The Great Railroad Revolution Read online

  Above all, the arrival of a railroad line satisfied what has been called the “booster spirit,” a manifestation of the “can-do” culture that was at the heart of the frontier mentality.12 It didn’t really matter if you lived in a two-bit town that consisted of a few houses and a church; a railroad connection opened up all sorts of possibilities for commerce and development. Those who did not own land at least had the prospect of being more likely to find a job, initially in construction but later in working on the railroad or for employers attracted by the transportation improvement.

  However, all these advantages had to be won at a price, and one that was not just financial. Railroad construction in the early days was extremely primitive and labor intensive. Most of the work was carried out with picks, hand drills, and shovels, as steam shovels had not yet been invented and pile drivers were little used. Gunpowder, whose effectiveness was limited, was the only available explosive for breaking through rocks and creating tunnels, which was an arduous process. Once the route had been surveyed and selected, the labor gangs would first have to clear the trees and other vegetation and then grade the ground to ensure it was flat enough to take the tracks. Since the early locomotives could not climb any substantial gradient—though American engines were more powerful, and therefore steeper gradients were allowed than in Europe13—this involved creating cuttings and embankments or, more commonly in the early railroads, following the contours of the landscape.

  There is remarkably little written in US railroad histories on the labor used to build the railroads, especially about the early days. Whereas in Britain the railroads were carved out by specialist gangs of “navvies,” who traveled from site to site and were famous for their prodigious feats of both laboring and drinking, in America local labor was used whenever it was available, supported, at times, by teams of immigrants.14 In the South, railroad construction was carried out mostly by slaves before the Civil War and by convict labor after emancipation. The usual arrangement was to appoint a construction company—a total misnomer since it did no actual construction—that acted as a buffer between the railroad promoters and the contractors who actually built the line. The construction company, which would usually have some or all of the railroad’s directors on its board, would remain a separate legal entity, taking the risk and the financial responsibility for ensuring that the line was completed. Therefore if, as often happened, costs exceeded original estimates and the construction company failed, the original railroad company would not face bankruptcy. The construction company was usually paid partly in cash, which was needed to cover the cost of the work, and partly in securities on which it could raise loans. The arrangement of channeling work through a construction company was, as we shall see in Chapter 6, which describes the building of the first transcontinental railroad, open to widespread abuse and corruption.

  The first American railroads were built largely by local people, with little or no experience of construction techniques. The planned route would be broken up into short sections, typically one mile long, and parceled out to contractors. In the early days, these were mostly partnerships formed by people in the area, relying on idle farm labor and any other available source of unemployed men. At first many of these contractors were the notables of the neighborhood, with social and political connections that could prove especially useful when the enterprise needed support from the local state government. Later, though, as the railroads headed farther west, where there were few inhabitants, immigrants would be called upon to make up the numbers. As in Britain, many of the early railroad builders were Irish, with canny foremen at times recruiting labor straight off the ships on which they had just arrived. New railroads would occasionally offer inducements to attract workers. In the 1840s, the Illinois Central advertised in the East for “3,000 laborers,” offering wages of $1.25 per day and a cheap fare of just $4.95 on the train from New York to Chicago.

  Usually, the basic contract for a new railroad would be solely for the grading and establishment of the roadbed. American standards were lower than those in Europe. To avoid building expensive tunnels and embankments, American railroad tracks followed the contours of the land, using steeper gradients and sharper curves than were found in Europe. This meant that the basic contract could be undertaken by the available— mostly unskilled—labor. The more complicated tasks, such as river crossings and even laying and spiking the rails down, were generally contracted separately to experienced bridge builders and tracklayers—the latter sometimes the railroad’s own skilled employees. America did not initially have large contractors such as Thomas Brassey or Samuel Peto, who flourished as civil-engineering contractors in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, but soon larger firms emerged that were able to take on the construction of a whole line, though invariably with the use of subcontractors.

  In the South, the arrangements for building railroads were rather different because of their use of cheap or free labor, provided by slaves before the Civil War and afterward through the subterfuge of convicts contracted out by the states. Few railroad histories address the shameful history of how the southern railroads were built in this way. However, according to Theodore Kornweibel Jr., author of the seminal study of the African American people and the railroads, their use of unpaid black labor was extensive and universal: “Slaves constructed most of the antebellum South’s 8,784 mile (by 1861) network.”15

  Because contractors found southern white farmers to be uninterested in taking up railroad construction, and “Irish and German immigrants were stereotyped as being prone to walk off the job and riot over pay disputes,” presumably as a result of the wretched conditions, slaves were the principal source of labor for the early southern railroads, along with a few free blacks who could be paid less than their white counterparts.16 At the outbreak of the war in 1861, fifteen thousand slaves were working for the southern railroads.

  For the most part, these slaves were hired from their original owners, the plantation farmers or miners, on fixed-term contracts of a year or two to provide a flexible and elastic source of labor. Many did not survive the length of the contract. Railroad construction was dangerous enough for wage laborers, but for the slaves the mortality rate was far higher. According to Kornweibel, slaves working on the railroads endured even worse conditions than their peers who were left behind on the plantations. Not only were the health risks of working in untamed countryside, which included attacks by animals and snake bites, compounded by the meager rations provided, but the regime imposed by overseers was often far worse than anything they had previously experienced. Housing often consisted of little more than a tent, and diseases such as scarlet fever, cholera, and malaria were rife. Kornweibel cites a particularly egregious case where a contractor on the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad kept slaves “in a square pen, made of pine poles, through which one might thrust his double fists, [with] no shutter on the door . . . no chimney and no floor, no bed clothing and no cooking utensils.” The conditions were, routinely, so bad that many owners refused to hire out their slaves to the railroad companies, knowing that they might lose their valuable asset. It was, in fact, not only the slaves who died in the difficult working conditions of the South but also their paid colleagues, as, according to the Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, “free Irish laborers died like flies in the Southern swamps.”17

  With labor becoming more available, through immigration and slavery, and the requisite capital more readily accessible, it was improvements in technology that constituted the third element in stimulating the growth of the railroads. Had Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb remained the apogee of locomotive development, the railroads would have been confined to a small part of the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, there was progress on every front, from tracks and sleepers to locomotives and cars. The rapid improvements in technology were essential to underpin the equally rapid spread of the railroad. The history of this technological development is often complicated by the fact that simultaneous progress was being made on both sides
of the Atlantic. It can be difficult to determine precisely who deserves the credit for a particular invention, with sources at times contradicting one another as to whether a specific advance should be attributed to America or to Britain. But it was essential for America to harness railroad technology to its own environment, to develop its own methods, and thereby to ensure that it was no longer dependent on British know-how.

  The needs of the US railroads were very different from those in Britain, given the longer distances, steeper gradients, and sharper curves of the American lines. Locomotive construction was therefore a priority. But first the railroad owners, who in the 1830s continued to build railroads with the intention of using horsepower, had to be persuaded that the steam locomotive was the future. Peter Cooper had paved the way, but it was on the Camden & Amboy that the crucial breakthrough was made. In 1831, a young engineer named Isaac Dripps, who was just twenty-one—many of the early locomotive designers, like today’s software wizards, were barely out of their teens when they started building engines—put together the John Bull, a Robert Stephenson locomotive that had been imported in parts from Britain. Although Dripps had never seen a locomotive before and there were no drawings accompanying the pieces, he managed the task in just a few weeks, and his reward was to be appointed as the Camden & Amboy’s chief engineer, a post he would hold for twenty-two years. Dripps was adept at improvisation. The locomotive had no tender for carrying the wood and water, so he built a small flatcar on which he fitted an old whiskey cask adapted as a water tank.

  Dripps made further improvements to the original John Bull and then produced a batch of similar engines, the first time a series of locomotives, rather than just one-offs, was manufactured in America. Dripps is also credited with creating the most distinctive feature of American locomotives, the cowcatcher, or rather the cow killer. Right from the start, US railroads had been built without protective fences, which was good for keeping costs down, but rather bad for safety, as cattle would seek out tasty morsels on the tracks, and hitting a cow at full speed could easily derail a train. The risk was increased by the American habit of building railroads on the cheap, which resulted in a large number of level crossings on both main roads and farm tracks.18

  The Camden & Amboy was plagued with a series of such incidents involving farm animals, and Dripps hit upon the idea of attaching a low truck to the front of the engine equipped with pointed bars of wrought iron to impale any hapless animal and ensure it did not fall under the engine wheels. The initial design of the truck was not perfect. One of the first locomotives to be equipped with it did indeed hit a huge bull, but the poor beast was impaled so deeply on the bars that it took block and tackle to dislodge him. Dripps decided that rather than impaling the animals, the cowcatcher should, instead, knock them out of the way. He therefore fitted the snowplowlike device on the front of the locomotive that would remain a familiar sight throughout the steam era known inaccurately as “cowcatchers.”

  At almost the same time, Matthias Baldwin, the foremost American locomotive builder, whose company would eventually become the world’s biggest producer of engines, entered the scene. Baldwin was by then in his thirties and had already enjoyed a successful career as a jewelry manufacturer, having built up his own company in his hometown, Philadelphia. He expanded into bookbinding and engraving and in 1827, by way of a hobby, had produced a stationary engine. A few years later, this encouraged a local museum owner, Franklin Peale, to ask Baldwin to manufacture a small locomotive, just large enough to pull a couple of cars around a circular track to be set up in the museum. Baldwin was by no means unique in coming to locomotive production in this haphazard way. According to historian Dee Brown, “In the 1830s, it seemed that every blacksmith, tinker, and ironworker, every wagonwright, carriagesmith and boilermaker—all the craftsmen of America—wanted to build a better locomotive.” It just so happened that Baldwin, after an uncertain start, proved to be better at it than his competitors. He was also in the right place to attract attention: “All Philadelphia felt an urge to ride behind the tiny iron horse that made its own power as it moved.”19 Crucially, Baldwin’s miniature museum ride was seen by the promoters of the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Normantown Railroad, who asked him to produce a locomotive for them. Baldwin had visited the Camden & Amboy workshop and based his locomotive design on the John Bull, but his Old Ironsides, completed in 1832, proved at first to be no world beater, as befitted its rather mundane name. It made an inauspicious start, averaging one mile per hour on the six miles between Philadelphia and Germantown, the five-ton engine requiring a great deal of coaxing, and even some pushing, to reach its destination. The railroad retained its horses for the time being, but Baldwin made improvements to his locomotive, and within a few months the animals could be put out to pasture—except on rainy days when the track was greasy and locomotives struggled to gain purchase (Old Ironsides regularly reached thirty miles per hour and occasionally more). Baldwin’s future was ensured, and by the time of his death in 1866, his company was producing more than a hundred annually. Despite the progress in locomotive development during the 1830s, horses remained the main motive power for many lines, and even when steam engines had been adopted, the animals were frequently called upon to help trains up sections with steep gradients.

  In some respects, American locomotives were better than their British counterparts right from the outset. For example, they were always fitted with cabs for the crew, a necessity given that the journeys were longer and the weather more extreme than in Britain. They were also equipped, for the most part, with four front bogie wheels. These were required— because of the poor condition of much of the track in the United States—to minimize the risk of derailment, as they guided the engines around the sharply curved lines. Another visual characteristic of US locomotives, necessitated by the widespread use of wood rather than coal as fuel, was the bulbous chimney, the sparkcatcher to go with the cowcatcher, that was designed to reduce the number of sparks flying from the chimney, which, in the early days, set off numerous fires beside the tracks.

  The resulting quintessentially American locomotives became objects of great fascination, affection even, among the American public. They looked like no other engines anywhere in the world, and to meet the onerous physical demands of the US railroads, they quickly grew to become the biggest in the world. Although the majority of US railroads chose four feet and eight and a half inches as the distance between the two rails, the same as in most of Europe, their locomotives could be designed to larger specifications. This was because the US railroads adopted a bigger “loading gauge”—the size of the overall envelope required by trains to fit into tunnels and under bridges—which enabled trains to be both wider and higher than their European counterparts. By the early 1830s, Dripps had already developed on the Camden & Amboy a locomotive appropriately named Monster, which weighed forty tons and had driving wheels four feet in diameter. As Ward puts it, “When locomotives became longer, more graceful, with attractively curved smokestacks, ornate wooden cabs, outsized headlights, fine brasswork, and painted detail, they became American works of art.”20

  If the first locomotives were crude, the cars were worse. As in Europe, most early cars (or carriages, as they were known there) were based on stagecoach designs and coupled together with chains that jolted ferociously as the trains slowed or accelerated. On the first run of the Mohawk & Hudson in September 1831, a Philadelphia lawyer traveling on the train reported that the passengers in the cars, which were stagecoach bodies attached to flat trucks coupled with chains with “two to three feet slack,” were consequently buffeted by jolts that had “sufficient force to jerk the passengers, who sat on seats across the tops of the coaches, out from under their hats.” All these notables, unaware of the realities of train travel, carried umbrellas to protect themselves against the all-pervasive black smoke and sparks. But it was to no avail, as a scene that would have done justice to a silent-film comedy ensued: “In the first mile, the last umbrell
a went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general mêlée took place . . . each passenger whipping his neighbor to put out the fire.”21

  American cars were different from European coaches in one crucial respect—right from the start they were open inside, without compartments or class distinctions, described by one historian as “a democratic palace instead of a nest of aristocratic closets.”22 Actually, this approach to coach interior design was probably born more of necessity than of any great democratic principle, since traveling long distances in a cramped compartment in very hot or cold weather, without access to a toilet— which was fitted far earlier to US than European cars—would have been unbearable. This was, too, a nation where black people, even in the North, where they were supposedly free, were made to travel in separate accommodation on many railroads. Nor was the open-plan arrangement always welcome. Many early passengers, confined to the relatively small cars, complained of the habits of their fellow travelers, such as spitting and chewing tobacco.