The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  With long-lasting track now available, the other requirement for a railroad was the development of a power source other than the wretched animals that would never be suitable for anything beyond hauling relatively light loads for short distances. Steam power was the obvious answer, but, again, there were numerous technical and practical obstacles to overcome. The first engines driven by steam were probably devised by Thomas Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon, early in the eighteenth century. His work was based on the pioneering efforts of a seventeenth-century French scientist, Denis Papin, who had recognized that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam. Newcomen, using a recently improved version of smelting iron, developed the idea into working engines that could be used to pump water from mines. His invention proved to be crucial in keeping the tin and copper-ore industry viable in Cornwall, since all the mines had reached a depth where they were permanently flooded and existing waterpower pumps were insufficient to drain them. By 1733, when Newcomen’s patents ran out, around sixty of his engines had been produced.

  Working in the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish inventor and engineer James Watt made steam commercially viable by improving the efficiency of engines and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. Boulton & Watt, his partnership with Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, became the most important builder of steam engines in the world, cornering the market by registering a patent that effectively gave them a monopoly on all steam-engine development in the UK until the end of the eighteenth century. Steam power quickly became commonplace in the early nineteenth century, and it was Boulton & Watt that provided the engine for the world’s first “practical” steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, which made its short maiden voyage on a Glasgow canal in 1803. Various attempts to propel boats by steam power had been made in both Europe and America since the mid-eighteenth century, but they had proved short-lived as a result of technical failure or other factors, notably fear of explosions. The most successful experiment had been the steamboat built by the US inventor John Fitch, who in 1788 operated a regular commercial service on the Delaware River between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, New Jersey, carrying up to thirty passengers. Fitch’s steamboat traveled more than two thousand miles during its short period of service, but competition from the roads meant that it was not a commercial success.

  Boulton & Watt’s much-improved engines led to the construction of numerous steamboats that were to prove particularly useful in America, with its vast distances and long stretches of navigable waterways. Steam power, therefore, was to be the catalyst for the early opening up of America—but on water rather than on rails. As George Rogers Taylor, author of the standard work on early transportation systems in the United States, suggests, right from its birth as a nation, the United States was “peculiarly dependent upon river transportation.”5 River courses determined the location and size of settlements, as, for a generation and more, waterways were the only way to reach much of the huge landmass eventually occupied by the United States.

  The rivers, however, were obstacles as well as pathways, and navigating up them was an arduous and perilous task. On the lower reaches of the bigger rivers like the Mississippi or the Hudson, it was possible for seagoing sailing ships to tack upriver for a few miles, but elsewhere swift currents and shallow waters made even such limited progress impossible. Produce from inland was, therefore, floated down on crude rafts and flat-boats that were too unwieldy to make the return journey and were broken up for lumber. According to Taylor, “Transportation up the rivers proved extremely time consuming and costly.” Labor costs to operate the narrow keelboats that were able to travel upriver were so high that these boats carried only the most essential items. The farther west, the greater the difficulty of river transportation. Pittsburgh could be reached from New Orleans only by a journey of nearly two thousand miles that took four months “and required a crew of strong men prepared to utilize every known method in overcoming the difficulties of upriver navigation.”6 Sometimes these tireless men rowed or towed, or even, occasionally, “bushwhacked,” pulling themselves along with whatever overhanging vegetation might be available.

  Steamships, therefore, transformed the scope of travel by river and the economies of the inland towns and villages. Once Watt’s engines had been refined by a series of inventors on both sides of the Atlantic, the feasibility of regular steamboat travel was demonstrated on northeastern waterways such as the Delaware and Hudson Rivers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The North River Steamboat, designed by the distinguished inventor and entrepreneur Robert Fulton, plied the New York to Albany stretch of the Hudson River from September 1807, becoming the first commercially successful paddle steamer. In the winter of 1811–12, another Fulton venture, a vessel optimistically named New Orleans, steamed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans and thereby became the first steamship to navigate the western waters of the United States. Going back upriver, however, proved too tough, and the New Orleans never made the return journey. It was not until 1815 that a steamship, the Enterprise, successfully made the journey in both directions, confirming the potential of steamboats to navigate long distances both up- and downriver. This epoch-making journey ushered in the heyday of the steamship. Although New York City quickly became the center of the steamboat industry, rivers and bays along the whole Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida were soon filled with steamers. On the Great Lakes, steamships took longer to displace the sailing boats that were well suited to local conditions and cheaper to operate, but they eventually did so. From their first appearance on the Great Lakes around 1816–17, steamships grew steadily in size and number.

  Farther west, the advent of the steamship changed the whole economy of the region: “In the great valley of the Mississippi, steam-driven vessels proved the most important factor in the great industrial development of that region from 1815 to the eve of the civil war.” By 1820, 69 steamships were navigating the western rivers, and the total peaked at 727 in 1855, demonstrating why it took some time for the railroads to establish their complete domination of inland travel. The mileage of the river system, with the Mississippi as its spine, was impressive: “One of the great pioneers of western expansion, Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) of Missouri—which in 1821 had been admitted as the first state wholly west of the Mississippi—reckoned that some 50,000 miles of water in the Mississippi river system were navigable by some kind of boat; in any case some 16,000 miles of steamboat routes are recorded.”7 It would take until the mid-1850s for the mileage of railroads to exceed even the latter figure. Indeed, at first, railroads and steamships complemented each other since many of the great rivers had not been forded, and it was not until the completion of continuous rail routes through the construction of bridges that the decline of the waterways became inevitable.

  Ships, of course, were limited to where they could go by the course of the rivers, and it was not really until the advent of the steamship that the notion of changing the features of the landscape to suit the mode of transportation, rather than the other way around, was born. The resulting canal boom came late to America. Whereas in Europe the heyday of canal building was already well under way by the turn of the century, following the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in northwestern England in 1761, there were still fewer than 100 miles of canal in the United States a half century later, and only two of these man-made waterways were more than a couple of miles long. There was no shortage of ambitious projects being put forward by entrepreneurs, but few canals were actually built. As with the turnpikes, the nascent road network, it was the difficulty of finding capital, together with the failure of early ventures, that underlay this lack of interest. America’s belated canal mania was triggered by the brave decision to build the Erie Canal, an astonishingly ambitious project, which stretched 363 miles across New York State between the lower Hudson River at Albany and Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie. First proposed in 1
807, it was built remarkably quickly between 1817 and 1825, becoming, by far, the longest man-made waterway in the world. Despite the difficulties of operation—there was only one towpath, and every time two boats met, one had to drop its towline into the water to allow the other to pass—its economic impact was immediate. Even before the canal’s completion, traffic crowded onto the finished sections, and there was soon talk of overcrowding and expansion.

  The wider economic impact of the canals demonstrated the same pattern that would later be seen in the railroad boom. Transportation costs to the interior were reduced dramatically, by as much as 95 percent according to some assessments, and trade between the East Coast and the Midwest expanded dramatically. The Erie Canal stimulated early westward migration and enabled farm produce from the interior to be transported east, beginning the process of uniting America. From Maine to Virginia, the success of the Erie set off a nationwide enthusiasm for canal building with the expectation that similar ambitious projects would be equally profitable. Projects that had been put forward before the construction of the Erie were quickly dusted off and now found ready investors, though for the most part this was through bonds sold and guaranteed by state governments. Even when canals were built privately, they often relied on some form of financial support from the states. These canals were mostly designed to improve connections between the Atlantic ports and inland communities and waterways, and, in the West, to connect the Ohio- Mississippi river system with the Great Lakes. Despite the fact that many of the projects did not, ultimately, see the light of day, there were more than 3,300 miles of canal in the United States by 1840.

  The canals, however, struggled. The biggest failure of the period was the 365-mile Pennsylvania Main Line between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio, an attempt to marry railroad and canal technology. It consisted of canals for most of its length except on the steep gradients through the mountains, where there were inclined planes on which a cable system hauled canal boats over the brow and then eased them down on the other side. The inclined-plane railroad sections proved to be a bottleneck, as they had less capacity than the rest of the system, and the scheme never became a true competitor to the far more successful Erie, not least because it had 174 locks, more than twice the number of its rival. Indeed, most of the canal projects never made money for their investors, and the brief canal boom came to an end by the late 1830s because of two financial crises and a general lack of confidence in the idea. The failure of the canals stemmed from several internal factors: they were expensive to build, had severe capacity limitations (which meant that even at times of maximum usage, many remained unprofitable), and were vulnerable to severe weather conditions (most crucially, they had to close in winter when they froze over and were also susceptible to floods—which made towpaths unusable—and droughts). On top of all this, the canal companies were bedeviled by management failures, reflected in poor maintenance of the water in the canals and the encroachment of vegetation.

  However, they might have survived all these difficulties had it not been for the arrival of the railroads, which proved to be their undoing. Whereas Taylor is keen to avoid the suggestion that the history of the canals was wholly lacking in success (“The student of the canal era will do well not to dismiss the canals as obvious ‘failures,’” he advises), they had mostly been built after the emergence of the railroads and consequently faced immediate competition. As Taylor concludes, the canal-building mania came too late to give them even a brief period of monopoly, as they had enjoyed in Europe: “It was the misfortune of most canals to become obsolescent even before they were opened for traffic. The advantages of the railroads were so great that even the strongest canals could not long retain a profitable share of the business.”8 He suggests, rather regretfully, that such projects as the Main Line of Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal would be remembered today as great monuments of the age had not the railroads usurped their position as the most efficient mode of transportation. As with the railroads, however, profits should not be the only criterion by which to judge the success of America’s now largely forgotten canal network. The hidden benefits that arose from the availability of improved and cheaper transportation—what economists call “externalities”—far outstripped the purely monetary profits that could be earned through the payment of tolls or fares, but these gains ended up in the hands of third parties who did not contribute toward the cost of providing these expensive schemes.

  The success of steamships and the brief flourishing of canals invites the question of why roads did not become a more successful mode of transportation earlier, given that boats were obviously limited to water-courses and the cost of digging lengthy canals was prohibitive. In the early nineteenth century, there were, indeed, numerous roads crisscrossing rural areas, but they were crude affairs that were little more than tracks. Taylor remarks that in 1815, the roads were “unbelievably poor by [modern] standards, . . . hardly more than broad paths through the forest.”9 When it rained, they turned into a series of muddy ruts, and when too dry, they became a powdery dust bowl. For the most part, they consisted of mere cleared paths, but in swampy or marshy land, logs were laid at right angles to the direction of the road to form what were known as “corduroy roads.” Given the impossibility of traveling far on these terrible roads, villages were generally built close to waterways.

  The condition of the roads was a result of the way they were managed. Their upkeep was the responsibility of the local “community,” which, as in Britain, was supposed to provide labor to build and maintain them. In reality, it was a haphazard process: local farmers were press-ganged into providing their labor for a few days, normally in winter. This arrangement was fine for the farmers, as they had little else to do during the cold season, but it was hardly conducive to effective road improvement, since winter was the worst time of the year to prepare a stable surface. The farmers were understandably unenthusiastic about working on roads other than those that led to the nearest village, market, or waterway. Nor did they have the requisite skills for making and maintaining a decent road surface. Despite these limitations, some local roads were joined together to form through routes. By 1816 there was a highway of sorts running north-south between Maine and Georgia, but it had few tentacles stretching westward.

  More significant was the development, beginning in the 1790s, of a series of turnpikes—roads on which tolls were payable. Turnpikes were typically built by private companies given permission in the form of charters by local state governments. The private toll-road movement had been boosted by the success of a number of early turnpikes, notably the Lancaster Turnpike, connecting Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was completed in 1794. Its profitability stimulated several imitators, with the result that by 1815, the main commercial centers between eastern Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and southern New England were blessed with good roads, several of which were well constructed with a solid stone foundation topped with a gravel dressing.

  As more states joined the Union, and settlers sought to move west, the logic would have been to create a network of these roads. However, this would have required federal funding, which was regarded with great suspicion in Washington and in many states. Furthermore, the idea of encouraging centralized national projects was seen as contrary to the Constitution, but Taylor sees a more prosaic reason behind the reluctance to spend money on these schemes: “The real obstacle which defeated a national system of internal improvements is to be found in the bitter state and sectional jealousies which were wracking the new nation.”10 In particular, the more-developed New England states felt that federal support for road schemes would undermine their hard-earned competitive advantage and encourage western migration to their detriment. In the South, too, there was widespread opposition to the construction of roads and a lack of capital to build them.

  The turnpike boom of the first quarter of the nineteenth century was largely funded by private local investors, which greatly limited both
their extent and their quality. States did, on occasion, provide additional financial support, and they were ready to grant charters to all manner of road-building schemes, many of which never saw the light of day or survived only a few years. The most ambitious scheme was the National Road, one of the rare roads to be supported by funding from the federal government. Construction of the road began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811, and it reached Wheeling, West Virginia,11 on the Ohio River—which would also be the intended destination of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—by 1818. It was extended to Columbus, Ohio, in 1833 and finally to Vandalia, Illinois,12

  by the middle of the century, but by then the railroad was emerging as the preferred mode of transportation for most people and freight carriers.

  For the most part, however, turnpikes were, like the canals, a failure: “Though a boon to travelers, turnpikes generally did not cheapen and stimulate land transportation sufficiently to provide satisfactory earnings from tolls.” Many turnpike companies were not even able to collect sufficient tolls to provide for the maintenance and operation of the road, let alone make a contribution to capital for the investors who had put up the money: “Even in New England, where they were relatively most successful, only five or six out of 230 turnpikes paid barely satisfactory returns to investors.”13 They were not helped by “shunpikes,” detours around tollbooths built by mischievous locals, or long-distance travelers’ habit of waiting until nightfall, when toll collectors went off duty, to use the road. A scarcity of honest tollbooth operators was another obstacle to profitability, and some companies simply sold the right to run the tollbooth for a fixed sum, knowing they could never collect the true income. The turnpikes could not, crucially, tap into the most significant market, the long-distance transportation of agricultural goods such as wheat, corn, or pork, because the tolls were simply too high in relation to the value of the produce. As railroad historian Albro Martin sums it up, “Road haulage could only be had at rates per ton that exceeded by several times the market value of such commodities at eastern points.” Consequently, many roads deteriorated for want of money to maintain them. As early as 1819, turnpikes were abandoned by owners unable to make a profit while paying for the operating costs. It was not, therefore, the competition of canals and railroads that did in the turnpikes, but their own shortcomings: “Many turnpike companies had failed even before this [railroad and canal] competition appeared and those which lasted after about 1830 [the advent of the railroads] had for the most part already demonstrated their financial unprofitability.”14