The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Moreover, railroads would have the advantage of a technology that ultimately proved to be their most effective weapon. Whereas steam engines were quickly adapted to operate on rails, they could not function on roads because they were too heavy and appropriate steering mechanisms had not yet been devised. A road carriage had to be light enough to spare the road surface while having to carry all the paraphernalia of its own heavy and hot machinery in addition to the payload of passengers or freight, all crammed into a single vehicle and perhaps, at most, one trailer. As a study into the rival technologies of the period puts it, steam road carriages “were lacking in a number of technical respects,” despite all the efforts to develop them.15 There were a few hardy inventors in Europe who tried to develop “road carriages,” but as it became clear, by around 1840, that railroads would become dominant, they gave up for a generation or so, leaving the field open to the iron road.

  Thus, at the start of the railroad age, in 1830, neither turnpikes nor canals had proved sufficiently profitable to maintain a sustained boom in their construction and continued operation. Railroads, therefore, held all the trump cards in relation to their rivals, but they still needed the technology of steam locomotives to ensure their success. The engines in steamships may have been precursors of those used in locomotives, but they were different in several respects: most notably, they could be far bigger, since they did not have to drag their weight along on land, and they could be less efficient, since ships had the capacity to carry vast quantities of fuel. Nevertheless, thanks to the steamships, by the time serious thought was being given to railroads, the key requirements for locomotive technology were in place. However, it was one thing to fit a large steam engine into a ship, where space was not at a premium, and quite another getting it down to a size small enough to move itself under its own power.

  To progress from the production of steam power to the development of a railroad required two significant steps. First, the engine had to be put on wheels to make it mobile, and then the wheels had to be placed on rails. As we have seen, this second step was essential because of both the primitive nature of the roads and the absence of any steering mechanism. Provided sufficiently sophisticated and small engines could be developed, the railroads offered a neat solution to both these limitations.

  The first attempt to create a self-propelled locomotive had taken place as early as 1769 in Paris, when Nicolas Cugnot’s Fardier16—which rather fancifully is mentioned in some automotive histories as the world’s first automobile—took to the streets but was declared a danger to the public when it hit a wall and overturned. Various other similar patents were taken out, even one by Watt, and several devices intended to run on roads were built in the late eighteenth century. None, however, met with any success, owing to their technical limitations or to the inability of the poorly built roads to support their weight.

  The answer was to use rails to support the locomotives. It was a Cornishman, Richard Trevithick, who first thought of the idea and therefore has the best claim to the much-disputed accolade of “father of the steam locomotive.” At the turn of the century, Trevithick had tried to run an engine on a road, but the lack of a steering mechanism inevitably resulted in a crash. In 1803, however, a locomotive placed by Trevithick on a track consisting of L-shaped rails laid on stone-block ties at the Pen-y-Darren ironworks in Wales managed to haul wagons weighing nine tons at a speed of five miles an hour. The feat was undoubtedly a world first, but the locomotive proved too heavy for the rails and was soon converted into a stationary engine hauling wagons by means of cables. Five years later, Trevithick demonstrated a steam locomotive playfully named Catch Me Who Can on a small circular track in a field close to what is now London’s Euston Station, but once again the rails proved to be insufficiently robust for the engine that ran on them. The locomotive attracted little public interest and would be his last such effort, as he emigrated to South America to develop stationary steam machines that were used in mines to haul up wagons and died in Britain in 1833, a forgotten figure.

  Trevithick’s efforts, however, had not been in vain. Others soon followed in his footsteps on both sides of the Atlantic. The early development of the railroad, though, took place in the Northeast of England, the Silicon Valley of its time. The main spur to its development was to harness steam power to improve the exploitation of mines. In 1812 mining engineer John Blenkinsop designed an engine, the Salamanca, the first steam locomotive to run on a commercial basis, whose cogs meshed with a toothed rail, the rack-and-pinion system that later became a feature of mountain railroads, for the Middleton colliery in Yorkshire, the first steam locomotive to run on a commercial basis.

  George Stephenson, a gruff, self-educated genius from the Northeast, picked up on the idea and became the most famous of these early pioneers, pushing the concept of steam locomotives far further than any of his predecessors, thanks to his talent of being able to develop and improve on other people’s ideas. In 1812 Stephenson was appointed as the “enginewright” at Killingworth colliery, just north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Within a couple of years he had produced the Blücher, named after a Prussian general who helped the British defeat Napoléon at Waterloo, which could pull thirty tons up a slight gradient at five miles per hour. It was just the beginning. If Trevithick was the father of the steam locomotive, Stephenson was its midwife, building a series of engines for collieries in England’s Northeast. Each new invention proved better than the last. In November 1822, on the eight-mile line connecting Hetton colliery, near Sunderland, with the River Wear, Stephenson’s “iron horses,” as they came to be known, began to regularly haul seventeen wagons weighing a total of sixty-four tons, more than double the performance of the Blücher. Nevertheless, all these engines were still primitive beasts that frequently broke down, lost steam through every join, and battered the tracks, which could barely withstand their weight.

  It was Stephenson who was chosen to lay out the Stockton & Darlington Railway. Although it is best characterized as the last of the wagonways, rather than the first modern railroad, the Stockton & Darlington represented a significant advancement over its predecessors. Opened in September 1825, it was the first common-carrier railroad to use locomotive power, as well as horses, and was designed for use by both passengers and freight. Nevertheless, it still lacked several of the necessary requirements to call itself a fully fledged railroad. Initially just twelve miles long, it was designed, like all the early wagonways, to transport minerals—in this case coal— from mines to a waterway. Although Stephenson built locomotives to run on the Stockton & Darlington, in its early years it was largely operated by horses pulling the wagons and the converted stagecoaches that were used for the few passengers who ventured onto the line. The railroad was crude in other respects, too. At its opening, only one steam locomotive, Stephenson’s Locomotion, was available. The track was single throughout, with limited passing points, which meant the engineers or horsemen sometimes argued over who should have the right-of-way when their trains met on the line, reputedly coming to blows on occasion. The Stockton & Darlington struggled financially in its early years, but eventually became highly profitable once steam locomotives became universally used. Despite its limitations, however, it demonstrated what proved to be the spur to the construction of so many railroads across the world: it brought down the price of the goods it carried, most notably coal.

  Stephenson kept producing improved locomotives for the Stockton & Darlington, but soon turned his attention to the Liverpool & Manchester, which, when it opened in September 1830, was the world’s first fully fledged railroad. Thirty-seven miles long, linking two major towns17 with a double-track railroad, and open to all comers for the carriage of both freight and passengers, this was a genuine precursor to all the world’s future iron roads. George Stephenson again had overall charge of both the construction of the track and the production of the locomotives, aided by his son Robert, who built far more reliable engines than those on the Stockton & Darlington. Seve
ral improvements, notably the multitube boiler, were incorporated into the prototype “premium engine,” which was given the name that is famous throughout the world, the Rocket.18 In 1829 the promoters of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway organized a competition, the Rainhill Trials, to find the best locomotive, and the Rocket easily won. Thanks to the Rocket and the quality of the route designed by George Stephenson, the Liverpool & Manchester was a triumph that was to usher in the railroad age. Both commercially and technically successful, it soon spawned imitators not just across Britain but throughout the world.

  Indeed, even the ramshackle Stockton & Darlington had attracted attention across the Atlantic, and promoters were beginning to come forward. America was at the time a couple of decades behind Britain in terms of industrial development, but was fast catching up, a process that would be greatly accelerated by its rapid adoption of the iron road. America might have been lagging behind Britain in technology, but not in initiative and ideas. As in Britain, there had been proposals for railroads long before they were technically possible. In 1815 there had been calls by a railroad pioneer, John Stevens, for a double-track railroad to connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic, an idea that at the time must have seemed to many as far-fetched as sending a rocket to the moon. But Stevens was not alone in proposing such ambitious schemes. That same year a charter was actually granted to the New Jersey Railroad Company, the first railroad charter in the United States, for a long line linking the Delaware River near Trenton with the Raritan River in New Jersey, but no investors came forward to back the plan. Railroads continued to be promoted in various parts of the East Coast during the early 1820s, but there was both a lack of capital to undertake such investment and widespread doubts that the technology was sufficiently developed to see these schemes realized.

  While the more ambitious ideas for railroads foundered, a few short lines serving mines or wharves did get built in the 1820s, using either standing engines or horsepower. The most sophisticated was the Granite Railroad in Quincy, Massachusetts, completed in 1826 and thought to be the first commercial railroad in America, since it was used by more than one company. Trains of three wagons, hauled by horses, took stone from a quarry to a dock at Boston Harbor three miles away on wooden rails protected by a layer of iron. It was an innovative railroad that included rudimentary switches (called points in Britain) and an inclined section where the track was carved into the granite. By the end of the decade, two much longer streetcar lines had been built at anthracite mines in northeastern Pennsylvania: a nine-mile line at Mauch Chunk19 and a sixteen-mile one at Carbondale, using contrasting traction methods. At Mauch Chunk, cars were hauled up a gradual incline by horses and mules, which then were given a ride in the empty wagons back to the bottom of the hill. Initially, there was a similar arrangement at Carbondale on the line built by the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company. However, the engineer of the line, Horatio Allen, had grander ideas. He had been to England to attend the Rainhill Trials and was so impressed that he arranged to import a British-built engine, the Stourbridge Lion, named after the town in the Midlands in which it was built. It had to be stripped down for the voyage and rebuilt, but its arrival in America aroused much fanfare, as it was the first locomotive to be operated in the country. Since he did not want anyone else to risk his life, Allen, the future president of the Erie Railroad, himself drove the Lion on its maiden journey, a six-mile run that included crossing a thirty-foot-high trestle bridge, in August 1829. The timbers of the track, which had been built for the far-lighter coal wagons, creaked threateningly beneath the seven-ton Lion, and the experiment proved to be a failure. The Lion never roared again: it was left in a shed and subsequently ignominiously broken up for parts. But it had shown the way, as Allen later recalled: “At the end of two or three miles, I reversed the valves and returned without accident to the place of starting, having thus made the first railroad trip by locomotive in the Western Hemisphere.”20

  These early lines, though, were in truth just slightly more complex versions of the wagonways whose history stretched back into the mists of time. The burgeoning cities of the Eastern Seaboard needed something rather more sophisticated to boost trade, and it was competition between them that spurred Baltimore into sponsoring the pioneering Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

  The initiative to build the Baltimore & Ohio was very much a stab in the dark. Its origins lay in the formation of the inelegantly named Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Internal Improvements, which sent one William Strickland across the Atlantic to learn about Britain’s burgeoning railroads. Strickland’s subsequent glowing report about the Stock ton & Darlington, presented to the society in 1826, suggested that railroads, rather than canals, were the answer to the need for better transportation links. Two other farsighted Baltimore citizens, Philip E. Thomas and George Brown, also visited the Stockton & Darlington and other railroad projects in Britain in 1826. Back in Baltimore, they set about raising money. They organized a meeting of local merchants, an echo of a similar gathering that had been the genesis of Britain’s first major railroad, the Liverpool & Manchester, to galvanize support for a 380-mile double-track line linking Baltimore, Maryland, with the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia.

  It was one thing to have such a grand idea, but quite another to see it to fruition in the face of the many financial and technical obstacles. However, a key factor in persuading the local merchants of the need for a railroad was the fear that Baltimore would be left behind by the other three major eastern seaports, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, as the main conduit between the interior of the United States and the Old World. All four cities were jostling for primacy and realized that communications with the interior were key to their development. Given that the other three cities chose canals or, in the case of Philadelphia, the ill-fated mixed canal and railroad Main Line, Baltimore’s decision to opt for a railroad was a farsighted one.

  This fierce intercity rivalry was the key stimulus to the demand for better transportation links. A particular concern for the citizens of Baltimore was that the Erie Canal gave New York a huge competitive advantage. Proposals to construct a Chesapeake and Ohio canal that would run parallel with the Potomac River also threatened the viability of Baltimore’s port, and consequently the railroad was quickly granted a charter by the Maryland legislature in February 1827. It was a courageous decision: the economics of building such a long railroad line were unknown, and the capital required was the then enormous sum of $5 million. It was courageous, too, from a technological point of view, since it was unclear whether British know-how, which had been developed for a milder climate and shorter distances, could be adapted to the harsher weather of the United States. In the event, the burghers of Baltimore needed little persuasion to be convinced of the need for the railroad. As Sarah H. Gordon, a chronicler of the impact of the development of the US railroads, suggests, “The merchants of Baltimore, anxious to establish a connection between their port city and the Ohio River, organized a railroad company in 1827, before they even knew whether a railroad would accomplish their goal.”21 Ultimately, the Baltimore & Ohio did not achieve its commercial aim, as New York, with its far-superior natural harbor and easy river access, won out, becoming the port of choice for European traffic, but that should not detract from the importance of the pioneering railroad.

  Construction of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad began in 1828, but by then another ambitious project was already taking shape in South Carolina. This was the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad,22 which is less well known than the Baltimore & Ohio but has a good claim as the more impressive innovator of the two. Although it did not obtain its charter until after the Baltimore & Ohio, the Charleston & Hamburg completed its line in 1833, far more quickly than its northern counterpart, which did not reach Wheeling, its planned destination, until 1852—twenty-four years after Carroll had turned the first sod. Moreover, whereas the first trains on the Baltimore & Ohio were horse drawn, the Charleston & Hamburg quickly adopted locom
otive technology, and homegrown at that. It was Horatio Allen, the engineer of the Delaware & Hudson, who had moved down south as engineer for the Charleston and commissioned the building of the first American locomotive, the rather quaintly named Best Friend of Charleston. He had persuaded the promoters of the line to adopt steam power, pointing out with great foresight that “there is no reason to expect any material improvement in the breed of horses in the future while, in my judgment, the man is not living who knows what the breed of locomotive is to place at command.” As rail historian Stewart H. Holbrook concludes, “While the Baltimore & Ohio was fooling around with sail cars and with horse-treadmill locomotives, the Charleston & Hamburg . . . had the first American-built steam locomotive.”23