The histories, scoundrels, and scandals of the transcontinental railroad can’t be seen at the Google’s two data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Of the two data centers, the second one (currently under construction) is a bit more spectacular. While the first data center is surrounded by bland industrial services along a fairly busy intersection, the second is literally in a cornfield, in an area where nearly every house we passed had an American flag on display out front.

Google didn’t come to Council Bluffs because of historical resonance. They came for the fiber, which runs parallel to Iowa’s many railroads and interstates. Rail infrastructure has shaped the language of the network (as noted in David A. Banks’s work on the history of the term “online”), the constellation of companies that form the network (most famously with Sprint emerging from the Southern Pacific Railroad’s internal-communications network), and, most relevant to this story, the actual routes that fiber-optic networks run.

Telecommunications companies quickly recognized the value of rail right-of-way as real estate for running cable networks long before the Internet—the first substantial use of rail networks for telecommunication networks starts with telegraphs. It’s a hell of a lot more efficient to run a cable along a single straight shot of property than negotiating easements with every single landowner between, say, Denver and Salt Lake City.

For railroads, this was a win-win, as the right-of-way agreements generate passive income, and the networks could be used for internal operations of the railroads themselves. As the first dot-com bubble expanded, more and more telecoms rushed to place their cables along rail routes. This New York Times story from 2000 documents the moment well; it also uses the delightful (and today, woefully underused) term “cyberage” and mentions an exciting new player in the telecom scene, Enron Broadband Services. Some railroad companies followed Sprint’s suit in this period, creating their own telecom services, like CSX Fiber Networks.

The markers of this right-of-way race along railroad routes (and highways, which have a similar right-of-way appeal to telecoms) are not especially impressive, but pretty hard to ignore. They usually take the form of orange-tipped white poles, or orange metal signs, spaced out a few meters apart running parallel to the rails. The orange part usually has a label warning people to call before digging, a phone number to call, and sometimes the name of the company or government agency that happens to own the buried cable. Labeled this way, fiber markers become a testament to telecom history, bearing names of companies that fell in the bursting of the first bubble, long ago absorbed into larger telecom networks. The new owners apparently don’t bother replacing the poles with their names or logos—presumably because it’s not really financially worthwhile to send someone to put Level 3 stickers over thousands of Global Crossing or Williams Communications logos on signage that’s more or less designed to be ignored by 99 percent of the public, like most network infrastructure.

Ingrid Burrington

Google’s Iowa data centers aren’t entirely designed to be ignored. Given their massive scale, they don’t really blend into the landscape that well, and because Google brands itself as open and accessible, they kind of have to call attention to themselves with accents of the traditional company color scheme and signage. Google data centers are more often obscured through landscape design choices and a security-through-obscurity logic. Placed beneath cresting hills or along thoroughfares that don’t have readily accessible shoulders, they are hard to really stop and look at, remaining unknown industrial buildings always glimpsed just barely out of the corner of one’s eye while driving.