The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  In charge of the depot was the station agent, a ubiquitous and increasingly important figure in the railroads, who, in European terms, was a combination of stationmaster, ticket clerk, and train dispatcher. He was the public face of the railroad company, and, not surprisingly, he did not always manage to juggle his many tasks to the satisfaction of passengers. His first problem was that, until the advent of the telegraph, he had no information about when a train was likely to arrive. Timetables were vague or nonexistent, and given the frequency of breakdowns, his only means of finding out if a train was approaching was to climb up to his lookout point. The agent was also in charge of selling tickets, but from the outset American railroads departed from the European practice of booking passengers in advance and only allowing people with tickets to board trains. Given the number of small, remote stations described by Dickens, that would have been utterly impractical. Instead, some passengers bought tickets from the station agents, whereas others paid the conductor, and it took some time for the railroads to work out ways of preventing fraud by both passengers and employees, which was prevalent. Early tickets came in various forms, ranging from metal discs to glazed colored pieces of cardboard. Numbered tickets were the obvious solution, but they did not become widely used until the mid-1850s and still did not prevent the conductor from simply pocketing the cash without issuing any kind of receipt, perhaps sharing the profit with the traveler, a scam known as “knocking off” that the companies attempted, often in vain, to stymie throughout the history of passenger rail in the United States.

  The conductor, called the captain in early days, also had a variety of jobs to do, as nicely described by George Douglas: “The conductor took tickets, sold passage to those who boarded the train without tickets, supervised the other trainmen, settled arguments, disciplined unruly children and admonished inebriated passengers.” The task of keeping passengers in check was not always straightforward. Trains were the first form of mass transportation, other than shipping, and people did not necessarily know how to behave. In the words of Sarah H. Gordon, “Passenger behavior ranged far from the traditional image of waiting quietly at the station, boarding the train when it stopped, and remaining seated throughout the journey.”34 Indeed. During the first two decades of the railroad age, when trains ran slowly—and infrequently—people would hop on freight wagons, ride in the caboose (the brake van) and the locomotive, or—tunnels being infrequent—sit on top of the cars. Passengers jumped on and off the trains at any point that took their fancy. During the numerous stops for breakdowns or to replenish the supply of wood or water, they wandered off into the countryside, either for the hell of it or to satisfy their bodily functions, since there were no toilets on board, sometimes finding themselves stranded when the train resumed its journey. Many careless souls perished, too, not understanding the unforgiving nature of tens of tons of rapidly moving metal.

  Inside, they would sit with legs or arms dangling out of the windows, spit (as Dickens noted), get drunk, abuse the conductor, and try to travel without paying. It took some time for the railroad companies to obtain the legal powers to be able to deal with misbehaving passengers. The states had to pass specific laws to allow railroad companies to throw passengers off the train for not paying the fare and even to give conductors the legal right to collect tickets.

  Conductors were seen by the railroads as representing the public face of the company to their customers. The cannier companies, therefore, recruited men with strong personalities, but who were also able to empathize with the passengers and help them cope with the inconveniences of rail travel. Conductors would often work the same trains week in and week out, thereby establishing relationships with the regular travelers and becoming well known throughout their route. At first, the driver took responsibility for the train and the welfare of the passengers, but it soon became obvious that the conductor was better placed to do so. According to railroad legend, it was the doyen of the early conductors, Henry—or “Poppy” as he was generally known—Ayres who changed this practice. Ayres, a “huge, genial teddy bear of a man, weighing nearly three hundred pounds . . . [who] hovered over his passengers with benevolent menace,” joined the uncompleted Erie in 1841.35 Shortly after he started working for the Erie, Ayres had a row with an engineer (driver), a German named Hamel, which is said to have established the future hierarchy on the trains. As there was no way of communicating with the driver, Ayres had rigged up a crude rope device, a kind of primitive forerunner of the emergency cord that would later become standard, to alert the driver if he wanted the train to stop. Hamel, a cussed character, refused to play ball and kept on cutting the rope. On the second occasion, Ayres threatened to beat up his hapless colleague unless he acquiesced in the arrangement, thereby ensuring that in the future, the conductor would be in charge of the train. To his passengers, however, Ayres was politeness personified. He remained with the Erie for thirty years, achieving fame and public recognition for the excellence of the service he gave to both his passengers and his employers. Ayres once persuaded an old lady who had left her umbrella, a precious family heirloom, on a connecting ferryboat that he had arranged for it to be sent via the telegraph system— an invention of mystery in the 1850s—to the next station. He knew, in fact, that lost items were generally dumped in the baggage car, but he was nonetheless rewarded for his pains with a rather undeserved kiss.

  Not only were trains few and far between in these early days, with perhaps two or three services per day at best on most lines, but they also traveled very slowly by modern standards. These two apparent inconveniences had an upside, however, in terms of passenger safety, since the infrequency of the trains made collisions a rarity. And the fact that the majority of trains traveled at barely twenty miles per hour meant that the frequent derailments—often dealt with by the simple expedient of the male passengers being inveigled into helping haul the recalcitrant car back on the rails— resulted in few injuries, let alone deaths, unlike in later years, when safety would become a major problem for the railroad companies (see Chapter 7). There were, of course, exceptions, and the first recorded passenger fatality—excluding the deaths of unwary people who were hit by trains while crossing the tracks—was on the Camden & Amboy in November 1833, barely a few weeks after all the horses on the railroad had been replaced by locomotives. A train traveling from South Amboy was derailed at Hightstown, New Jersey, when an axle broke, injuring all but one of the twenty-four passengers and killing two. The train was carrying a remarkable contingent of famous people, suggesting perhaps that early travelers were largely the better off. The infamous entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt, who broke a leg in the accident, vowed never to travel by rail again, a promise he failed to keep when he gained control of numerous railroads a quarter of a century later (see Chapter 8). The former president and now congressman John Quincy Adams was the sole passenger to escape unscathed, while Irish actor Tyrone Power, who suffered only minor injuries, later wrote a detailed account of the crash, describing it as “the most dreadful catastrophe that ever my eyes beheld” and recalling how he helped a fellow passenger, a surgeon, tend to the injured.36

  As rail lines extended, journeys lasting more than the daylight hours became necessary. Some railroad companies started running freight trains after dark, and from the early 1840s passengers, too, started being carried at night. The technical difficulties of nighttime travel, especially the issue of lighting the way for locomotives, proved hard to tackle. One company, the South Carolina Canal Railroad Company, hit upon the primitive and perilous idea of hitching a small flat wagon to the front of the locomotive with a pile of sand and blazing pine-log fire to light up the way, but this crude solution, clearly a stopgap, was soon abandoned. Instead, various types of oil lamps were tried, and eventually the rather more secure system of kerosene-burning lamps with mirrors to enhance the beam was universally adopted. Some of the early lamps were huge, more than two feet high, but soon they were reduced to a more manageable size. This was another poi
nt of divergence between railroad practice in America and Britain, where locomotives ran without any front lights until the 1880s, since it was felt that as long as there were no obstacles on the track they were unnecessary, although they were helpful to track workers. Part of the reason was that British lines were protected by fences, whereas in America railroads were never totally enclosed, which explains in part their lower construction cost. This lack of fencing increased the likelihood of collisions, both with people and—later—with cars. In the early days, however, it was animals that came most frequently into contact with trains, normally with fatal results for the latter. A fully grown cow could easily derail a train, even one fitted with a cowcatcher, and the railroad companies were by law always held liable for these incidents. Cannier farmers realized that this was a lucrative way of disposing of poor livestock. The Michigan Central, a line that traversed cattle country for much of its route, was keen to keep on the right side of the public and consequently made generous provisions to any farmer whose animals were struck by a train.

  When the line was taken over by a private company, the new owners tried to reduce the bovine casualty rate by putting up fences, but still the cows kept wandering onto the tracks. As Holbrook explains, “The simple, honest agrarians along the road were quick-witted to know Opportunity when it loomed on the steel rails in the form of the Iron Horse. They began to feed their oldest and poorest stock handy to the tracks and often, it is said, plumb between the rails.”37 The company, cottoning to the farmers’ ploy, reduced the compensation to half the value of the beast. The farmers, far from giving up, launched a full-scale war on the railroad, putting obstructions on the line, tampering with switches, and attacking trains with stones. It was only when the railroad infiltrated the farmers’ organization and raided their homes just as an arson attack on a train was being launched that normal traffic could be restored. A dozen conspirators were convicted and jailed.

  It was passengers rather than freight that kept the early railroads solvent. In fact, the rail companies were slow to see the potential of freight as a source of income, which is ironic given that today America’s rail industry is dominated by freight interests. The reason for the tardiness, though, was simple. As American towns in the first decades of the nineteenth century were largely self-reliant, there was little need to transport manufactured goods around the country. As for the transportation of agricultural produce, the other potential area of freight transport, it took some time for farmers to appreciate that the railroads created new markets for their produce. As George Douglas summarizes, “The railroads didn’t get into the freight business in the early days simply because there was no freight business to be had.”38 Of course, some lines were built solely to serve a mine or quarry, and mail began to be carried as early as 1834 on the Camden & Amboy and on many other railroads soon after. Indeed, by the end of the 1830s, entrepreneurs like William F. Harnden and Alvin Adams were renting space in baggage cars for their express-parcel services, but most of the early railroads earned the bulk of their income from passengers.

  Whereas freight could be carried uncomplainingly at night, accommodating passengers was more difficult. Train travel in the early days was not for people of nervous disposition: “Those who travelled on the first American railroads needed every bit as much pioneer spirit as those who built them.” Some trains simply stopped wherever they happened to be at dusk, with little regard for the needs of their passengers. The New York Tribune, in October 1846, suggested that the Housatonic Railroad in Connecticut, whose trains simply stopped at nightfall, should “either run their trains through in the course of a day or stop them where passengers can find beds.” The newspaper editor was appalled that on several occasions trains had stopped overnight at the village of New Milford, where there were no hotels, and therefore, shockingly, “several ladies had to lie on the floor without beds.”39 As more trains simply continued their journeys through the night, the discomforts mounted, particularly for women. Whereas men could simply put their legs up on the seat in front, provided it was empty, for women such an indelicate move was considered unseemly, and therefore they had to keep their feet on the floor, making sleep even more difficult. A few more forward-looking railroads began introducing cars with facilities to bed down on several eastern routes, but they were still basic and uncomfortable until the man who gave his name to the sleeping car, George Pullman, transformed overnight travel in midcentury (see Chapter 7).

  Sunday travel was another bone of contention. While some railroads with devout directors argued that this broke the Sabbath, others cottoned to the idea that Sundays could be a source of profitable business. The clergy themselves seemed to have an ambivalent attitude: “Pastors often extorted special Sunday excursion rates from companies, even as they argued the remainder of the week against running trains on the Sabbath.”40 The men of the cloth stressed that a Sunday excursion into the countryside for a picnic was a healthy exercise. Despite this, some railroads, particularly in the South, refused to run trains on Sundays, creating much inconvenience for passengers. In Vermont, Sunday passengers had to endure a passage from the Bible being read out above the clatter of the train by the conductor to fulfill the requirement of a state law passed in the 1850s.

  Connections, in those early times, were a particular trial. As we have seen, transferring between separate stations in the same town generally required a cab ride and, because of the lack of coordination of services, could involve a lengthy wait. Right up to the Civil War and beyond, many railroads resisted investing in expensive river crossings, and therefore journeys were broken up by short rides in steamboats. Travelers on long and complicated journeys were at risk, too, of being cheated by “runners” working for agents. They would sell tickets promising connections between all the various legs of the journey, but on arrival at some distant point the naive traveler would find that the runner’s voucher, often painstakingly printed with images of the latest locomotives and steamers, was just an elegant fraud.

  For the rich, there is always the option of buying themselves out of inconveniences, and train travel was no exception. Railroad companies were happy to provide a flatcar on which a buggy or stagecoach could be attached with ropes and, better still, offered the affluent the opportunity of exclusive use of a well-appointed private car. The stagecoaches soon became a safety risk, as the speeds of railroads increased, but the rich continued to travel in their own railroad cars, normally hooked up to a regular service, right into the twentieth century.

  The feelings of the less affluent travelers who had to slum it in the service cars were neatly summed up by one, unfortunately nameless, traveler who, after a troublesome journey on the Boston & Providence in 1835, commented: “And all this for the sake of doing very uncomfortably in two days what could be done delightfully in eight or ten.”41 Leaving aside the rather fanciful notion that eight to ten days spent in a stagecoach could be described in any way as “delightful,” speed was the railroad’s unique selling point, which ensured that within a generation it became the dominant form of travel. Even the average of twenty miles per hour, which the early trundlers struggled to achieve, was sufficient to give the railroads a tremendous advantage over all the alternative forms of transportation. It was speed that stimulated the boom that saw the mileage of railroads, which in 1840 was around the same as that of the canals, increase almost exponentially, whereas canal building all but stopped. In the 1840s only 375 miles of new canal were added to the network, and closures of the economically weak waterways had already begun. Railroads like the Hudson River Railroad, and indeed the Erie, were being laid parallel to existing canals or river routes, and consequently even the steamboats were beginning to feel the pinch.