Why are the older towns w/ railroad tracks going through seem to be spaced, laid out about 10 miles apart?

After doing some traveling this summer in upper WI, I realized the towns where 10 miles apart. These are small rural farm and logging towns and railroad track were laid in the early 1900's during the heydey of logging m\up there.

Was this for the convenience of the farmers, logging companies or because the small locos used back then needed water that often?

Thanks, just curious!

I'm sure there were many factors to locating a town along a railroad. In agricultural areas, five miles may have been about the convenient limit for a farmer traveling with a horse and loaded wagon. A team pulling a wagon doesn't travel very fast considering this was on dirt roads (where they had roads) and it could be very muddy at times. A ten mile round trip could use up half a day when most farm work was done by hand from sunrise to sunset.

Paul S

that is about the limit for a horse load to get to the elevator and back in one day. also the tractors of the time with about 6 mph road gear.

According to one reference source about the history of the Illionois Central, in the 1850s the Mississippi Central - later acquired by the IC - placed a station every ten miles as the line was built. There were virtually no existing towns along its line. But they knew that if they built the line, people would come, settle, and generate traffic. And so they did.

I am sure that for reasons stated in previous replies, the ten mile spacing was not just a convenient number.

Sometimes you had towns already there and questions had to be decided who would have the railroad. It could get competitive. In the case of the IC that Owen mentioned, there are the close almost adjoining towns of Grand Junction and LaGrange, TN. Both had the Memphis & Charleston, but Grand Junction got the north-south Mississippi Central (that's still its name - the IC came and went in the meantime). Where this makes a difference is in who gets the passenger and freight stations and whose town grows and develops.

Not that it has to do with 10 mile intervals, but before railroads which towns became important stops for riverboats determined who later became big cities and who didn't.

Here on the EX-PRR Middle Division mainline the towns are 11 miles apart. A few years ago I bought a book on the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal up at Gallitzen Pa. which said something about this a being the distance that a mule could pull a canal boat before being switched out. I would have to dig up the book to quote exactly why. Anyhow the when the PRR was finally allowed to compete with the canal it followed the river and the towns were already established by the canal.