The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Although the service in Pullman cars may have been solicitous in the extreme, that was not the case for those unfortunate enough to breathe their last in one of his cars. The company rule was simple and immutable. The corpse had to be taken off at the next station stop, even if there were no undertaking facilities there. The conductors, more humane than their employers, were on occasion known to break the rule surreptitiously, allowing the deceased and their companions to continue to the next town that had an undertaker rather than leaving them with the body of their loved one at some godforsaken, lonely halt.

  The logical extension of the sleeping coach was the dining car, and here too Pullman was an innovator, though not the inventor. The provision of food had long been a neglected issue for passengers and one that the railroads almost cussedly failed to address. Travelers were encouraged to bring their own food or to buy from the hawkers who congregated at stations and sold their wares through passenger windows. On some routes, the railroads allowed brief meal stops during which passengers rushed off the train, gulped down a usually rather unsatisfactory meal in specially appointed restaurants on the platforms, and were herded back by hustling and whistling train staff eager to keep the service on schedule. On the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad, for example, stations were marked on the timetable with an e, for “eats.” Before stopping at Grinnell, Iowa, the conductor would make his way through the cars asking how many people needed supper and then wire ahead to the local Hotel Monroe to ensure the right number of meals would be made available. For his pains, of course, he would get a free meal.10

  It was not until 1862 that the first dedicated food-service car was introduced by the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, a predecessor of the Pennsylvania Railroad. This was not a proper dining car but a stand-up counter at which precooked meals could be purchased and eaten. The meals were reheated in an oven powered by steam from the locomotive, a not entirely enticing prospect.

  As he had done with the sleeping car, Pullman revolutionized the concept and was the first to provide what were called “hotel cars,” with their own kitchen facilities and table service. Initially, the idea was to install a small galley on a sleeping car, serving steak meals for sixty cents at temporary tables, but in 1868 Pullman’s Delmonico—he always gave his cars names, often with classical references, or, in this case, to a chic New York restaurant—ushered in a new era of on-board refreshment, as it was the first vehicle dedicated purely to the preparation and serving of meals. This development broke the railroads’ long resistance to providing dining cars, born, quite possibly, of the realization that they were likely to be a loss maker, as, in fact, has proved to be the case, since the cost of staffing and providing quality food at an acceptable price generally outweighs what can be reasonably charged for a meal. Nevertheless, Pullman’s initiative was soon followed by other companies, and by the 1880s dining cars had become standard on long-distance routes. Interestingly, although the range of food varied considerably in both quality and variety, with many companies specializing in regional dishes, the layout of dining cars has remained largely standard right through to the present day.

  For Pullman, the dining car was a chance to further indulge the luxury market. And how. The hotel cars on the Chicago–Omaha leg of the transcontinental route listed no fewer than fifteen seafood dishes—kept fresh with vast quantities of ice carried in a separate car—and no fewer than thirty-seven meat entrées, including a prodigious selection of game. On the highly competitive route between New York and Chicago in the 1880s, according to Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Pullman’s mouthwatering menus included, besides staples such as chicken, ham, chops, and porterhouse steaks, “exotica such as English snipe, quail, golden plover and blue winged teal; or oysters and clams, raw, stewed, boiled, fried or ‘fancy roast’ as you might wish, all at around 50 cents per person.”11 If you still had the appetite, a rum omelet would set you back only a further forty cents, and a good brandy could be had for just thirty cents. Life on the crack trains for affluent passengers was rather like a permanent party. The sexes, in good Victorian fashion, were separated, with lounges for ladies and club cars complete with card tables for the men, who could drink, smoke, and gamble without being bothered. Nothing was spared in the decor, with its rich upholstery, heavy drapes, massive freestanding armchairs (discreetly bolted down to cope with the vagaries of the track), perhaps even a piano, and always a well-stocked library.

  Of course, things were not like that for everyone. Hoi polloi traveled in more modest style, but the introduction of sleeping and dining cars was part of a wider improvement to rail services that began as soon as the Civil War ended and continued through to the end of the century.

  Technical improvements to trains made a difference not just to passengers’ comfort, but also, crucially, to their safety. The poor safety record of the railroads had become a national scandal after the Civil War. As we saw in Chapter 3, there were few accidents in the early days, but as trains speeded up and services became more frequent, both the frequency and the seriousness of rail disasters increased.

  Most early deaths came about not through accidents but as a result of passengers, unused to even the modest speeds of the trains, jumping on and off cars while they were in motion. The American design of coaches, with a platform at both ends, was far too tempting for passengers who saw a train departing, and not a few ended up under the wheels. Leaning out of the window was another bad idea, as there was very little clearance. One early victim on the Erie soon after its opening was a Mrs. Walters, who made the mistake of trying to ensure her luggage had been taken on board and was killed instantly when her head hit a station support.

  The most common victims, however, were trespassers, or simply “track strollers,” whose deaths attracted little attention because they were seen as largely their own fault. Track walking was a deceptively hazardous activity that, in a way, was almost encouraged by the lack of fencing. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this was partly the result of American railroads being built on the cheap, but also of the fact that they stretched far into virgin territory where fencing was simply unnecessary. It was, perhaps, understandable that it took time for people to comprehend the danger posed by the speed at which trains traveled. As today in parts of Asia and Latin America, the railroad track often represented the best route for walking between neighboring villages, but those who used these shortcuts were unaware that a train traveling at just thirty miles per hour covers forty-four feet per second and, on the single tracks that were the norm in those days, could come from either direction. Walking in the same direction as the wind was particularly hazardous, as the sound of a train behind the hapless stroller might not be heard until it was too late. Drunkenness, too, was a contributing factor in many track fatalities.

  Right from the beginning, “trespassers”—who included suicides, since standing in front of a train ensured that no second attempt was required— were the biggest category of casualties. As Henry Poor, the editor of the American Railroad Journal, wrote in 1855, “Of the hundreds who are annually maimed or slaughtered on our railroads, more have certainly fallen victim from careless walking or lying [!] on the track than from any other half-dozen causes put together.” Mark Aldrich, a chronicler of disasters on the American railroads, reckons that “railroads killed children by the hundreds who were playing on the track or gathering coal.”12 The State of New York responded to these accidents in 1850 by requiring fencing, but this was a rare exception, and the American railroads remain largely unfenced to this day. By 1890, deaths by “trespassing” had reached an annual rate of more than three thousand and would attain a peak of more than fifty-five hundred during the First World War.

  These statistics did not include deaths at grade crossings, which were a major source of accidents and remain one of the greatest risk areas of train travel in the United States.13 As mentioned in Chapter 2, the American railroads differed from their European counterparts by the proliferation of grade crossings, or “level crossings
” as they are called in Europe. On main lines European railroads in general separated roads from railroads with bridges or tunnels. In America the railroads, built quickly and cheaply, crossed roads without a bridge or underpass being provided. There were no crossing keepers, and accidents were inevitable. In the days when only horses and carts trundled along the road, damage and injury were largely confined to the road users, although there was the odd exception when the accident caused a train to derail. However, as roads became busier—ironically as a result of the very development stimulated by the railroads—the risks increased.

  It was not just passengers, trespassers, or road users who lost their lives on the railroads. It was, in fact, railroad employees who faced by far the greatest risk, and within a couple of decades of the start of the railroad age, the annual death toll had already reached three figures. Indeed, railroad employees have always suffered far more fatalities than passengers, and in the early days there was little regard for their safety, despite the great variety of risks they encountered, which attracted little attention in the press. Working on the open track was ever hazardous, but the biggest danger was in shunting yards, where drivers, firemen, and track workers were often hit by engines. Even though the locomotives moved only very slowly, the result of such collisions was frequently fatal. Boiler explosions were a far greater hazard than they were in Europe, as locomotives were pushed harder over longer distances and at higher pressures to get up the steeper gradients, and there was no inspection regime. Indeed, unlike in most European countries, the US government did not initially inspect new railroads before they opened. The first such inspections were introduced at the state level in New York only in 1855, but there was no universal system until much later. Nor was there a systematic way of investigating accidents. Again, New York was the pioneer, setting up a commission to investigate accidents based on the British Board of Trade, but only a few states followed suit before the Civil War.

  Indeed, there was a lack of regulation of all aspects of the railroads until the later years of the nineteenth century. Although there were a few regulations in some states, generally introduced as a response to a particular disaster, there was what could be described as a deliberate “want of government regulation.” America was a country of pioneers, different from staid Europe, and it was in keeping with its spirit that perhaps less regard was paid to safety than on the other side of the Atlantic. The contrast between European and American attitudes was summed up by an Englishman, Charles Weld, whose train was derailed because of the crew’s efforts to make up time. He found that most of the passengers commended the train crew’s attempts to get back on schedule and commented, “Accidents on railways are thought so little of in America it is useless to remonstrate.” Not entirely. Gradually, the situation changed as accidents, and the publicity surrounding them, proliferated. The tone of the most extreme newspaper coverage can be gauged from a comment in the Ogdensburg (NY) Republican, which in 1852 claimed there had been “a proposal in the state legislature to abolish hanging and substitute for punishment a ride upon some of our railroads.”14

  In terms of bald statistics, rail travel was generally very safe, especially when one considers that it was a novel technology that was still bedding down. The death toll of passengers was small in relation to the millions using the railroads, but by the mid-1850s the perception of danger was understandably heightened as these accidents came to the notice of the public through a press that was never restrained in its reporting of disasters and tended to illustrate its coverage with lurid line drawings. The clamor for legislation increased as the trains grew in number and traveled ever faster.

  The year 1853 was a seminal one in terms of rail accidents and the public attitude toward them. It had started particularly badly with the death in January of Bennie, the eight-year-old son of the president-elect, Franklin Pierce. The family was traveling from Boston to their home in Concord, New Hampshire, on the Boston & Lowell Railroad, when a coupling broke, sending the Pierces’ car down an embankment. Although the coach was rather more luxuriously appointed than most contemporary cars, it was still a flimsy wooden affair that broke up easily on impact, and poor Bennie was killed instantly, crushed under a seat. It was a tragedy from which his father, who along with his wife was unhurt in the crash, never really recovered during his undistinguished four-year term in the White House.

  That relatively minor accident was a portent of far worse to come later in the year. Two major disasters took place within a fortnight of each other in the spring of 1853, and their proximity exacerbated the sense that railroads were dangerous. The first was at a railroad intersection near Chicago accurately known as Grand Crossing. Chicago was experiencing its initial surge of railroad construction, and railroad lines were being laid with little thought for safety or operating convenience. At Grand Crossing the tracks of the Michigan Central had been built right across those of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, two hostile rivals. The procedure for such intersections was crude and required all trains to stop, but the rules were not always followed by engineers who believed that trains of other companies were simply unwanted intruders.15 On April 25, an eastbound Michigan Central express bound for Toledo, Ohio, ran into the side of a heavily loaded Michigan Southern immigrant train that failed to observe a stop signal, causing the death of twenty-one German passengers and injuring many more. Less than two weeks later, on May 6, the first major railroad bridge accident in the United States occurred on the New Haven Railroad, and again it was a driver who was responsible. The drawbridge over the Norwalk River in Connecticut was operated by a signaler who had correctly imposed a stop signal, which the driver ignored. The train plunged into the river with the loss of forty-six lives, and the driver narrowly escaped being lynched by the angry survivors, a fate that, according to George H. Douglas, “would befall numerous engineers—some culpable, some totally innocent—in the years ahead.”16

  The proximity of two accidents of such magnitude led to much anguished speculation in the newspapers about the safety of the railroads. There were several more high-profile accidents that year, but with lower death tolls. At the time, the most spectacular accidents were the growing numbers of head-on crashes, known with tombstone humor as “cornfield meets.” Since almost all railroads were single track, with no signaling, early train schedules were simply set by intervals between trains. But without telegraphic communication, which only began to be introduced widely in the 1850s, it was impossible to communicate between train and dispatchers (known as controllers in Britain), placing broken-down trains in great peril. The conductor was supposed to run down the track to put down warning flares, but on occasion this procedure broke down, resulting in disaster. Operating rules were crude and at times vague. Remarkably, the rules of several railroads, including some major ones such as the Camden & Amboy, the Western & Atlantic, and the Georgia Central, decreed that if two trains met, the one closest to a loop (or “turnout,” sections where there were two tracks to allow trains to pass each other) should reverse. According to Aldrich, “This encouraged train crews to speed, both to go beyond a turnout and if that failed, to back into it.”17 The result, on the Camden & Amboy, was predictable. In August 1855, a train from Philadelphia had arrived at Burlington, the normal crossing point, early and, according to company rules, was allowed to leave after waiting ten minutes when the train from New York failed to show up. However, once under way, the driver spotted the train coming from New York, and it was up to him to go back. He reversed at great speed, hitting a horse and buggy driven by an elderly doctor. The rear coach was derailed by the collision with the buggy, pulling four other coaches with it and causing the deaths of twenty-three passengers.

  The deadliness of “cornfield meets” was all too baldly demonstrated at Camp Hill on the North Pennsylvania Railroad on July 17, 1856. The world’s worst railroad accident to date, with fifty-six fatalities, it became known as the Picnic Train disaster because it involved a Sunday excursion train. (In the hist
ory of rail accidents, both in the United States and elsewhere, excursion trains have featured regularly. The reasons for this include the fact that they did not appear in the regular timetables, often used old stock, and were frequently overloaded.) Packed with at least one thousand passengers, mainly Irish teenagers from the local Catholic church heading for a hot day in the park, the train smashed head-on into a local service because the driver, though knowing that the other train would be coming in the opposite direction, was speeding along the line in the hope of reaching the next turnout in order to catch up on lost time. The two trains met at a bend with such force that the explosion was heard five miles away, and the resulting fire caused most of the deaths. The driver of the local train blamed himself and immediately committed suicide by taking arsenic, although in fact he was exonerated by the subsequent inquiry.

  The disaster speeded up the introduction and use of the telegraph, bringing about a major improvement in safety. A system of issuing train orders, which authorized a train crew to proceed to a particular point such as a station or a loop, was developed. However, cornfield meets continued to occur when there was confusion over the orders, or procedures were not followed properly. Silent films would later portray robbers trying to arrange train wrecks by deliberately forcing the dispatcher to issue false orders so that they could steal from the wreckage, but no evidence exists of such a crime ever actually being committed. Head-on collisions were the most spectacular of the litany of possible accidents, but derailments caused by broken rails or proceeding too fast around bends, bridge failures, livestock on the line, and broken axles all contributed to fatal accidents in the early days of the railroads. At root the problem was that the rapid spread of the railroads had not been matched by the technological changes required to keep them safe. For a time, anger about rail safety subsided as the number of spectacular accidents declined significantly. The Civil War diverted attention to the far-bloodier tragedy taking place before the eyes of the public. In the aftermath of the war, however, as both the numbers traveling and the mileage of railroad increased rapidly, safety again became an issue, fueled by a series of yet more eminently preventable accidents.