The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Black people, many of whom were becoming more prosperous, as demonstrated by the emergence of a small black middle class, were flocking to the railroads, too, but had a varied experience on the trains. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the trains were integrated, even if individual whites were wont to show their displeasure at sharing accommodation with blacks. However, it was not long before the southern railroad companies soon began to create what became known as “Jim Crow” cars. However, segregation was not universal, depending often on the whim of the conductor and the courage of the black passengers to face up to discrimination. Whereas poor blacks obviously used coach class—the American trains were largely unclassed, but on some services there was “coach” and “parlor” accommodation—some of the more affluent ones were carried for a time without problem in the parlor cars: “Segregation policies were not hard and fast during the 1880s and 1890s, and no individual, black or white, could know with certainty what the policy on services for black people would be in any given part of the country.” The railroad companies themselves disliked the policy of segregation for practical reasons, as it imposed an unnecessary cost on them. However, white travelers, especially those in second class, pressed for it, since to many segregation was seen as necessary for the protection of female virtue. They were concerned, too, about the less servile generation of blacks who had no memory of slavery and thus “did not know their place,” in the way their fathers had. In the early years of the twentieth century, therefore, attitudes hardened: “By the turn of the century, segregation had fastened its grip on practically every arena in the South where the races might come into public contact.”36 Conditions were supposed to be “separate but equal,” but that was a sham that the Interstate Commerce Commission failed to enforce. In fact, lives were even put at risk by the habit of putting black people in old wooden cars in trains where the white folk traveled in steel cars that, in the event of an accident, would plow into their wooden neighbors.

  The train companies operating on the border between South and North at times had to go to extraordinary lengths to impose segregation, since they could not disobey state laws, whatever the cost burden. The Pennsylvania Railroad was forced into making cumbersome arrangements for its trains on the Cumberland Valley Railroad that crossed Maryland, which had passed a Jim Crow law, and West Virginia, which had not, on their way to Virginia from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Black passengers were not willing to be segregated in states that did not require it, and therefore the railroad took to carrying partitions that were hastily installed when entering a segregated state and then removed when it left. Remarkably, this practice continued until passenger services on the line ceased in the late 1940s. In the North, where there had been a few instances of racial segregation on trains, attempts to reimpose it were rare and unsuccessful. Just before the First World War, the Central Railroad of New Jersey started separating its white and black passengers at its restaurant at Jersey City Station but soon abandoned the idea when the blacks simply went over to using the rival Pennsylvania Railroad.

  Inevitably, with the rapid takeoff of the American economy, the demand for freight transport boomed, too. Until the immediate post–Civil War period, freight transportation had been a pretty haphazard process. The discontinuous nature of the railroad network meant that transshipments, which increased cost, were the norm on even relatively short journeys. The shippers needed a continuous point-to-point service, and that started to be provided in earnest after the war, when a number of railroads cooperated to provide fast—in other words direct—freight lines. These were either separate companies that coordinated the shipment of freight through several separate railroads or groups of railroads that cooperated to provide the service. By the mid-1870s, virtually every major railroad company belonged to one or more of these freight-line arrangements, which greatly improved the efficiency of rail transportation. Along with the vast number of new lines that were being built, rail was now able to dominate the freight market as never before, with water transportation becoming far less competitive. The railroads took over most of the grain trade from the Midwest, which was principally shipped through Boston rather than downriver to New Orleans. This changed the nature of some of the major trunk companies, which now started earning the bulk of their revenues from freight. The Pennsylvania, for example, earned $3.6 million from carrying passengers in 1876, but more than four times that amount, $15.9 million, from freight. This highlights an important fact that can be forgotten in the history of the US railroads and one that made them different from European networks: they have been, for the most part, focused on the carriage of freight. Of course, this was not universally true, and there were many lines that, for some periods, were dominated by passenger travel, and passengers played a key role in revenue terms on many others. Overall, however, freight has been the most important component of railroad economics for long periods of US railroad history and certainly since the post–Second World War demise of the passenger network. Indeed, that very collapse of the passenger traffic can be partly explained, as we shall see, by the existence of a lucrative freight trade.

  The capture of the freight market by the railroads led to an odd paradox. Freight rates became very competitive. Boston, for example, had no fewer than thirty-one fast freight services feeding into it, while in 1880 there were as many as twenty competing routes between St. Louis and Atlanta, ranging in distance from 526 to 1,855 miles, which suggests the longer ones would take the business at a loss. Not surprisingly, this fierce competition led to reductions in freight rates during the boom times of the 1870s and 1880s. Yet the farmers complained about being ripped off by sky-high prices and regarded the railroads as monopolistic villains. This perception helped turn the public against the railroads, as the farmers began a campaign that would lead to regulation and severe restrictions on the rail industry. Just as the railroads were fulfilling their promise, delivering untold economic benefits to America, they began to lose their popularity.

  8

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  By the end of the century, the railroads were by far the biggest business enterprise in the United States. Their mileage had increased to two hundred thousand, as the tentacles of the ever-expanding iron road crept relentlessly across the country, connecting every sizable community and many small ones. By then, almost every American lived within easy access of a railroad station, and the railroads carried everything from livestock to lobsters, ice to rice. The tracks went everywhere, to the mountaintops or down into the valleys, to the hotel door or the dock beside the oceangoing liner. They were quite simply ubiquitous, and their impact on both the development of the economy and the American way of life was universal. Given the sheer breadth and scale of their achievements, the railroads should have enjoyed a golden age, feted by a grateful populace, rather like the car is loved by so many today. It should, indeed, have been the height of the love affair between the people and their railroads. For a time, but only a very short one, it was. Richard White, the author of a book on the trans continentals, suggests rightly that Americans appreciated their railroads despite their failings: “Nineteenth-century North Americans became quite aware of what transcontinental railroads failed to do, but initially they embraced them, as they embraced all railroads, as the epitome of modernity. They were in love with the railroads because railroads defined the age.” As White points out, the claims made for the railroads were akin to those lavished on the Internet before the collapse of the dot-com boom. This age of unbridled optimism could not last, and it took barely a generation for the climate to change. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the railroads became, first, disliked and, then, widely resented. It was partly a natural cycle. At first the railroads had been the plucky innovator, the new kid on the block bringing prosperity and opening new horizons, then they became an established but respected business, and eventually they turned into the rapacious monopolist, reviled by almost everyone: “As the rail industry grew in size and became mor
e distant from the public’s everyday concerns, it lost that sense of being the underdog that had long endeared it to the American public. Americans could readily identify with the idea of a courageous David fighting vast odds, and such an image enabled them to champion the tiny locomotives struggling against nature’s worst elements.”1

  As the railroads became bigger, they lost the public support they had enjoyed in the early days. Sure, the man at the depot was still old Fred whose kids went to the local school, but he now worked for an organization that was remote and disconnected from the local community. But it was not just the growth that changed people’s perceptions. The railroads had indeed misbehaved and were guilty of all sorts of calumnies, but the level of antagonism they engendered was undoubtedly way beyond what they deserved, given the positive changes they had inspired and the economic wealth they had created. They were the bankers of their day, widely distrusted and too big to fail.

  Their achievements are, though, worth spelling out in some detail. It is, indeed, difficult to discern much in the lives of late-nineteenth-century Americans that had not been affected by the iron horse, and mostly for the good. America’s industrial takeoff was stimulated by the spread of the railroads in a synergic relationship where cause and effect are difficult to disentangle. Let’s start with a few statistics. The United States in the late nineteenth century was a very different place than in 1830. It now stretched across the North American landmass from coast to coast and included all but a couple of today’s states, nearly double the number that existed when the Best Friend chugged down the track of the Charleston & Hamburg. The nation’s population had increased in that period from fewer than 13 million to more than 76 million. Of course, this was not entirely due to the railroads, but it would have been difficult for the Union to hold together without them. By facilitating immigration and the flow of goods, the railroads cemented the ties between states and ensured there were no further attempts at secession. Without transportation infrastructure, the United States could not have been held together, and the railroads, rather than turnpikes or canals, were the only viable mode of transportation in terms of speed, scale, and accessibility. And the telegraph lines laid alongside them added another form of vital communication.

  At the macro level, the changes were all too obvious but relatively gradual as the rail system expanded. From the opening of the first railroad, it took fifty years to go through the stages of development to make it possible to travel from town to town, from state to state, from region to region, and eventually from ocean to ocean. At the micro level, the changes arising were more complex but no less significant and would happen quickly once the iron horse arrived. Picture that isolated village mentioned previously, where the blacksmith shod not only the horses but quite possibly the people, too, and where otherwise most of the inhabitants were self- sufficient, making their own clothes, hoarding food for the winter, and barely registering on the money economy. That way of life could not survive the railroad, any more than could the traditional culture of the Native Americans. The railroad was both creator and enabler, but also destroyer. In a country as vast as the United States, its impact varied greatly from place to place, but in the East the pattern was clear: the railroads stimulated the growth of towns and cities at the expense of their rural hinterlands.

  Most of the changes brought about by the iron horse were beneficial: economic growth, creation of jobs, more efficient markets, opportunities to travel, easier distribution of goods, and so on. But by no means were all the effects positive. It could, for example, be argued that the railroads exacerbated the differences between rich and poor. The railroads were promoted by their developers as a great democratic institution, open to all and enabling everyone to travel around the country. The reality was rather different. The rich and the middle class could flock to the cities for work or pleasure, and consequently urbanization accelerated at a ferocious rate. According to Sarah H. Gordon, “The cities quickly grew to unprecedented, and unmanageable proportions.”2 They prospered thanks to the crowds who boosted their economies as they shopped, ate in restaurants, and stayed in hotels. Railroads, as with all transportation improvements, benefit the areas where people want to go, and although there may have been the occasional rural excursion, for the most part it was the cities that profited from people’s ability to travel more easily. They developed central business districts located near railroad stations, and in order to maintain as much density as possible, the office block, and later the skyscraper, was born. These buildings, full of white-collar workers, were the new factories of the age, housing hundreds, if not thousands, of office workers in the way that the manufacturing industry had done earlier.

  The effect of the arrival of a railroad connection on a community was immediate: the very nature of the village or town would be transformed overnight. The town that acquired a station would prosper to a greater degree than its local rivals that were not so blessed. There were disadvantages, too. A small town that had been self-sufficient could quickly change into one dependent on the regional, or even the national, economy as people switched to using the larger town’s amenities, in much the same way that today downtowns have been killed because local residents have access by road to big-box stores and strip malls.

  The station, or depot, however modest, would become a hub, the start or the end point of most people’s visits or of journeys by local inhabitants to distant places. The relationship between the town and the station would be symbiotic, and again it is difficult to disentangle interwoven threads of cause and effect. Gradually, as more people used it, the station would improve, with the erection of bigger shelters, the introduction of signs showing arrivals and departures, the employment of more staff, the installation of ticket and information offices, and, of course, food counters. More often than not, the local Western Union office would be part of the station area, allowing people to send telegrams to the rest of the country. The larger stations would provide facilities like shoeshine boys, newsstands, and even hotel accommodation, and the area around the station would prosper—at least initially.

  There were numerous other ways in which trains and stations stimulated local economic activity. The trains brought in mail-order goods from department stores in the city, fresh produce for the local shops, mail, packages, and newspapers. Even the station clock was a useful public amenity, providing what was probably the best local estimate of the time. Indeed, the standardization of time was yet another side effect of the spread of the railroad, but given the angst that the time difference caused both railroads and their passengers for journeys on the east-west axis, it was remarkable that it took a half century after the opening of the first railroad for the problem to be sorted out. Because of the size of the American landmass, dawn is typically more than three hours earlier on the East Coast than in California. Therefore, a train heading 750 miles west would gain around an hour by the sun, but in practice every town had its own local time, creating confusion. Buffalo in upstate New York, for example, had three clocks set outside its elegant station: one gave New York City time for the New York Central services; the second was set to Columbus, Ohio, time, used by the Michigan Southern and other midwestern railroads; and the third showed local time. According to Stewart H. Holbrook, “In Pittsburgh, the situation was even worse, for the railroads touching there used a total of six time standards.”3 There were twenty-seven local times in Michigan and thirty-eight in Wisconsin, and coast-to-coast travelers between Maine and San Francisco would have to change their watch twenty times on the journey.

  In Britain the standardization that mainly affected the Great Western, the principal east-west railroad, had largely been completed by 1852, but in the United States it took a long time to overcome the opposition of what Holbrook calls “traditionalists” and “obscurantists.” The humble principal of a ladies’ college in Saratoga Springs, New York, Professor C. F. Dowd, first urged the adoption of time zones in 1869 and prompted the creation of a group of railroads to lob
by for the change. The plan was refined by William Frederick Allen, the former engineer of the Camden & Amboy who is immortalized for his efforts in a small tablet in Washington’s Union Station, with the suggestion of four time zones, based on the longitudes of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Memphis (Tennessee), Denver (Colorado), and Fresno (California). The plan was adopted at a convention in October 1883 and, with remarkable haste given how long the chaotic situation on the railroads over the issue of time had been allowed to continue, was scheduled to be introduced on the eighteenth of the following month at noon. There were still dissenters who balked at the notion that the railroad rather than the sun was now the determinant of time. In Bangor, Maine, Mayor Dogberry vetoed a city ordinance to adopt eastern standard time, suggesting, “It is unconstitutional, being an attempt to change the immutable laws of God Almighty and hard on the working man by changing day into night.”4 The local sextons were even banned from ringing the church bells at the new times.

  Despite the fear of God’s wrath, the day passed off smoothly. It was not an easy task, but sensibly, rather than risk changing over in the middle of the night, the appointed time was noon. Trains were ordered to stop while the clocks were adjusted, and there were no accidents, though there were inevitable delays and many people missed their trains, even the attorney general, who had opposed the adoption of railroad time by government departments but found himself late for a train as a result.5 There were no riots, despite the fury of the fundamentalists, but there were convoluted details to sort out, such as whether an insurance policy, which expired at noon, would pay out during the extra time gained when the clocks were put back. Few Americans today know that it is because of the needs of the railroads that they have four time zones. As Holbrook explains, little mention of it is made in the history books, and “most Americans seem to be of the general but rather fuzzy idea that the time zones were invented by either Benjamin Franklin or George Washington.”6