The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Another benefit for passengers of the consolidation of the railroads into bigger networks was that they were able to run longer continuous services, making it possible, for example, to travel between Maine in the far-northeastern corner of the country down to Florida in the South without changing trains. With such grand schemes and even bigger ambitions, it was, on the face of it, a good time to be in the railroad business. The automobile was not yet threatening rail’s hegemony, and the airplane was just a funny idea dreamed up by a couple of innovative brothers from the Midwest working in a barn in North Carolina. Moreover, America’s economy, after the postpanic depression, was growing again, and the population, boosted by the arrival of immigrants, was expanding rapidly too, reaching 100 million just before the outbreak of the First World War.

  Consequently, between 1896 and 1916, it was boom time on the tracks. The core network was complete, though the construction of secondary lines3 continued until mileage reached its peak of 254,000 miles at the point the United States entered the war in 1917. This reduction in construction activity by the railroads allowed them to devote more capital investment to making improvements, such as reducing curves and gradients, and four-tracking busy sections, rather than the far more expensive process of having to carve out new lines. The healthy state of the industry can be gauged by the generosity of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which only a few years earlier had tried to cut wages but now, in 1902, raised the pay for its 100,000 workers by 10 percent. This was because, according to the company president, Alexander Cassatt—a particularly forward-looking railroad manager—the cost of living had risen by about a quarter since the depression of the mid-1890s, and “we have more business than we can handle and can’t see our way out of that difficulty unless we keep our men loyal to the company and help them when they help us.” This enlightened attitude was by no means universal, but the other trunk railroads mostly followed suit. In fact, while pressure from the unions and shortages of skilled workers resulted in a sharp increase in labor costs during the prewar period, the high rate of inflation meant that real wages barely increased at all. The growing strength of the unions, now far better organized, meant the railroad companies were inclined to settle disputes through arbitration often under the auspices of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in contrast to their previous obduracy. There were consequently only a few local strikes, with no national action on the scale of the Pullman conflict. The unions even managed to make some progress on the length of the working day, which was still routinely twelve hours, managing to reduce it to a maximum of ten. The proliferation of unions, representing different skills and groups of workers, led to a series of demarcation disputes that would dog the industry for decades. By 1910 labor issues were never far from the surface: “Demands from one railroad union or another were almost continuously before the railroads. As technological changes revolutionized railroading, they added to labor problems.”4 Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, industrial relations topped the list of problems for railroad managements.

  Labor issues were only one of the numerous problems faced by the railroad companies. Although Martin suggests that “the two decades before World War I were the golden age of the railroad passenger train in America,” as ever with claims of so-called golden ages, the gilt is easily scratched off. Despite rising revenues and sensible consolidation, the years between the bankruptcies of 1893 and the First World War were not an unequivocally happy time for the railroads. Certainly, the railroads enjoyed remarkable growth during this period, with the number of passenger journeys tripling in the twenty years to 1916. And it was not just impoverished immigrants hopping on overcrowded special trains. Pullman journeys increased fivefold, from a mere 5 million in 1900 to 26 million in 1914. Interestingly, this was a rare period in American railroad history when passenger growth far outpaced the rise in the carriage of freight. In a way, this was not surprising. When it came to passenger travel, the railroads had it all, cornering every market since, for most journeys, there remained no viable alternative. Apart from a few trips that could be made by boat, either along the coast or on lakes, the railroads catered to everyone, “from the travelling salesman who was making his way through his territory in ten and twenty mile hops to the well-to-do family setting out in Pullman drawing room comfort for a tour of the great American West.”5 Although freight carriage did grow in this period, the marketing efforts of the railroad, together with the increase in population and greater prosperity generally, resulted in a far faster rate of growth for passenger traffic. A measure of the extent of rail travel can be ascertained from one particularly busy day marking the end of the vacation season, September 4, 1910, when the two main New York stations coped with 200,000 arriving passengers. On that day, the Adirondack Express from upstate New York, which usually had around ten cars, consisted of no fewer than sixteen trains of similar capacity that arrived at five-minute intervals at New York Central. Over at Pennsylvania Station, the Seashore service from Atlantic City in New Jersey had to be run as nine separate sections, with a couple of extra trains solely for baggage.

  The growing affluence of the American people ensured that demand for travel rose rapidly. It would be false, however, to suggest that Americans were constantly hopping on trains. Although the number of journeys annually in this period was constantly above 1 billion, that still meant only ten or so rail trips per year for every American, a rather modest amount in comparison with, say, the number of journeys made nowadays by car. The vast majority of people stayed at home, as they always had, and contemporary surveys suggest that around 5 percent of the population accounted for most of this travel. Apart from immigrants, tourists and business travelers were the mainstay of the railroad companies’ passenger market. Business travel was greatly stimulated by the fact that, thanks to the railroads, corporations now saw the whole country as a unified market, encouraging businesses to expand beyond the borders of a particular state or region. America was now a national economy, rather than a series of regional ones, and the railroad as a whole was a monopoly provider for many journeys, albeit often with competition between railroads.

  The railroad companies set out specifically to cater to this high end of the market, although, interestingly, before the First World War there was only one railroad fare, with no first class other than the Pullman supplement and occasional provision of “parlor” cars. There was fierce competition on the most profitable routes in the East, notably between New York and Chicago, where, by the start of the 1900s, there was a choice of no fewer than eighteen different routes. The railroad companies introduced high-profile luxury trains, partly to tap this lucrative section of the business market, but also because such trains created widespread interest and attracted favorable publicity. These prestige services were conceived by the passenger traffic managers of the major companies who began to take on a public relations and proactive selling role, again something of a first for the railroad, since the very idea of marketing was a new notion that was little known in other industries. The publicity emphasized the time savings on these new trains that, cunningly, were branded with names designed to set them apart from the standard services. The Pennsylvania Railroad had led the way in 1887 by introducing the Pennsylvania Limited between New York and Chicago, which was promoted as an all-Pullman service, boasting a barbershop, a bath and valet service for gentlemen, and a maid for their female companions. There was an impressive and varied wine list, and the publicity blurb explained at length how the latest fashionable cocktails would be mixed in the observation car (another innovation, though domed ones would be introduced only after the First World War) at the rear.

  The New York Central responded with an emphasis on speed by introducing a fast day train between New York and Buffalo called the Empire State Express in 1889. Two years later, in a highly publicized exercise, it ran the train with a specially designed engine numbered 999 that covered the 436 miles in just over seven hours, an average of 61 mph. It reached a speed of 82 mph, but ther
e were claims, which attracted widespread attention despite much evidence to the contrary, that the train reached 112 mph, which would have made it the first wheeled vehicle to exceed 100 mph on the planet. Of course, the routine journeys never reached anything like those speeds, with 60 mph being the highest that passengers experienced, but journeys were now generally much faster. Whereas in the aftermath of the Civil War averages of 25 mph or at best 30 mph might be the norm, now many fast trains averaged nearer 40 or 45 mph. A pair of contemporary timetable analysts, E. Foxwell and T. C. Farrer, who looked at express trains across the world in 1889, found that the fastest US train was the Baltimore & Ohio’s Royal Blue, which operated the 40 miles between Washington and Baltimore in forty-five minutes, an average of 53 mph, the fastest regular service in the world. Two years later that service ran all the way to Jersey City, on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan, and Washington at the same fast average speed, taking just five hours for the whole trip. However, it was the Pennsylvania Railroad that boasted the largest number of fast services. Foxwell and Farrer also found numerous trundlers, notably in the West, where no train passed their test of being an “express” (which required an average speed of 40 mph), but also in the East, where they noted disapprovingly that even many services designated “Flyer” or “Limited” were slow. They were most scathing about a service that ran between Jersey City and Buffalo, New York, that averaged just 31 mph.

  The success of the Pennsylvania Limited led to other companies’ naming their prestigious trains, but rather unimaginative names predominated, with much use of the words flyer, express, and limited. There were a few more evocative names, such as the Fast Flying Virginian, but many of the best ones, such as the White Train between Boston and New York, so called because it was painted in white trimmed with gold, were not adopted officially by the railroad company. One name and train, however, stood out, and that was the Twentieth Century Limited, devised by a dynamic railroad manager, George Daniels, who ran the New York Central’s passenger business for nearly two decades. It was not only the name that was ingenious but the whole marketing exercise. Daniels had already been responsible for one major innovation, the redcap service of free porters (though since everyone tipped them, a charge was soon introduced) who carried passengers’ baggage at stations and became a universal feature of US railroad travel. Daniels, though, had a consuming passion, and that was to establish a fast and luxurious daily service between New York and Chicago. The usual timing for the nearly 1,000-mile route was twenty-four hours, but with the introduction of the daily luxury service between the Big Apple and the Windy City in June 1902, with its clever name, Daniels cut the journey’s duration to twenty hours. This was achieved through improvements to the line and by keeping stops to a minimum, partly via the technical innovation of providing lengthy troughs between the rails at key points to allow the ever-thirsty locomotives to replenish their water supply without stopping, an innovation imported from the UK.

  The Twentieth Century Limited was, at first, more of a PR exercise than a commercial venture, as was Daniels’s claim that the Central was “the world’s greatest railroad.” The inaugural train, consisting of five cars, was designed to accommodate just forty-two passengers, and although they paid a premium, it was insufficient to cover even the running costs of such an enterprise. The image of the train was perceived as so important to the company that operating staff were told to prioritize the Limited at all costs, even if that meant causing delay to many other passengers. The most impressive feature of the Twentieth Century Limited was its on-board service, which was better than anything that preceded it, apart from the railroad barons’ personal trains described in Chapter 7. Barbers and stenographers were on hand, and there was a smoking room and a library. The decor in the diner was notable enough—”Heavily molded mahogany, leaded upper lights to the windows, pot plants on the walls between them, flowers on every table and specially-commissioned high quality linen, crockery and silverware”—but the dinner itself was even more so.6 A typical offering in 1904 consisted of a half-dozen courses or more, depending on the passenger’s appetite or, more accurately, gluttony, starting with a consommé julienne, followed by chicken, beef ribs, goose, and both dessert and cheese, along with extras and adornments such as olives, capon patties (financière was the inappropriate name they were given), salads, and, of course, coffee. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect was the price of the meal: just one dollar, definitely a “loss leader,” long before the term had been invented. So keen was the Central to impress its prestigious passengers—whose names were printed in newspapers, in the same way as luxury-liner passenger lists—that they were refunded a dollar for every hour that the train was late. It was the Twentieth Century Limited that gave us the expression “red- carpet treatment,” since at both New York and Chicago crimson carpets embossed with the company’s insignia were laid out so that passengers did not risk soiling their shoes on the surface of the platform. And it was the Twentieth Century Limited that later featured in one of the most famous railroad film scenes when Cary Grant, in the 1959 Hitchcock movie North by Northwest, is saved from capture by the beautiful but prim Eva Marie Saint.

  In response to the Central’s introduction of the Twentieth Century Limited, on the same day in 1902 the Pennsylvania relaunched its Pennsylvania Limited as the Pennsylvania Special. It later became the Broadway Limited, a reference not to New York’s theater land but to the fact that its railroad, mostly four-tracked rather than two, was broader than its rivals. Although the Pennsylvania’s route between New York and Chicago was about eighty miles shorter than the Central’s, it was hampered by the steeper gradients on its line and by freight congestion around Pittsburgh, and consequently was less reliable. However, both the Pennsylvania and the Twentieth Century services were successful and became profitable, so much so that at peak times both companies required two full-length trains to operate the service. The rival companies each tried to reduce timings by a couple of hours in the first decade of the twentieth century in much-publicized initiatives, but the practicalities and the not inconsiderable cost of speeding up services stymied their efforts, leaving twenty hours as the norm until 1932, when diesels were introduced.

  As with the earlier luxury coaches provided by Pullman, these prestige trains cannot be seen as typical of contemporary train services, but their introduction suggests that many companies were now making concerted efforts to improve what modern marketeers would call “the passenger experience.” These enhancements reflected the fact that the railroads now realized that passengers had to be attracted to the railroad, as they could not be relied upon as a captive market, especially in the highly competitive East, where there usually was an alternative route available for most journeys. Making it easier to purchase tickets was an obvious innovation. Most of the major companies established ticket offices in locations that were more convenient than the local station, such as downtown or in affluent shopping districts, allowing people to avoid that irritating trek to the railroad station on the edge of town, where, invariably, there was a lengthy line for the understaffed ticket office. Independent brokers sprang up, selling tickets on behalf of all the local railroads, and wielded considerable power, since they could recommend particular routes to their clients. In addition, numerous rival agencies could be found along the streets near stations that made money by obtaining a discount from the railroads, rather than charging an extra fee to the passengers. This proliferation of ticket agencies opened the door to corrupt practices, as different railroads vied to gain their favor. Most notable was the practice of selling tickets below the normal fare, known as “scalping.” Agents would obtain discounted tickets, such as un-sold special-rate deals intended for group travel or the second portions of unused returns, and sell them cheaply. It was not unusual, though, for these scalped tickets to be invalid, leaving the passenger having to pay twice over. Another colorful character involved in ticketing was the broker employed by the railroads to persuade the v
arious agents of the superiority of their particular company’s service. These men and, interestingly, women were chosen, according to Martin, on the basis of “personality and ability to hold your liquor [that] were believed to be of the greatest importance in the serious business of persuading a local ticket agent to punch the box opposite the name of one’s own railroad on the yard-long tickets with which long-distance travelers often had to contend.”7 Hotel porters, too, carried on a lucrative trade in obtaining cheap rail tickets for guests and pocketing a commission. By and large, this little subindustry of independent ticket sellers disappeared during the First World War, as the railroads became, once again, the sole vendors of their tickets.