average train load and car load both rose. The live operating averages from the period—41.6 tons per car, 565 tons and 37.4 cars per train, 11.5 mph—are the machine those percentages describe.

What lasted was standardization. McAdoo’s mechanical committee drew locomotive and freight-car designs that any road could use. Main-line power came in light (about 54,000-pound axle load) and heavy (about 60,000-pound) versions. The 2-8-2 Mikados were the most numerous. Including leftover Russian 2-10-0s retrofitted after the Bolshevik Revolution, more than 2,000 locomotives were built to those specifications. Boyd put freight-car output above 100,000, most of them boxcars, composite steel-and-wood. John H. White, Jr., in The American Railroad Freight Car, tracked steel in the national car fleet from 8.6 percent in 1905 to 51.8 percent in 1915 and 65.2 percent in 1920. The type-by-type locomotive table, and what each company received, belong on the USRA page.

The cost of keeping the trains rolling was deferred maintenance. By the Armistice many properties were worn. The USRA has been criticized ever since for running the plant down. The same standardization, Stover later noted, showed up in the 1921–1940 figures: more capacity per car, more ton-miles, higher train speeds, less coal per thousand tons. When the second war came, the roads were determined not to be taken again.

Interurbans

The electric interurbans largely stayed out of federal control. They handled little of the war’s freight. Hilton and Due put national mileage at 15,562 in 1917; the peak had already come in 1916, at 15,580. They dated the industry’s final shape at about 1912 and a marked decline from about 1918. An Electric Railway War Board was formed in 1917. Because few companies moved troops or tonnage in volume, it had little to do. There were exceptions. The Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern, which did handle considerable freight, was taken over. The national overview is Interurbans & Streetcars.

Locomotives and cars for France

The American Expeditionary Forces did not live off the French railways. They brought their own. The standard engine was a Baldwin and Alco 2-8-0 Consolidation, later called the Pershing type, sized for French clearances and bridges, with air brakes and European couplers and buffers. The War Department figures compiled by Leonard P. Ayres put about 1,791 of those 100-ton consolidations in the cargo, along with about 26,994 standard-gauge freight cars, from U.S. entry through April 1919. About 650 of the engines went over set up on their wheels, a trick that had not been done with locomotives of that size. The first such shipload left on the Feltore in the spring of 1918 for St. Nazaire. American crews ran American trains on French rails from the ports inland. That equipment is not the USRA domestic order. It is the overseas half of the same war.

Return to private operation

The Armistice came on November 11, 1918. The Federal Control Act still ran. McAdoo and then Hines asked for five more years. Labor would have taken permanent public ownership. The companies wanted the keys. Congress wrote the Transportation Act (Esch–Cummins) on February 28, 1920, and the roads went back at 12:01 a.m. on March 1. Private management came home to worn rail, a wartime wage bill, and a new statute that gave the ICC power over mergers and abandonments. That law is the 1910s closer, treated on Railroads In The 1910s.

A diesel-electric switcher was tried in Brooklyn in 1918 and sent back within months. The first that sold appeared in 1925. For that story see diesel locomotives. Streamliners belong to the 1930s. When the country entered the next war, the railroads moved the Army again, this time under private operation. That chapter is Railroads In World War II.

Sources

Stover, John F. The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads. New York: Routledge, 1999. First-track peak 254,037 (1916). Compensation as the average net operating income, June 30, 1914–June 10, 1917. Wartime traffic shares; more than 40,000 miles in default or receivership by 1915
Boyd, Jim. The American Freight Train. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 2001. Rental rather than a taking of title. On the order of 100,000 freight cars to USRA designs
Hilton, George W., and John F. Due. The Electric Interurban Railways in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960. 15,562 miles (1917); peak 15,580 (1916). Coach fares 3 cents a mile under McAdoo. Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern as a freight exception. Electric Railway War Board, 1917
Cunningham, William J. American Railroads: Government Control and Reconstruction Policies. 1918 ton-miles about 1.8 percent above 1917, with fewer train-miles and car-miles
Ayres, Leonard P. The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919. About 1,791 Consolidation locomotives and 26,994 standard-gauge freight cars shipped through April 1919; about 4 million in the Army, about 4.8 million in all services
White, John H., Jr. The American Railroad Freight Car. Steel in the car fleet: 8.6% (1905), 51.8% (1915), 65.2% (1920)
Schafer, Mike. Freight Train Cars. USRA boxcars largely composite steel and wood
Army Appropriation Act, August 29, 1916, 39 Stat. 645
Wilson proclamation, December 26, 1917; federal control December 28, 1917. Federal Control Act, March 21, 1918, 40 Stat. 451. Walker D. Hines, Director General, January 11, 1919. Return March 1, 1920
Transportation Act (Esch–Cummins), February 28, 1920
Adamson Act, Sept. 3 and 5, 1916, 39 Stat. 721. Wilson v. New, 243 U.S. 332 (March 19, 1917)
Railroads’ War Board organized April 11, 1917. Fairfax Harrison, chairman. Willard car-shortage reports, spring–summer 1917
DeNevi, Don. America’s Fighting Railroads: A World War II Pictorial History