The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  However, the focus of the region was already changing. Chicago had previously looked south to New Orleans along the Mississippi as its main economic outlet, but this was an unsatisfactory transportation corridor, as both the trip downriver and the subsequent voyage across to Europe were lengthy and expensive. With the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s, Chicago had begun to look eastward. The town had become the effective terminus of the waterway, because ships, after reaching the end of the canal at Buffalo, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, could continue their journey to Chicago along the Great Lakes. Whereas previously much of the raw produce of the area, such as meat, timber, and grain, was almost worthless because of the high cost of transportation, the value of these commodities increased as eastward communications improved. Chicago’s connection with the Mississippi was greatly facilitated by the completion of the Illinois & Michigan Canal in 1848, but westward extension of the waterway through the vast grain-growing area of the Midwest was impractical given the distances involved. The railroad was the obvious means of exploiting the rapidly growing economy of the region. And Chicago, at its center, with its easy connections both East and West, as well as the water-front on Lake Michigan, was its natural strategic hub. Ogden’s Galena & Chicago Union rapidly became profitable, proving to be far more efficient than the plank roads. Two other, similar, railroads soon sprang up, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy24 and, in the same year, the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, which in 1866 became the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, revealing its ultimate ambition of reaching the ocean, which, as with many similarly named railroads of the time, was never fulfilled. These were the three original “Granger” railroads, so called because their primary purpose was to bring farm produce to market. By reducing the price of transportation, these railroads increased the amount of money the farmers received for their produce and were the catalyst for the agricultural development of the huge Midwest prairies.

  In 1852, Chicago was connected to the Eastern Seaboard by the Michigan Central, which later became part of the New York Central system. Like the Erie and the Pennsylvania, both of which would eventually reach Chicago, this was a very different type of railroad from those that were swiftly spreading out west of the city. The nature of this difference explains one of the great mysteries of the American railroad system: why did all railroads, from both East and West, stop in Chicago, rather than simply going around or through the Windy City, just as they traversed every other town in the vast space between the two oceans? The answer is that the two sets of railroads that terminated at Chicago—the Granger railroads to the west and the major trunk railroads to the east—were so different as to be completely incompatible in purpose and financial performance, preventing the mergers that would seem logical. The four major eastern trunk railroads—the Erie, New York Central, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore & Ohio (which had finally gotten to Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in 1852)—soon reached Chicago. The reason they stopped there and did not progress westward was because, by the time of their arrival, the Granger railroads had already established themselves. The Grangers were weak railroads, eking out a tenuous existence delivering farm produce to market, a one-way business that offered little potential for growth. The large areas they covered, and the fierce competition—at least initially—between each railroad company, meant that they earned low returns, making them an unattractive acquisition for the big trunk railroads. For their part, the Grangers could not expand eastward, as they were always too weak to take on the big railroad companies. Once past Chicago, they would have had to build lines all the way to the East Coast, as the existing lines would have refused them access to their tracks, clearly an enterprise beyond them.

  The decision of the big trunk lines not to go beyond Chicago was based on caution and custom, since railroads did not like sending their trucks onto another company’s tracks through fear of losing them. This rather unimaginative thinking would determine the somewhat fragmented nature of the US railroad network. Perhaps if one adventurous eastern railroad had decided to venture west, braving the inevitable attacks from the Grangers, it might have been able to overcome the initial difficulties. The prize, a genuinely national rail system that would allow untrammeled transcontinental travel, could well have been worth it. In the event, only the Baltimore & Ohio dared, eventually, to try to connect the two types of railroad, through its purchase of the Chicago & Alton, but that was in 1931, when the railroads were already beginning to struggle in the face of competition from road and air transportation.

  Thus, by happenstance, a combination of geography and economics, as well as timidity and habit on the part of the big companies, Chicago became America’s preeminent railroad hub, though St. Louis became another key transfer point between eastern and western railroads. Even after America’s East and West Coasts were linked by the iron road, transcontinental services still started from Chicago rather than the Eastern Seaboard. Throughout the history of the US railroads, in fact, there have been very few transcontinental routes that did not require a change of trains in the Windy City.

  Chicago’s position as a railroad hub became entrenched as its people and politicians realized the advantages of not allowing traffic to go directly through. Chicago had no genuine through stations,25 only termini, and although a few freight lines, such as the Belt Railway, were eventually built around the city, the whole nation’s railroad industry became geared around Chicago as a transfer station, where trains were broken up and re-formed in massive classification yards for onward dispatch. It would sometimes take days for goods to be moved from one yard to another, and, like the citizens of Erie, the Chicagoans were in no hurry to suggest that the two different railroad systems serving the town should be unified. Quite the opposite. They benefited enormously from the lack of through routes, none more so than Franklin Parmalee, whose eponymous company enjoyed the highly lucrative monopoly of transferring passengers between the various stations. At least the service he provided was classy. He used old coach-style rigs pulled by the best local horses and painted a distinctive green and driven by smartly turned-out men. The latter developed a reputation for providing not only a cordial service but, more surprisingly, honest information, even if that meant they lost a fare because the destination was too close or best reached by another means, in distinct contrast to the “bunco steerers of various rackets who had been operating on American travelers since the earliest coaching days.”26 By the outbreak of the Civil War, Chicago was the undisputed rail capital of the United States, boasting no fewer than eleven rail lines.27

  The big trunk lines in the East remained very much the exception right up to the Civil War. Most of the hundreds of railroads being promoted and built in the years before the war were small, local, and limited in intent. The pace of their growth, however, was remarkable, with thirty thousand miles having been completed by the end of the 1850s. This was roughly as many miles as had been built at the time in the rest of the world put together and represented more than a tripling of the mileage of railroad in that decade. It was still, though, not a network but rather a collection of mostly short lines with a huge disparity in standards of provision. Through journeys were, for the most part, a trial, even in the East. For example, five different lines made up the New York–Washington service, making for a long and arduous journey, and it was not until 1863 that passengers could travel between the two cities without changing trains.

  Indeed, much rail travel before the Civil War was difficult, slow, and, as traffic increased, potentially dangerous (see Chapter 6). In 1840, the American railroad system was merely a “thin, broken network stretching along the Atlantic coast from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the Carolinas.”28 Broken is the right word. To go from Boston to Georgia, for example, required a rail trip to Stonington, Connecticut, steamers to New York and then to New Jersey, followed by four different rail journeys to reach Washington, with changes at Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where the two train stations were at different ends of the tow
n, necessitating a cab ride.

  Charles Dickens, an experienced traveler on railroads in Britain, visited the United States in 1842 and was not impressed with what he found, sparking a lifelong controversy between the writer and the new nation when his collection of musings titled American Notes was published in October of that year. His first journey was on the Boston & Lowell, which he found lacking in most of the amenities to which he was accustomed: “There are no first and second class carriages as with us; but there is a gentlemen’s car and a ladies’ car: the main distinction between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the second, nobody does. As a black man never travels with a white one, there is also a negro car; which is a great blundering clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of Brobdingnag.”29

  In fact, on some railroads black people, both slaves and free, could travel in the same accommodation as white people, whereas on others, especially in the South, they were relegated to baggage or freight cars. Contrary to what Dickens says, there was first- and second-class accommodation on some railroads, with variations in fare levels much in line with European practice. When the Western Railroad opened between Boston and Albany in 1842, for example, it charged $5.50 for first class but just $3.66 in second. The Boston & Lowell, on which Dickens traveled, had second-class cars on the services that catered to factory workers, charging them just $0.75 cents compared with the $1.00 that Dickens probably paid.

  Most of the early cars on American trains were based on stagecoach design, accommodating perhaps a dozen or possibly thirty people at most. Even the more modern ones were little better, and it was no wonder that Dickens found these “shabby omnibuses” not to his liking. The cars were, in fact, rather like the homes of the day: they were built of wood, poorly lit by candles, and inadequately heated by stoves, and the only ventilation came from opening their rather small windows. Worse, for Dickens, was the layout. Unlike those in the UK, which had individual compartments, the US cars were open plan, accommodating up to fifty people, with the doors at the ends. They were fitted with crosswise seats, separated by a narrow passage through the aisle, each holding two people. Dickens, a rather private man, did not enjoy the fact that Americans expected to talk to their neighbors during the journey, even raising subjects that would be taboo between strangers in England such as politics and, showing that some things do not change over time, banks. Cotton, too, was a perennial matter for discussion. Being forced to sit among the other passengers meant that Dickens met far more Americans than he probably would have done otherwise, but he used this experience merely to pour scorn on the American tendency toward patriotism and their supposed mispronunciation of the word route as rout. He was impressed with the ladies’ coaches, particularly the fact that they made it possible “for any lady [to] travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere.” However, he disliked the fact that the conductor wore no uniform and walked up and down the car “as his fancy dictates, leans against the door with his hands in his pockets and stares at you.”

  American informality was clearly not to his liking, either, and worse was Americans’ habit, mentioned in the previous chapter, of chewing tobacco and spitting the remnants on the floor. Another, more sympathetic, English writer, Fanny Kemble, an actress who loved the nascent railroads—she was taken on a train by George Stephenson before the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester in 1830—found “a whole tribe of itinerant fruit and cake-sellers” offering their wares at every major station, as well as water boys who passed through the train with a long-spout can and glasses for the benefit of thirsty travelers, unconcerned with the lack of hygiene;30 such a service can still be found on some trains in India today. Journeys were enlivened, too, by the news agent, often fondly referred to as the “news butcher” or even “news butch.” In the early days, these were self-employed young men who had realized that passengers on long train journeys would welcome reading material, as well as drinks and snacks. They would pass through the trains offering the day’s paper, magazines, sweets, soda pop, and cigarettes. Later, the individual entrepreneurs were subsumed into the gigantic Union News Company, which was given a monopoly by many train companies in an effort to deter peddlers on the trains. The “butchers”—invariably enthusiastic young men, dressed in the smart blue uniform with brass buttons of the company—would, in a falsetto voice, scramble their various wares into one word: candycigarettescigars or newspapermagazines. As time went on, they expanded their offerings. Whereas officially they were allowed to sell only respectable magazines such as Harper’s and Scribner’s, many privately supplied penny dreadfuls or even slightly titillating magazines that would have passed as the Playboy of the day. Traveling much later through America by train, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson was impressed by the young men providing the service and amazed that one could buy “soap, towels, tin washing basins, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon.”31 The butchers were not always benign, however. Short-changing drunks and elderly passengers and selling bogus goods were frequent rackets, as was the scam of offering cheaply bound novels for twice the normal price of twenty-five cents on the basis that one of them supposedly had a ten-dollar note inside.

  In the winter, heating was a universal problem on the early trains. Dickens found that most cars were provided with a stove in the middle. This not only filled the air with what he called “the ghost of smoke” but also meant that those sitting near it became overheated, while those at the far ends of the car simultaneously froze. The stoves were a hazard, too, in the event of accidents, becoming “the cause of cremation” in later years when derailments and other disasters became ever more frequent.32 In the heat of summer, the dilemma for passengers was that opening the windows, if they afforded such a facility, risked the perils of sparks from the chimney setting clothes on fire, while keeping them closed meant virtual asphyxiation in the hotter parts of the nation. Indeed, cinders from the soft coal used in the United States not infrequently wrecked the clothes of passengers in uncovered wagons or those unwise enough to open the windows in more modern ones. One prominent and infuriated victim was the visiting English social reformer and abolitionist Harriet Martineau, who reported that sparks had burned no fewer than thirteen holes in her gown during a short journey in the South.

  In glorious overwritten prose, Dickens bemoans the lack of views, the discomforts, the noise, the smells, and the bumpy ride caused by the primitive couplings between cars:

  There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell. . . . Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours. . . . Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and schoolhouse; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water.

  He was flabbergasted by the scarcity of people at the intermediate stations, even on a journey close to a major city like Boston, and the fact that the train ran down several main streets, which was rarely the case in Britain apart from on small branch lines:

  The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no
policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted “When The Bell Rings, Look Out For The Locomotive.” On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on hap-hazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road . . . on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.

  While Dickens’s description does not suggest it, the Boston & Lowell was, in fact, one of America’s better-appointed railroads at the time. Other lines were far more primitive. The empty woodland stations Dickens describes were better than the halts found on many other lines that had no facilities whatsoever and where, to stop the train, the local farmer would have to wave his shirt at the approaching locomotive. In towns, trains would stop on a particular corner, or the railroad company might have rented a small shop to sell tickets and provide a few lucky waiting passengers with some shelter from the elements. Even more so than on European railroads, stations were an afterthought for the parsimonious rail companies, who found it tough enough dealing with all the engineering problems such as track, tunnels, and ties without having to consider providing for the wretched passengers. So American stations were termed depots, based on the French word dépôt, a place not so much to offer services to the passenger but, rather, to deposit goods or people with a minimum of fuss. These depots were modest, and the most common structure was a wooden barn through which the train passed as if in a tunnel. Not surprisingly, since they were made of wood, destruction by fire was an all too frequent hazard, a fate suffered by the East Boston depot of Massachusetts’s Eastern Railroad on the very day the railroad opened in 1836. A few depots were fitted with doors at either end of the tracks to retain a measure of warmth in the adjoining waiting rooms, but this created an additional hazard, as locomotives occasionally crashed through them to the horror of the waiting passengers. Right from the beginning, depots began to provide food for passengers (a necessity given the increasing length of the journeys being undertaken), but it was rarely wholesome. Hapless travelers who consumed these prepared meals during a lunchtime stop at a depot often complained of indigestion, possibly caused by having to bolt down their food to ensure they could regain their seats, which generally could not be reserved. Station facilities taken for granted by rail travelers today, such as signs displaying the name of the station and warnings to advise passengers of an imminent departure, took many years to be introduced. Indeed, many railroad companies seemed reluctant to stop for passengers or provide them with even the most basic facilities. In New Hampshire, for example, the state had to legislate in 1850 to compel the railroad companies to provide depots for passengers at every stop. Other states tried to ensure that passengers were provided with information about services—timetables—so that they did not have to wait interminably at stations. As historian Sarah H. Gordon comments, “That the state had to require railroads to arrive and depart on schedule, to provide reasonable accommodation, and to build passenger depots implies a notably lackadaisical approach by railroad corporations to the social aspects of rail service.”33