Yes, as utterly private enterprises, each railroad had to establish its own stations in any city it served. Chicago had six terminals serving two dozen railroads. New York had a similar number—though four of them were on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. A city the size of Cincinnati, Minneapolis, or Nashville often had three. Only at the end of the 19th century did cities begin to try to rationalize their railroad stations and tracks, often in combination with civic beautification movements. Typically the railroads would be bullied, one way or another, into creating a shared “Union Station” that could be used by all the passenger trains. Local politicians weren’t blind to the huge amounts of money the railroads were able to spend to establish their initial or later stations, and giving railroads permission to cross or close city streets to lay rails and create terminals provided ample opportunity for shakedowns.

West of the Mississippi, nearly all cities were essentially the creation of the railroads, and therefore typically grew outward from the station established by the first railroad. Later rival railroads often built parallel tracks, as seen in Denver or Wichita or both coasts of Florida, and typically had to build their own stations. Cities where rail corridors crossed, such as Omaha, Ft Worth, and San Antonio, seldom had shared stations.

As for the routings in between cities, that had a lot to do with geography. Between, say, Chicago and East St. Louis, there were few constraints, so the first rail line might take an almost straight “air line” from one to the other, while those built later would take routes that might collect additional traffic from cities like Peoria or Decatur, just off the direct line. By the late 19th century, transcontinental traffic had become important enough that late-building railroads sometimes took the opposite approach: the Santa Fe deliberately chose to build the most direct possible route from Kansas City to Chicago across open prairies instead of one via Davenport or Quincy and Peoria that would have more short-haul business.

Where possible routings were constrained by geography, such as mountain passes or river valleys, things got really nasty. An agricultural valley might well support one railroad, but a second could mean a rate war that would end up starving both. The result was a lot of proposed railroads created, and even given state charters or franchises, just so they would be bought out by the railroads with which they might compete. In other places, particularly narrow mountain passes, there was a race to occupy the useable pathways that sometimes led to bloodshed between rival work crews.

All this surveying and engineering was, of course, surrounded by a whirlwind of unrestrained cutthroat capitalism, inflated to continental proportions never before seen. The Machiavellian wheeling and dealing of Vanderbilts, Goulds, Huntingtons, and the other investors would eventually lead to populist national political movements, to the Interstate Commerce Commission, and to securities regulation laws.

Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad, by Walter R. Borneman, tells a real-life equivalent of the Railway Empire game: the interconnected story of several railroads and the larger-than-life personalities who ran them as they battled each other to be the first to cross the Southwest.