The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Despite its parochial roots, the Erie was a different kind of railroad from anything that had been envisaged before. It was a grand projet of its day, a line stretching nearly 450 miles to link Lake Erie with the ports of the Atlantic. Its origins stretched back to 1829, when the idea of linking the ocean with the lakes had been first touted by a farsighted pamphleteer, William Redfield, who later became the inaugural president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He published a map of a proposed railroad from New York to the Great Lakes, and his pamphlet led to the granting of a charter to the New York & Erie Railroad, as it was initially called, by the governor of New York in April 1832, but it would take nearly two decades to bear fruit.

  Right from the start, the Erie, which would eventually suffer no fewer than five bankruptcies, struggled. Construction of such an ambitious line, which would, briefly, be the longest in the world, had inevitable difficulties. It might have been broadly welcomed by people in the communities through which it passed, but there was no shortage of smallholders directly on its path who saw the opportunity to make a fast buck by demanding excessive amounts for small parcels of land. These were frontiersmen and hillbillies, early settlers who had migrated westward in a haphazard way to carve out a subsistence living from the relatively poor land and who had no truck with the railroad. Cannily, they would wait until the railroad’s work-force was all ready to cross into their field and then suddenly up their demand for cash. Even the local Native Americans got in on the act. One oft-reported tale describes how, when the Erie sought to cross the Seneca reservation in Cattaraugus County, in western New York State, the local chief demanded ten thousand dollars for the right-of-way. Appalled at this demand, the railroad manager blustered that the land was no good for anything else, such as growing corn or potatoes, and that it had no good timber on it. The sage paused and then said, “It pretty good for railroad.”5 His tribe got the money.

  The construction of the Erie is an epic story that has been largely forgotten in American railroad folklore, having been overshadowed by the much-recounted tale of the transcontinentals a couple of decades later (see Chapter 5).6 In fact, the Erie merits an equally prominent place in railroad history, as the line was built at a time when the railroad pioneers were still feeling their way with the technology, and fully deserved its appellation as “the work of the age.” The Erie’s reputation, too, has suffered because of the numerous mistakes made during its construction and its later role as the plaything of the railroad barons (see Chapter 8), but the building of the line was the greatest achievement of the early railroad entrepreneurs, as the scale of the construction dwarfed all other contemporary schemes.

  To support the construction of the Erie, the State of New York put up a loan of $3 million, and the company tried to raise $1 million, but faced immediate difficulties when, a few weeks after the ceremonial turning of the first sod in 1836, New York’s financial district was razed to the ground in a catastrophic fire that bankrupted many of the putative investors in the railroad. This was just the start of a string of financial problems that would not only delay the construction of the Erie but call its very existence into question. Work proceeded in fits and starts, as money was made available by pressuring stockholders and persuading local rich residents to commit themselves to the scheme, but there were long periods when the work camps were quiet. Following the company’s default on its interest payments in 1842, construction ceased altogether and would not recommence for three long years. Remarkably, the citizens of Middletown, New York, succeeded in persuading the promoters to complete a nine-mile stretch of line from the neighboring town of Goshen before construction ceased to ensure they would enjoy the benefits of being the Erie’s western terminus until work could resume. At this stage the Erie stretched barely forty miles from the Hudson, less than one-tenth of its planned length, and there were doubts as to whether it could ever be completed. The stoppage proved especially damaging, since stockpiles of material, such as ties and stone, left on uncompleted sections of the track, were purloined, often by the very farmers who had supplied the material but not been paid for it. Many local farmhouses would subsequently boast solid timber frames hewn from wood originally intended to support the railroad rather than their roofs.

  Somehow, though, New York State was prevailed upon not only to cancel the original $3 million debt, but also to allow the railroad to issue new stock to raise a further $3 million to ensure work could recommence. This time, there was a new powerful president at the helm of the railroad, Benjamin Loder, who had made his fortune out of dry goods. Though having no knowledge of the railroads, he was just the sort of man the Erie needed, because he had the ability and strength of character to drive through construction of the line despite all the obstacles, financial and practical, in its path. He made the Erie into an unstoppable force, helped by thousands of Irish laborers who fled their native country during the long potato famine that started in 1845 and who consequently were grateful even for the low wages offered. The Irish were not, though, always a happy bunch, given the perilous nature of their work. It was remarkably similar to that of the laborers building India’s first major railroad through the Western Ghats outside Bombay at around the same time, who were forced to hang down from the tops of cliffs in flimsy baskets to drill holes in which they placed gunpowder.7 An almost identically risky technique was used in the hilly region around Port Jervis, on the Delaware, where the cliffs rose almost straight up from the river. The brave fellow in the basket with the task of setting the charge would signal to be rapidly hoisted to safety before the fuse burned down. Inevitably, at times ropes got snagged or instructions misheard, and the consequent explosion would send the hapless man to his doom. Many of the dislodged rocks plunged into the neighboring Delaware & Hudson Canal, leading to a series of lawsuits between the two companies.

  The Irish were prone to fighting, and at one stage something akin to a war broke out between two factions, the Corkonians, from the Southwest, and the Fardowners, who confusingly mostly came from Connaught in the West of Ireland.8 The men were working for contractors who had been charged with cutting through a wall of solid rock to create a mile-long embankment in a hilly region called Shin Hollow. It was slow work, necessitating the establishment of semipermanent work camps that provided very basic housing for the laborers, usually consisting of big barns where food was served downstairs and the dormitories above were reached by outside ladders. Others lived in simple outlying huts, mostly without heating or ventilation. Both gangs had arrived recently off the boat and wanted to establish themselves as the dominant force. The Fardowners, who back in Ireland usually fared worse in these disputes, decided to attack one of the barns occupied by the Corkonians with the aim of chasing them off the work site. The row may have started because the Cork men had accepted the low daily rate of seventy-five cents rather than the usual dollar. Several days of battles and skirmishes ensued, including one incident in which, after a whole barn housing the hapless Corkonians had been brought down by sawing through the timbers, each man was made to swear that he would not work on the railroad again. There was, more by luck than design, no loss of life. The Fardowners then set about attacking a group of Germans who proved to be far better organized than either Irish group and, despite their small number, saw off the men from the Emerald Isle. It took the intervention of the local militia, called in by the contractors and, oddly, sporting full-dress uniforms as they had no other, to confront the men and quell the riot. There were other, more minor, disturbances too, but, according to railroad historian Stewart H. Holbrook, it was not the hillbillies, the difficult terrain, or the aggressive Irish laborers that were the major delaying factor for the railroad but “the tremendous snows that blanketed New York State [that] . . . piled onto the tracks four, five, six feet deep on the levels with drifts up to thirty feet and more in the cuts.”9

  There were other major natural obstacles, too. The Erie could boast that it had built the most impressive railroa
d structure to date on the American railroad system, the Starrucca Viaduct, a stone-arch bridge spanning a creek near Lanesboro, Pennsylvania. The valley was wide, and the twelve-hundred-foot, sixteen-arch bridge was built in stone with concrete foundations, rather than from wood, which was used for most contemporary bridges. It took eight hundred workers a year to complete the bridge— which still carries railroad traffic today—at a cost of $320,000 (about $9 million in 2012 values).

  As the railroad reached each small community on the route, prolonged celebrations were held with feasts for the masses and speeches, often with Loder himself as the star. The partying at Dunkirk, New York, when the line was finally opened in May 1851 right through to Lake Erie was, however, on a far grander scale. Holbrook notes wryly that the myriad of opening ceremonies for railroad lines throughout the nineteenth century were “pretty much alike,” but then adds, “I think the Erie doings deserve some attention.” Indeed. The opening was celebrated by running two trains all the way from Piermont on the Hudson to Dunkirk on a trip that included an overnight stop in Elmira, as the overall travel time was around twenty-four hours. The guests included the US president, Millard Fillmore, and “298 assorted statesmen and political catchpoles of varying degrees of importance,” who feasted first at Elmira and then, after resuming their journey apparently rather the worse for wear, at Dunkirk on the second night, where they were greeted by the USS Michigan firing a twenty-one-gun salute. A three-hundred-foot table positively “groaned with barbecued oxen, pork and beans in 50 gallon containers, bread baked in loaves ten feet long and two feet thick,” and there was even an enormous clam chowder.10 As railroad opening celebrations go, it was probably the grandest of them all before the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads in 1869. Indeed, the building of the Erie was, in a way, the start of the process that less than two decades later would see the completion of the first transcontinental. It marked a recognition that the railroad had come of age, demonstrating that it was able to cover huge distances through difficult terrain. The local communities may well have been delighted by the arrival of the iron horse, but these folks were somewhat incidental to the line’s true purpose, for the Erie was primarily intended to be a long-distance trunk line. California, or, rather more practically, the Mississippi, was the obvious next stop.

  Not long after the Erie started operation, the promoters realized that the siting of both the eastern and the western terminals of the railroad had been a mistake. Piermont was too far upriver—twenty-five miles—from New York, and consequently the line was quickly extended down to Jersey City, almost opposite New York across the Hudson. At the other end, Dunkirk was soon found to be inadequate and was swiftly replaced as the western terminal by the more substantial town of Buffalo. Despite such teething troubles, once completed the Erie made an enormous difference to the transportation system of America’s Northeast. As the obvious and cheapest way to carry goods inland, it greatly strengthened New York City’s control of domestic commerce. The Erie also reinforced New York’s stranglehold as the nation’s foremost port, even though the line terminated on the wrong side of the Hudson. According to the historian of the Erie, the completion of the railroad “helped Gotham to become the continent’s most populous urban center and meant secondary places for long-time rivals Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia.”11 The promoters of the Baltimore & Ohio, therefore, had failed in their aim of making their city the dominant East Coast port, primarily because their line went to the wrong place, but also because it had taken so long to reach its original planned destination at Wheeling on the Ohio River. New York, it must be stressed, had other benefits, such as an excellent natural port and a buoyant financial district, but the Erie Railroad undoubtedly helped to consolidate its superiority.

  The choice of terminals was not the only mistake made by the Erie’s promoters—a number of other blunders would contribute to the financial difficulties that were to beset the line. Back in the 1830s, the directors of the company had made a fatal error of judgment when they turned down the opportunity to buy, for a mere ninety thousand dollars, the New York & Harlem Railroad, the city’s first railroad. This would have given it access to New York City by virtue of the Harlem’s route through Manhattan, thereby avoiding the need for travelers to take a steamer downriver from Piermont. It was not the modest outlay of a few thousand dollars that lay behind the Erie’s directors’ decision not to acquire the New York & Harlem, but their belief—perhaps somewhat surprising from a twenty-first-century standpoint—that its passengers would rather enjoy the boat trip along the Hudson. Even the ambitious men who built America’s first trunk line would appear not quite to have understood the import of what they were doing.

  They made a major technical error, too, that would ultimately cost the railroad dearly. Thinking that the land was too swampy and that positioning the railroad above the land would reduce the impact of snowfall and flooding, the Erie spent three-quarters of a million dollars driving piles into the ground on which the track would be laid. The directors had become enamored of a device called Crane’s Patent Pile Driving Machine, eight of which—operated by no fewer than thirteen men apiece—were enlisted in the cause of creating a raised railroad. More than one hundred miles of piling were completed before the idea was abandoned when it was discovered that the foundations were not stable.12 The Erie would have done well to call on the pioneering railroad engineer George Stephenson, who had successfully built part of the Liverpool & Manchester through marshy terrain in the late 1820s. Early passengers on the Erie would be bemused by the sight of mile upon mile of decaying oak piles running parallel to the line.

  A further blunder was the Erie’s choice of a six-foot gauge, rather than the four feet and eight and a half inches that eventually became standard. The wider gauge was chosen for a variety of reasons, including, oddly, the utterly false notion that it was used extensively in the UK. But the chief motivation behind the Erie’s directors’ decision, as with Isambard Kingdom Brunel when he opted for a seven-and-a-quarter-foot broad gauge on the Great Western, was the wish to differentiate the railroad from others. The directors also argued that the steep gradients on the line would require powerful locomotives, which could be more easily accommodated with the extra width. There was an obstinacy in the decision, too, the notion that it would be better if the Erie did not connect with any of its lesser neighbors— further evidence of the directors’ failure to understand that the ultimate role of the railroads would be, precisely, to allow long- distance carriage. This isolationist stance had been encouraged by the State of New York, which, in order to protect New York’s advantageous trade position, had included a provision in the railroad’s charter that the line should not connect with any others across state borders. This decision not only increased costs because of the extra width required for the track, but, as with the Great Western in the UK, had to be reversed later at vast expense, a task that was not fully completed until the 1880s.

  The choice of gauge may seem like a mere technical issue—and therefore beyond the scope of this book—but in fact it is of fundamental importance to railroad history. In Australia, for example, the failure to agree upon a standard gauge throughout the country fatally undermined the railroad’s efficiency and prevented it from developing into the vital economic force that it became in most economically advanced nations. In America, too, there was no clarity over gauge at the dawn of the railroad age, and the Erie was far from alone among early railroads in choosing its gauge with little regard for the idea of connecting with other lines. The Baltimore & Ohio was built to what became standard gauge, four feet and eight and a half inches,13 whereas on the Mohawk & Hudson the rails were four feet, nine inches apart, and on the Camden & Amboy a further inch separated the rails. In the South, the Charleston & Hamburg had gone for the full five feet—a common, but by no means universal, gauge for southern railroads. Louisiana, for example, went for five and a half feet. As early as 1834, the American Railroad Journal was advocat
ing the adoption of a universal gauge, but this would not actually be achieved until a half century later (see Chapter 8). By the outbreak of the Civil War, there were eleven gauges in the North and almost as many in the South. A journey between Philadelphia and Charleston would, at the time, require no fewer than eight changes of gauge.

  Probably the most bizarre consequence of the failure to unify gauges was the brief battle dubbed the Erie Gauge War of 1853–1854. Confusingly, this had nothing to do with the Erie Railroad, which was, in fact, named after Lake Erie and did not pass through the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, where the battle took place. The line between Buffalo, New York, and the New York–Pennsylvania border was built to a gauge of four feet, ten inches by the Buffalo & State Line Railroad. However, a passenger heading west from that border toward Cleveland, Ohio (the next state), would have to change trains, because a twenty-mile stretch of line between the border and the town of Erie had been built, by a different company, the Erie & Northeast Railroad, to a six-foot gauge. Then, at Erie itself, came yet another change of train—back to the gauge of four feet, ten inches that was becoming prevalent in Ohio. Obviously, this was totally unsatisfactory for the passengers, but for the people of Erie, as with residents of many other such junction towns, one man’s burden was another’s benefit. The local carters and haulers, and, indirectly, the hoteliers, inn-keepers, and restaurateurs, profited from the town’s status as an enforced stopping place.