The Great Railroad Revolution Read online

  Despite these many positive developments for the railroads, services remained basic on many lines, adding to the unpopularity of the railroads with some members of the public. The postbellum period was also the age of “bare knuckles,” as the major companies began to slug it out for increased market share. Powerful and unscrupulous railroad magnates—men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, and banker Jay Gould— became a feature of the industrial landscape of America’s “Gilded Age,” and they exacerbated the railroads’ unpopularity, as did their response to the increasing labor unrest. The resentment engendered by several railroad strikes would be a significant factor in the birth of labor unions in the United States. The farmers became an especially strong force opposed to the monopoly of the railroads, and even though many of their accusations were unfair, they were a potent and influential opposition. Over the course of barely a generation, the railroads became, first, disliked, and then widely resented. It was partly a natural cycle. At first the railroads had been the plucky innovator, the new kid on the block bringing prosperity and opening new horizons, then they became the established but respected business, and eventually they turned into the rapacious monopolist, reviled by almost everyone.

  Chapter 8, taking a breather from the chronological narrative, looks at how, despite the increasing hostility toward them, the railroads had changed America. Few aspects of American life remained unaffected. Most of the changes brought about by the railroad were beneficial: economic growth, creation of jobs, more efficient markets, opportunities to travel, easier distribution of goods, and so on. There were numerous others ways in which trains and stations stimulated local economic activity. The trains brought in mail-order goods from department stores in the city, fresh produce for the local shops, mail, packages, and newspapers. Even the station clock was a useful public amenity, providing what was probably the best local estimate of the time. The station, or depot, however modest, would become a key part of the town’s amenities, the start or end of most people’s visits or of journeys by local inhabitants to far- distant lands. The relationship between the town and the station would be symbiotic, and as with much of this story, it is difficult to disentangle the causation.

  There were, though, negatives too. Because the poor could not afford to travel, it could be argued that the railroads exacerbated the differences between the haves and the have-nots. The big towns prospered thanks to these crowds who boosted their economies as they shopped, ate in restaurants, and stayed in hotels. The consequent rapid and unplanned growth of the cities, stimulated by the railroads, was not necessarily a welcome change. Railroads, as with all transportation improvements, benefit the areas where people want to go, and although there may have been the occasional rural excursion, for the most part it was the cities that profited from the ability of people to travel more easily. Central business districts sprang up near railroad stations, and, in order to maintain as much density as possible, the notion of the office block, and later the skyscraper, was born. These buildings full of white-collar staff were the new factories of the age, housing hundreds, if not thousands, of office workers in the way that the manufacturing industry had done earlier.

  The ninth chapter looks at the effect of the restrictive legislation, born of the increasing mistrust of the railroads, which was to do them great harm in the twentieth century when their stranglehold over the transportation industry was lost. By the early years of the new century, the railroads had consolidated into seven major groupings (although many other smaller companies remained independent), a process that both increased their efficiency and allowed them to invest more in improvements. New lines were no longer the priority, since virtually every community was now connected to the network, but there was a need for massive investment in the system. Whereas many improvements were made in the pre–First World War period, the strictness of the control by the new regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, reduced the railroads’ profits and therefore their ability to invest. The key question was whether the railroads would actually have used any extra profits to good effect, or would they have simply paid out more money to their shareholders?

  Consequently, the railroads entered the First World War in a relatively poor state. The neglected railroads were now called upon to provide for unprecedented levels of demand and were found wanting. They were short of every type of capital asset, from new rails to functioning locomotives, and the lack of coordination between them meant services were inefficient and slow. As a result, the government was forced to take over control of the railroads during the war, an unprecedented and largely unwelcome situation, which also posed the dilemma of what to do with them when the fighting ceased.

  Chapter 10 covers the interwar years when, to arrest the decline in passenger numbers, the railroads invested heavily in new equipment and, after prevaricating, began to move over to the new technology of diesel that offered cheaper and faster services. This was the period when the rail companies provided the most exciting trains that ever ran on the American rail network, although sadly only for a relatively brief period, as competition from roads and later aviation killed off these services. This time, in 1941, the railroads entered the war better equipped and ready to cooperate with each other in order to ensure there was no repeat of government takeover.

  And, finally, the last two chapters show how the performance of the railroads in the Second World War was their last heyday, preceding a remarkably rapid decline, first in passengers, and then in freight, which actually could have resulted in the closure of much of the network. In the event, the railroads were rescued by the government and by changes in legislation. The freight railroads are now flourishing and passenger rail growing, amid much discussion about increased investment and, in particular, high-speed rail. Towns and cities across the country see rail as a way of reducing the burden on the roads, and, despite opposition, many new schemes are being put forward. The railroad, a nineteenth-century invention that struggled in the latter part of the twentieth, undoubtedly has a great future in the twenty-first.

  I dislike the expression road, shortened from railroad and used very widely in America, because of the confusion it might have caused among readers little versed in railroad history, and therefore have rarely used it. I have, too, eschewed initials. The Baltimore & Ohio remains just that, rather than the B&O, because the proliferation of initials makes for difficult reading. This style, too, imposed on me a discipline not to use the names too often.

  There are a few passages that are based on my earlier book Blood, Iron, and Gold, which, although covering the world’s railroads, detailed the US story, and therefore inevitably I have drawn upon some parts of the narrative but expanded them. Similarly, a few events described in Fire and Steam, my book on the history of Britain’s railroads, have inevitably been repeated in the first chapter, which recounts the prehistory of the railroads, and the chapter on the Civil War relies in part from the equivalent chapter in Engines of War.

  I have ignored the Canadian and Mexican railroads, although they are in many ways part of the same interconnected system, not least through shared ownership. That is particularly true of the transcontinentals—like the United States, Canada built far too many too quickly, ending up with three to serve a tiny population—but I have left them out for reasons of simplicity and brevity. Recounting those stories is for another book.

  I realize that it is somewhat cheeky of me, a Brit, to try to write a concise history of American railroads. My justification is that it sometimes takes an outsider to understand the importance of what local people take for granted or simply ignore out of familiarity. It has been a fantastic and hugely enjoyable task. I traveled twice extensively on the US rail network and met numerous people with an interest in rail who helped formulate my ideas. Nevertheless, I am sure there are mistakes, and errors in interpretation. They are, of course, all my own. I hope, though, that they do not detract from the thrust of the book, which is to show the railroads in context and to explain how
they helped to create the America of today, even though that has been largely forgotten. Please do point out any mistakes by e-mailing me via my website, www.christianwolmar.co.uk. This has proved very useful in the past, and any corrections will find their way into future editions.

  Special thanks are due to the hardy individuals who read the full draft and provided detailed corrections and suggestions: Clyde Williams, Gerald Rawling, John Fowler, Andrew Dow, and John Sears. I cannot thank them enough. Some of the mistakes they uncovered required a level of attention to detail and knowledge that astonishes me. Many other people provided support, advice, corrections, or information. In no particular order: Robert Lester Porter, Fritz Plous and the people on his e-mail list, Diana Bailey Harris, Teresa Glynn (for office support), Xavier Bryce, Rupert Brennan Brown, Andrew Adonis, Deborah Reddig, Craig Haberle and all at the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum, Kelly Ohler, Mike Forter, Ed Burkhardt, Nigel Harris, Mark Sullivan, Pip Dunn, and Tony Streeter.

  Because of a hard-drive failure at just the wrong time, I may have omitted several people, to whom I am deeply apologetic. I would, too, like to thank Amtrak, which did provide me with free travel—though not sleeper accommodation—for my tour around the country in the autumn of 2010. I may be a bit hard on the company, but at least it is still there celebrating its fortieth anniversary, which many thought it would never reach.

  My agent, Andrew Lownie, steers me through the confusing world of publishing, and the team at PublicAffairs is ever supportive. Special thanks are due to my editor, Richard Milbank, at my British publisher, Atlantic Books, who did so much to improve the book with amazingly detailed and thorough work, and to Toby Mundy, Atlantic’s chief executive, who always believes in my ability to pull off these projects. Thank you also to Annette Wenda, copy editor of the American edition, for her excellent work. And special thanks to my partner, Deborah Maby, who is always there for me.

  Dedicated to all my children and stepchildren—

  Molly, Pascoe, Misha, Harriet, and Robyn—

  and in memory of

  Tony Telford (1942–2011),

  who sadly died

  in the summer of 2011 and

  had helped me greatly

  with several of my earlier history books.

  1

  THE RAILROADS WIN OUT

  It was a particularly prescient remark. Indeed, so prescient that it has subsequently become the stuff of legend.1 The speaker was an old man, Charles Carroll, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The event was the ceremonial turning of the first sod of earth to begin work on the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s pioneering railroad. The date, inevitably, was Independence Day, July 4, 1828, just over a half century after the declaration that resulted in the creation of the new nation. The words were simple: “I consider what I have just now done to be among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if indeed, it be even second to that.”

  And so it proved. If the Declaration of Independence in 1776 marked the birth of a nation, the advent of the railroads enabled America to become the most prosperous nation on earth within a few decades of Carroll’s spadework, turning a preindustrial society into an economic powerhouse. America and the railroads were to be a perfect fit, their joint growth intertwined so intimately that countless historians have been unable to determine whether it was the growth of the American economy that sparked the expansion of the railroads or vice versa. The Baltimore & Ohio was not the first entity in America to call itself a railroad, and, as we shall see, its reputation as the first modern railroad in the United States rests on shaky ground, but there is no doubting the importance of its inauguration as a stimulus in creating America’s most important industry of the nineteenth century.

  Railroads had, in fact, been a long time coming. The first American railroads were the product of a disparate series of inventions stretching back centuries, but which were mostly spawned by the Industrial Revolution in Britain that began in the first half of the eighteenth century. The long gestation period of the railroads can be explained by the fact that it became possible to construct them only once the various aspects of technology that prefigured their birth had been developed and subsequently improved through application. A railroad was a far more sophisticated concept than any previous invention, requiring several elements to come together: the technology, both for the traction and the track; the financing to pay for it; the permission of the state to build it; the creation of an appropriate legal framework; and, of course, the labor for construction. Such a coordination of different agencies, technologies, and resources had been effected only for military purposes and required vision and ambition, as well as the cooperation of the various entities involved. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the emergence of the railroads was a stuttering process, conducted in fits and starts with numerous failures and dead ends along the way. Once they had been established, however, the railroads would spread far faster than any of their pioneers could have imagined.

  The precursor to railroads, normally called wagonways2 or tramways, which consisted of wagons pushed or hauled along tracks by animal or human power, was actually quite an old invention. There are some suggestions that the ancient Greeks used tracks built into the road to drag boats across the Isthmus of Corinth. Traces of heavy, flat-topped stone blocks placed along a Roman road, the Fosse Way, near Leicester in the English Midlands—possible evidence of an early form of wagonway—can be found in the local museum. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century, however, that the increase in demand for coal prompted the invention of more sophisticated wagonways. The replacement of stone blocks with wooden tracks to support the wagons provided a better all-weather surface that could be used in conditions that turned conventional roads into mud. Soon there were extensive networks of these tracked wagonways, all with the same purpose, namely, hauling heavy material such as coal or slate out of the mines and, usually, to the nearest waterway. Wagonways also appeared in Germany and France, but it was in Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, that their number grew fastest. Although these early lines were crude and mostly quite short, several were substantial operations whose scale reflected the increased demand for coal. The Tanfield Way in County Durham, in northeastern England, opened in 1725 and soon built up to an astonishing traffic of 450,000 tons annually (or, as has been calculated, “one fully loaded wagon every 45 seconds on working days”)3 and necessitated the construction of the Causey Arch, the world’s oldest stone railroad bridge.

  As loads became heavier, the simple wooden timbers laid on earth were quickly worn away. To counter this problem, the wood was covered with a layer of iron to protect the rails, a practice that was first recorded as early as 1738. This innovation led to a rapid spread in wagonways. Until the introduction of iron-covered rails, the total extent of the network was limited to a few hundred miles, with the longest wagonway stretching about a dozen miles, but the greater durability of the new rails encouraged the building of thousands of miles of iron ways. By the middle of the eighteenth century, some longer tracks had been built to connect different mines, although sometimes less cooperative mine owners would ban their neighbors and rivals from transporting coal across their land, thus blocking the easiest access to waterways.

  The next requirement was to stop the wagons from slipping off the rails. Various ideas were tried, such as sinking the rails into the ground, as with some streetcar lines today, and L-shaped rails to keep the wheels aligned, but the crucial idea of putting a flange all around the wheel began to be developed only in the late eighteenth century. There were two ways of ensuring the wheels stayed on the track: either the edge of the rails could be turned up, making an L shape to guide the wheel along the track, or the wheel could be fitted with a flange—a projecting rim—with similar results. The L-shaped rail was first tried out in 1776 at the Duke of Norfolk’s colliery in Yorkshire.

  Not for the first or last time, a tec
hnological development proved unpopular with those affected by its introduction. In this instance, it was the colliers, who, on finding that the new type of rail required the use of fewer horses and men to haul the coal, broke up the rails—called plates—and chased the terrified plate layer, one John Curr, into the forest, where he hid for three days. L-shaped rails, though, proved cumbersome and inefficient, and various inventors tried putting the guiding flange on the wheel instead of the track. The pioneer of this method seems4 to have been William Jessop, who used flanged wheels on a wagonway in Loughborough, in the English Midlands, in 1789, a design that, of course, became the norm on all railroads. Jessop is also credited with another crucial improvement: the laying of transverse ties (or sleepers, as they are known in Britain) on which to lay and fix the rails, greatly improving the stability of the track.

  There was fun to be had with these innovations, too. A century before Jessop, the idea of coaches running on tracks had appealed to King Louis XIV of France. The Sun King used to entertain his guests by giving them rides on the Roulette, a kind of roller coaster built in the gardens of his château at Marly, near Versailles, in 1691. It was a carved and gilded carriage on wheels that thundered down an eight-hundred-foot wooden track into a valley and, thanks to its momentum, up the other side—much to the amusement of the king’s bewigged guests.

  None of these early lines, whether for hauling coal or entertaining French aristocrats, which were operated by human or animal power supplemented at times by gravity, could truly be said to resemble a “railroad” in the modern sense of the word. A convenient definition for a true railroad might be a trackborne transportation system powered by mechanical means—though horses were used in some early systems—able to carry freight or passengers in both directions and intended for public use. This latter point was a crucial step forward. Railroads would not have had their transformative effect if their use had been confined to the owner’s personal needs or to a single purpose such as hauling minerals. The next logical stage in their development was to become common carriers—that is, not just to provide the facility for the owner, but to make it available to all comers. These new lines tended to be run by canal companies, using the railroads as feeders for their own networks. In July 1803, however, the nine-mile Surrey Iron Railway—in what is now suburban South London—was completed and was the first public railroad open to anyone prepared to pay the toll. Numerous similar enterprises followed, connecting mines and waterways within their localities and allowing a wider range of potential customers, including mills and factories, to transport their goods along the tracks.