Supply Chains, Railroads & Where Things Go Wrong - Part 1

As long as there has been commerce, there have been supply chains. Even though there is no record of the first ever supply chain, I can say with confidence that it existed. Why?

Beyond the very simple act of barter between two parties in the distant mists of unrecorded time, there had to be. Once buyer A told seller B that he needed something X that B did not have, the need probably compelled B to go out and find a source for X so that he or she could sell it to A. When B asked source C to supply X, a supply chain was created.

Imagine that source C needed widget Y to make X. If C did not have any widgets in the immediate vicinity of his primitive abode, C had to go out and get Y and add another link to the chain. Further complicating matters would be if C had to build X out of a number of different widgets, Y1 through Y12, say. This might have created at least a dozen branches to the supply chain. So, things would get very complicated very fast.

I don't believe that contemporary supply chains are any more complex than were stone age supply chains. Only the tools we use to accomplish the movement of one widget, or product, or component, from one end of the chain to another have changed. In the 19th century, railroads became on of those tools.

History records that railroads were almost entirely first conceived as a means to move material from one place to another. The concept was both so simple - wheels rolling on some kind of guideway - and so complex ( How do we make this idea actually work without destroying the wagon, destroying the material, and/or killing someone?) that the early builders rarely, if ever, thought of more than one link in the chain. A good example would be carrying coal from mines to ports on navigable water, which was done often during the 19th century and may have been done sooner. The only question to be asked there this: When does a horse or mule following guideway of some kind become a railroad? I would argue it's when a mechanical engine, rather than an animal, becomes the source of movement. However, the answer is unimportant to our understanding of railroads as links in supply chains.

Once promoters decided that railroads could be used to connect multiple businesses and places to one another, and could carry both freight and passengers faster than could the average draft animal, supply chains became a necessity in doing business. I repeat myself in saying it doesn't matter when this occurred, just that it did.

Foremost, the railroad of the early- to mid-19th century couldn't exist without supply chains. It needed a wide variety of parts to make up the whole, and therefore became its own best customer. A near-contemporary example of this would be the railroads that went to make up the CSX Railway and Norfolk Southern systems of today, both of which used coal as fuel well into the mid-twentieth century and both of which had their own mines and hauled tons of the now disgraced black diamond for others.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In Part 2, I'll look at the complexity and complications of those supply chains impacted by today's pandemic and political business climate.