A railway town, or railroad town, is a settlement that originated or was greatly developed because of a railway station or junction at its site.
North America
During the construction of the First transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, temporary, "Hell on wheels" towns, made mostly of canvas tents, accompanied the Union Pacific Railroad as construction headed west. Most faded away but some became permanent settlements.
In the 1870s successive boomtowns sprung up in Kansas, each prospering for a year or two as a railhead, and withering when the rail line extended further west and created a new endpoint for the Chisholm Trail.
Becoming rail hubs made Chicago and Los Angeles grow from small towns to large cities.
Sayre, Pennsylvania and Atlanta, Georgia were among the American company towns created by railroads in places where no settlement already existed.
In western Canada, railway towns became associated with brothels and prostitution, and concerned railway companies started a series of YMCAs in the late nineteenth century in response.
Role in land speculation
In some cases, a railroad town would be started by the railroad, often using a separate town or land company, even when another town already existed nearby. The population of the existing town would shift to the railroad town. This would create a boon for the town company and its railroad founder, which would sell off lots near the station at a substantial profit, often before the railroad ever arrived at the new townsite.
Such is the case with Durango, Colorado. In the spring of 1880, William Bell of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad scoured the La Plata County area in the vicinity of Animas City, located on the Animas River. When negotiations to acquire land through the local homesteaders fell through, Bell acquired property downstream to the south under more favorable conditions in the name of the Durango Land and Coal Company. By the end of the year, a Durango newspaper reported all of "Animas City is coming to Durango as fast as accommodations can be secured". The population, at the time estimated between 3,000 and 5,000 people, crammed into the little "box town", where the only permanent structures were saloons, dance halls, restaurants and stores.
When the railroad arrived in August 1881, the train stopped in a jubilant Durango, not Animas City. The railroad pushed on up the Animas River, reaching Silverton in July 1882, passing through Animas City without a stop. Animas City subsisted as a de facto suburb of the Durango area before annexation by Durango in 1948. The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, a heritage railroad and successor to the Rio Grande in La Plata County, still passes by the townsite.
Europe
In Denmark, Sweden and Norway, a related concept is the stationsby or "station town". Stationsbyer are rural towns that grew up around railways, but they were based on agricultural co-operatives and artisan communities rather than on railway industries. Among the Swedish towns mostly influenced by railways include Alvesta as a hub for the inland south and Hallsberg as a hub for the interior middle of the country. For Norway, towns such as Bryne on the west coast, Lillestrøm and Ås in the east and south of Oslo are good examples.
United Kingdom
In Victorian Britain, the spread of railways greatly affected the fate of many small towns. Peterborough and Swindon became successful due to their status as railway towns; in contrast, towns such as Frome or Kendal remained small after being bypassed by main lines. Some entirely new towns grew up around railway works. Middlesbrough was the first new town to be developed due to the railways, growing from a hamlet of 40 into an industrial port after the Stockton and Darlington Railway was extended in 1830. Wolverton was fields before 1838 and had a population of 1,500 by 1844. Other examples of early railway towns include Ashford (Kent), Doncaster and Neasden. Derby came to be dominated, first by the North Midland Railway, and later the Midland Railway, which based all their engineering works, as well as their company headquarters, in the town; a large area of the town was built by the company architect, Francis Thompson.