THE GREAT
RAILROAD
REVOLUTION
Also by Christian Wolmar
Engines of War
Blood, Iron, and Gold
Fire & Steam
The Subterranean Railway
On the Wrong Line
Down the Tube
Broken Rails
Forgotten Children
Stagecoach
The Great Railway Disaster
CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
THE GREAT
RAILROAD
REVOLUTION
The History of
TRAINS IN AMERICA
Copyright © 2012 by Christian Wolmar
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved.
First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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Designed by Trish Wilkinson
Text set in 11 point Minion Pro
Maps by Jeff Edwards
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolmar, Christian.
The great railroad revolution : the history of trains in America / Christian Wolmar. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61039-180-1 (e-book)1. Railroads—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Transportation— United States—History—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
HE2751.W73 2012
385.0973—dc23
2012020987
First US Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations
Maps
Introduction
1. THE RAILROADS WIN OUT
2. A PASSIONATE AFFAIR
3. THE RAILROADS TAKE HOLD
4. THE BATTLE LINES
5. HARNESSING THE ELEPHANT
6. RAILROADS TO EVERYWHERE
7. GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
8. THE END OF THE AFFAIR
9. ALL KINDS OF TRAIN
10. THE ROOTS OF DECLINE
11. A NARROW ESCAPE
12. RENAISSANCE WITHOUT PASSENGERS
Notes
A Note on Sources
Index
Maps and Illustrations
MAPS
1. Railroads, 1880
2. Railroads, 1916
3. Pennsylvania Railroad
4. Railroads, 1850
5. US Rail Network, 2010
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Atlantic locomotive built by Phineas Davis
2. The Best Friend of Charleston
3. Completion of the first transcontinental railroad
4. Railroad travelers shooting buffalo
5. The ticket office of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad
6. The Immigrants’ Guide to the Most Fertile Lands of Kansas
7. Farmers versus the railroads cartoon
8. Completion of the Great Northern Railroad
9. Historical caricature of the Cherokee Nation
10. Texas Central Railway Yards in Houston
11. Crowded passenger car illustration
12. Railroad station in the Catskills
13. Elevated railroad section in New York
14. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad electric locomotive
15. Edward H. Harriman cartoon
16. Dutch immigrants
17. A logging railroad in a forest
18. Cartoon on railroad influence
19. Red Cross workers and World War I soldiers
20. Steam train on a trestle bridge
21. Illinois state troopers at a railroad strike
22. Pennsylvania Railroad Station
23. Redcap porter
24. Three streamlined locomotives
25. The Twin Cities Zephyr
26. Pennsylvania Railroad poster
27. Southern Pacific poster
28. Passengers watching a movie on a train
29. “Is Your Trip Necessary?” poster
30. Senator Alben Barkley and President Truman
31. Santa Fe Chief train wreck
32. Amtrak’s Acela Express
THE GREAT
RAILROAD
REVOLUTION
Introduction
America was made by the railroads. They united the country and then stimulated the economic development that enabled the country to become the world’s richest nation. The railroads also transformed American society, changing it from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse in the space of a few decades of the nineteenth century. Quite simply, without the railroads, the United States would not have become the United States.
The extraordinary growth of the railroads changed the very nature of America. From modest beginnings in the 1830s, the mileage grew to cover nearly two hundred thousand miles by the turn of the century, more than in any other country in the world. Yet the epic tale of the growth of the railroads and their influence on the development of the nation is now largely forgotten and ignored. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the automobile and the airplane continued their relentless march toward domination of the US domestic transportation network, the historical importance of the railroads was being written out of the nation’s consciousness. Passenger railroads were reduced to a loss-making irrelevance. Mention the American railroads to most people, and they will talk about them as a spent force. Yet railroads still flourish in the United States and are a vital part of the infrastructure. The tracks are still there, but even when the huge freight trains run through town centers, they somehow remain invisible to the American public. It is a surprising fact that America’s railroad network remains the world’s largest and is the bedrock of the country’s freight transportation system. There are, too, signs of a revival in passenger railroads, with money available from the federal government thanks to President Obama’s welcome, if flawed, stimulus package of 2009 and a rise in passenger numbers on Amtrak services. America may have gradually disowned its railroad heritage—but now is the time to reclaim and reinstate it. This book attempts to do just that.
Although there are countless tomes on railroad history, few have tried to tell the story of the American railroads and their impact in one concise narrative. That has meant taking a very selective approach, and inevitably many facets of the rich story of America’s railroads have been left out. Inevitably, it has been impossible to be comprehensive, and I have had to be selective on what aspects to cover in detail. I have, for example, chosen particular railroads to look at in some depth as examples, since there is no way that any book of a reasonable length could adequately cover the history of 250,000 miles of track, which was America’s route mileage at the railroads’ height. Obviously, most of the prominent companies are mentioned in the book, but there are numerous omissions for reasons of space or repetition.
As with several of my other books, I have focused more on the nineteenth century than the twentieth. That is deliberate. It was in the nineteenth that the railroads were bei
ng built, and they reached their zenith soon after the turn of the century. The story of the twentieth is one largely of decline and waning influence, a time when railroads were losing their importance and where opportunities to make the best use of this historic legacy were missed. Although this period is covered in less detail than the earlier times, I try to explain why what started out as a love affair between the American people and their railroads has turned out so badly and why an industry that makes such a positive contribution to America’s economy today is largely ignored or even reviled.
I have highlighted for particular attention the role of a few of the individuals who created or ran the railroads, but again for reasons of space I have left out many other great characters who have contributed to the making of American railroads during its near two centuries of existence. I make no apology, but hope the reader will understand how difficult this selection has been.
The first chapter looks at how railroads emerged and why they developed as opposed to other forms of technology. Each aspect of what constituted a railroad had to be conceived, developed, and refined: track beds, rails, cars, and locomotives. Railroads brought together the most complex set of technologies developed since the dawn of civilization. And America was a pioneer, joining the railroad age just after the first modern railroad had been opened in the United Kingdom. America was a young country, ripe for the railroad revolution, and within a few years of the first line opening, there were already a thousand miles in short separate lines laid principally on the Eastern Seaboard. Quite clearly, the railroad’s moment had arrived. It soon became obvious to its early promoters that—on grounds of efficiency and cheapness—locomotives rather than horses must be used to pull the carriages and railroad trucks. The first significant railroad had been developed in Britain in 1830, and several European countries had quickly followed suit. The United States fast caught up and was soon leading the world in railroad mileage. The railroad age had arrived, and nothing could stop it.
The second chapter shows how America’s relationship with the railroads soon became a passionate affair. They grew symbiotically, rapidly spreading across the more economically advanced states. From harboring doubts about the railroads, suddenly everyone wanted to be connected to the railroad. The burgeoning United States adopted railroad technology faster and with more enthusiasm than any other nation, embracing the new invention that seemed to reflect the pioneering spirit of the age. Up and down the East Coast, railroad lines sprang up with amazing speed, stimulating economic growth that would change the way people lived and eventually make America the most powerful nation on earth. Of the twenty-six states that constituted the Union in 1840, only four—Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Vermont—had not completed their first mile of track. The beginnings of what would become the major railroad companies were established during the 1840s with the opening of the New York Central & Hudson River and Pennsylvania lines. However, for the most part in the 1830s and 1840s, the development of the railroads was a local affair. People wanted to have easy access to the local town, or possibly to the other end of the state, rather than across the nation. These early railroad companies were a true ragbag of outfits, ranging from, literally, one-horse companies carrying coal out of a mine to longer lines stretching into the outback and carrying thousands of passengers a week.
The third chapter shows how the railroads took off as an industry in the years running up to the Civil War. The 1850s saw a massive increase in the pace of track development, and the mileage more than tripled during the decade. This was a period of strong economic performance, both driven by the railroads and speeded up by their construction. Although most of the railroads were built by the private sector, little of this remarkable growth would have been possible without government support through various mechanisms, such as allowing companies to run lotteries, the granting of monopolistic rights, tax exemptions, and land grants. It was the start of a difficult relationship between government and the railroads.
The American railroads were bigger in every sense than those in Europe. They covered longer distances, used larger locomotives, and hauled longer trains. The railroads seemed to be tailor-made for the huge American landmass and for the indomitable spirit of its people. European countries were constrained by reactionary governments slow to recognize the social and economic benefits of the railroads and by old-fashioned customs that those with vested interests worked hard to protect. Americans, however—free from the shackles of tradition and unencumbered by obstructive government—took to the new method of transportation with far more gusto and enthusiasm than their European peers.
The Civil War, covered in Chapter 4, was the first true railroad war and was particularly lengthy and bloody as a result. Key battles were fought around railroad junctions, railroad sabotage became a key tactic of the war, and troops were transported huge distances in a way that would have been impossible even a decade previously. The North, industrially stronger than its rival, was lent a key advantage by its superior railroads, which, crucially, were far better managed during the war than those of the South. The Unionists quickly realized that the operation of the railroads could not be left to chance and placed them under military control early in the conflict. By contrast, the secessionists never established government rule over their railroads, with the result that they operated far less efficiently. The war would also witness remarkable examples of derring-do on the railroads: the Andrews Raid (or Great Locomotive Chase) in April 1862—in which Union volunteers commandeered a locomotive on the Western & Atlantic line, deep in Confederate territory, and created mayhem as they drove it north—has entered American folklore but somewhat obscured the true story of the railroads in this conflict.
The fifth chapter tells the story of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The dream of a coast-to-coast line had first been mooted as early as 1820, but it was not until the 1850s that the idea was seriously considered; its start was delayed by the Civil War, although ironically it was the absence of the Southern politicians that allowed the legislation to be passed by Congress. It was by far the most ambitious railroad project of this period in the world—to be surpassed thirty years later only by the Trans-Siberian, the subject of my next book—but its exact purpose was somewhat unclear. To reach the Pacific Ocean, three thousand miles away, was an obvious ambition for the federal government in Washington seeking to unify the new nation, but it was never going to be a commercial proposition. Thanks to lobbying by a remarkable young dreamer, Theodore Judah, who gained the political backing of Abraham Lincoln, Congress passed the act to build the line in 1862. The law also allowed for massive subsidies in the form of both cash and land grants to the two companies building the line, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific.
Like much of the story of the US railroads, the building of the transcontinental encompassed both the best and the worst aspects of pioneering American culture. On the one hand, there was the extraordinary achievement of building nearly two thousand miles of line through two mountain ranges and a long stretch of desert, making it by far the longest railroad in the world up to that point; on the other, there was the shameless corruption that allowed the directors of both companies to make extraordinary riches through the simple expedient of contracting the work through dummy construction companies. Crédit Mobilier of America, established in 1864 by Dr. Thomas Durant, was at the center of the scandal that broke in 1872, when it was revealed that a number of congressmen had received cash bribes or shares in the company. There was, too, the excess of competitive zeal that saw, at one point, the ridiculous phenomenon of the two railroad companies grading parallel lines in order to maximize the land grants paid by the government. Nevertheless, the celebration to mark the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869 must be seen as one of the turning points of US history.
In Chapters 6 and 7, the amazing exponential growth of the railroads during the rest of the nineteenth c
entury is explored against the backdrop of their growing unpopularity. No community of any size in the United States could afford to be out of range of a locomotive’s whistle, and, by the end of the century, with a network encompassing more than two hundred thousand miles, very few were. The transcontinental had prompted growth in the West, and the railroad was beginning to knit the nation together. The 1880s saw the biggest increase in rail mileage of any period of US history: seventy-one thousand miles of track were built during this decade, most of it in the states west of the Mississippi. The construction boom was greatly stimulated by the federal government’s continuing program of offering land grants to the railroad companies constructing these lines. The grants were controversial, as they benefited a relatively small number of companies, but they undoubtedly played a critical role in bringing the eastern and western parts of the United States together. Without them, the widespread settlement of the West by newly arrived immigrants might not have been possible.
For passengers, technical improvements were making their journeys better. Significant improvements to the quality of the tracks allowed faster speeds, while better locomotive technology enabled the railroads to carry heavier loads at a cheaper rate. Introduction of better brakes, steel rails, and improved couplers enhanced the performance of an industry that had been widely criticized for delays and accidents. The needs of passengers were catered to by such innovations as dining and sleeping cars promoted by inventor and industrialist George Pullman. In addition, the railroads began to standardize equipment and operating procedures, further reducing costs and making it easier for trains to run on the lines of other companies.
During this period of rapid growth, the very nature of the rail system changed in fundamental and highly visible ways: for instance, towns with two or more stations often built one consolidated “union” station, and lines that had hitherto been separate were linked for the first time. In November 1883, time was standardized into four zones to help the railroads keep a schedule. A truly national rail network was taking shape.
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