If Chicago didn't exist, someone else would have put a city within a handful of miles of the same location.

It's about as centrally located to the US as you can get from the Great Lakes, and once a canal opened (in this case, the Eerie, but shorter canals could have existed, it was just in NYC's interests to have that particular canal), then that's about as far as a boat can go, and water traffic is more efficient than rail.

So you would have trains leaving 'Chicago' to go everywhere, and someone would have thought to build a canal to get to the Illinois river and hence the Mississippi.

I'm not so sure that "St Louis" had to be exactly where it is, but Chicago is virtually a foregone geographical conclusion.

French explorers recognized the strategic importance of the area in the 1600s. For sure, a large city would eventually sprout in the area where Chicago is.

When France ceded the lands of the Illinois Country (east of the Mississippi) to Great Britain in the 1700s, all the French had to GTFO. St Louis was the highest land along the Mississippi anywhere close to the confluences of the Missouri, Ohio and Illinois rivers. Since the Mississippi flooded almost every spring, this was the best place to put a city and it allowed the French to maintain more control over the area than they were supposed to have.

The railroads were built by men, however, and could have gone anywhere. The negotiations and influencing that got them all built through Chicago has had a huge ROI for the last 150+ years.

> St Louis was the highest land

That explains it. I kept thinking there must be better spots to put it. It does appear though that it’s surrounded by wide flood plains on several sides and certain spots would be harder to ford than the narrows that bracket the city on two sides.

The Chicago portage is also the shortest distance between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. So it was more or less destiny.

Reminds me of US Steel selling off a rail that bypassed the Chicago railtraffic jam for big money:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-09-27-070926...

St. Louis would have likely been in the same general area too because of the Missouri river.

Isn’t Bailey Yard in North Platte, NE the biggest rail yard in the US with about 14,000 rail cars going through it daily.

Chicago is where all the Class I (i.e., big railroads) meet: UP, BNSF, CN, CP, KCS, CSX, NS. There are several railroad yards in the city and surrounding environments, so much so that the rail lines are really visible on Google Maps who otherwise loves to deemphasize rail routes.

Indeed, Chicago and the Mississippi River is the dividing line in the North American rail network. UP and BNSF dominate western US, CSX and NS the eastern US, CN and CP dominate Canada, and large regionals like KCS, the Mexico side is similarly or more abysmal.

Unfortunately they don’t integrate that well together to form a cohesive network. CP is attempting to buy KCS/KCSM to create something of a NAFTA/USMCA railroad, but it’s not clear it would deliver those benefits without harming competition in the existing setup. Ideally the rail infrastructure would be publicly owned and invested in, and any train operator could transport from any location to any location on the North American rail network.

Yes. But there's one railroad line that goes through North Platte. There once were ~38 railroad lines into Chicago. Some are no longer in service (at least as through lines), but Chicago is still far more widely served than North Platte.

The Chicago region has dozens of very large rail yards, with construction of new yards and expansion of existing yards ongoing. It would take a lot of investment elsewhere to eclipse: Russia/Moscow is making a strategic investment that will pay large dividends for them for decades to come.