The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Ironically, one of the reasons the railroads enjoyed such a boom in freight transportation in the 1920s was that they were carrying vast quantities of material for road building and for car manufacturing. Much of this would disappear once the roads improved, but they also carried huge quantities of iron ore, coal, and other minerals for the booming heavy industries. The months leading up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 were in many respects the apogee of the railroads in the United States, at least statistically. There were more than 20,000 daily passenger trains serving the 130 million population, a staggering 2.6 million freight cars (more than at any time in the railroads’ history), and 57,500 locomotives, nearly all steam engines. The industry employed 1.6 million people, and although mileage had begun to decline from the peak of 1916, there were still nearly 230,000 route miles. Track miles, which include sidings and count both lines in double-tracked sections, had actually risen considerably in the period, demonstrating the level of investment undertaken by the railroads. Although most of the additions to the rail network were small branch lines serving a particular mine or factory, or creating useful connections, one remarkable new railroad came to be opened during the interwar years, with the completion in 1923 of the Alaska Railroad. Railroads had come late to the territory—which would become a state only in 1959—with construction not starting until the 1900s, stimulated by the Klondike gold rush, when several early efforts led to the bankruptcy of the companies that had built the lines. It was not until the federal government, seeing the value of a railroad in the mineral-rich territory, took over the lines in 1914 that work resumed and the railroad could be completed. In 1923, President Warren Harding drove in the traditional golden spike that completed the 470-mile line, from the sea at Seward to Fairbanks in the interior, which, unusually, was government run as part of the Department of the Interior (and survives today under the ownership of the State of Alaska, carrying both passengers, especially in the summer, and freight). As with many American towns, Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city, owes its existence to the railroad, since it was created when the federal government took over the line and realized it was the most convenient transfer point between ship and rail.

  Despite the railroads’ financial difficulties and the incursions into their market by the new modes of transportation, they still dominated transportation in the interwar period. An example of the scale of the passenger rail operation at this point was the success of the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited, which, when launched in 1902, consisted of just one train with a handful of cars. Now, on the eve of the crash, the Central had a dedicated fleet of 122 coaches and 24 locomotives for the service, which typically ran as six or seven separate trains, each carrying a hundred or so passengers in luxurious conditions. Crucially for the company, the prestigious service was a vital part of its economics, earning revenues of $10 million annually.

  The railroads were still booming when the Wall Street crash of October 1929 ended thoughts of growth and ensured that the 1930s would be an agonizing time for the railroads. Inevitably, the increased competition combined with the effects of the Great Depression that followed the crash plunged many railroad companies into the red. During the 1930s, companies responsible for more than a third of the overall mileage fell into bankruptcy, including such famous names as the Erie (yet again), the Missouri Pacific, the Rio Grande, and the Wabash. Even the major eastern lines, such as the Pennsylvania and New York Central, only just managed to stay afloat. As ever with railroads when times get tough, the government had to intervene, as they were still a far too important part of the infrastructure to be allowed to go to the wall. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was created that was intended to bail out organizations deemed essential to the national interest, and railroads became the second-biggest beneficiaries after the banks.11 In 1932, the initial payments were made, with the Baltimore & Ohio and the Van Sweringen group of companies being among the first recipients of this cash, which was used to reduce bank debts that the railroads could no longer service. Throughout the decade, hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund were used to pay off railroad debts.

  The New Deal was, however, ultimately more helpful to the highways than the railroads. Highway construction had already been a great generator of jobs in the Keynesian mood of the 1930s, and in 1938 the Public Works Administration, created under the New Deal, agreed to fund construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the nation’s first superhighway. With a huge workforce of thirty thousand, it was completed just two years later and would be the model for the forty-eight-thousand-mile interstate system built between the 1950s and 1980s.

  Despite the stringencies resulting from the Depression, the 1930s would see the major railroads embark on one last brave and flamboyant attempt to counter the threat from cars and planes in an effort to try to retain the passenger market. Technology had developed on the railroads, too, and they could now call on a formidable new weapon, the diesel locomotive. Even before the introduction of diesels, the railroad companies had started to realize that providing their rich customers with new wallets and putting on modeling shows was not all they wanted. More powerful steam locomotives, fewer station stops, and improvements to the track all enabled them to speed up their services. The country’s most prestigious trains, the two rival New York–Chicago services, the Twentieth Century Limited and the Broadway Limited, finally cut the timing on the service from twenty to eighteen hours. However, because of the effects of the slump, other services were consolidated, which resulted in some expresses extending their times, as they had to call at more stations. In 1933, only forty-three daily US train services were timed to average more than sixty miles per hour on any part of their journey. America, which a generation before had boasted the world’s most consistently fast services, was now falling behind Europe, where various countries were using modern steam technology or diesels to speed up their trains. Indeed, embarrassingly, it was Canada that could now claim to have the fastest expresses in North America. This was, though, about to change with the advent of the diesel in the United States the following year, which would prove to be a real game changer in terms of speed and would give the passenger rail services a new lease on life.

  The rail companies’ pre-1914 interest in electrification schemes suggested that they had begun to recognize the limitations of steam, but changing traction methods required courage, commitment, and deep pockets. As a result, few railroads continued with electrification programs in the uncertain climate following the First World War. The Pennsylvania was a key exception, embarking on an ambitious scheme to put up the wires on its lines to Philadelphia and later farther on to Harrisburg, as well as down to Washington, creating what was at the time one of the biggest electrified networks in the world. The other mainline long-distance railroads did not follow its example because of the cost and a reluctance to move away from steam. Electrifying the vast swaths of the sparsely populated Midwest or the virtually empty West was simply uneconomic.

  Gas engines had been used as an experiment before the war by a few railroad companies, such as the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Santa Fe, and the Union Pacific, which tried it on railcars with limited success. A more sophisticated version was used by the three-car trains of the Chicago Great Western on its Blue Bird service, running between the Twin Cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis) and Rochester, Minnesota, introduced in 1929, but these engines proved far less efficient than diesel. First developed by the eponymous German Rudolf Diesel, at the end of the nineteenth century, the first diesel locomotives used in regular service on a US railroad were switchers introduced by the Central Railroad of New Jersey in 1925. Although they were particularly useful for such yard work, and dozens more came into service in subsequent years, it was mainline services that would be revolutionized by their deployment. Their introduction stimulated a brief heady period when various companies tried to outdo each other in providing the most up-to-date trains with the best facilitie
s and customer service.

  It was a combination of new technology and forward-looking management that resulted in the first regular long-distance diesel service. The key technological advance was the use of light alloys in the engines by General Motors, which by generating a greatly improved power-to-weight ratio made them far more efficient. It was happenstance that the new engine caught the eye of Ralph Budd, the boss of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and he realized its potential to revolutionize long-distance rail travel. Budd is one of the heroes of railroad history in the interwar period. In his previous job, at the helm of the Great Northern, he had overseen the construction of America’s longest railroad tunnel, the 7.8-mile Cascade Tunnel (mentioned in Chapter 9) completed in 1929 on the main line through the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. It was built to shorten the route by reducing the height of the pass needed to cross the mountain range, therefore limiting the risk of delays in winter. To further boost capacity, the tunnel and the track running up to it were electrified because of the danger posed by smoke in confined spaces and the greater ability of electric locomotives to climb steep gradients. It was the type of investment that the more farsighted railroad managers focused on during the interwar period because the expenditure on improvements to the track and infrastructure paid off in terms of lower operating costs. Budd was one of the visionaries of the period, who, unlike many of his contemporaries, realized early the extent of the challenge to rail’s monopoly from road transportation and complained, to no avail, about the fact that “the controlling ideas and policies of regulation which may have been entirely appropriate when railroads enjoyed a practical monopoly of overland transportation have now become obsolete and should be modified.”12 Sadly, it would be a long time before the regulators listened to this line of thought, which was articulated all too rarely by rail-industry advocates.

  Budd, though, was keen to try to give the railroads the best possible chance of resisting the onslaught of the car. While many of his fellow managers were becoming increasingly doubtful about the possibility of ever making money out of passenger rail services, Budd launched a service based on diesel locomotives and excellent facilities that would serve as the benchmark for long-distance rail journeys. After seeing the General Motors diesel engine at the Chicago World’s Fair, he commissioned a new type of streamlined diesel locomotive,13 oddly enough from a company also called Budd. Dubbed the Pioneer Zephyr (Budd had just been reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which refers to Zephyrus as the west wind and thus oddly started a trend of trains being called Zephyr), in May 1934 it made a record-breaking and much-publicized “Dawn to Dusk” run from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago, where its arrival coincided, quite appropriately, with the opening of the “Century of Progress” Exhibition at which the train was the centerpiece exhibit. The Zephyr covered the thousand-mile distance at an average of seventy-eight miles per hour in thirteen hours, just over half the normal timing of twenty-five hours, without stopping, an impossibility for steam locomotives. As with many such train-speed record attempts, there was much cheating, as other services were shunted into sidings and all 1,689 grade crossings were guarded by flagmen to stop car traffic well ahead of the train, which consisted of just one set of three cars. Even the stations were protected by local police and, oddly, Boy Scouts. Just to make sure that the train, which was carrying Budd as well as various reporters and dignitaries, caught the eye of the media, it also had a four-legged passenger, a burro inevitably called Zeph, a small donkey donated by a newspaper as a mascot. Best of all for Budd, the fuel for the run reportedly cost just $14.64 (at 4¢ per gallon).

  Such a journey speed could not be replicated in normal service, but nevertheless the train was no mere publicity stunt. Rather, it set a trend, and running high-speed diesel services became the aspiration of rival rail companies, particularly on the long stretches through the West but also in New England. Within a couple of years, a whole family of Zephyrs, Cities, and Limiteds had emerged on various railroads, transforming the nature of passenger travel for those lucky enough to be able to afford it. The Burlington, spurred on by the ever-enthusiastic Budd, was the pioneer, introducing in quick succession the Twin Cities Zephyr between Chicago and Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Mark Twain Zephyr down to St. Louis, Missouri, as well as consolidating the Denver Zephyr by introducing a twelve-car train that covered the route in a more easily achievable sixteen hours, still a great improvement on the original steam locomotive timing.

  Other railroads soon followed suit, with a plethora of similar services being introduced within a couple of years of the inaugural Zephyr run. In a demonstration run, a six-car Union Pacific diesel broke the coast-to-coast record, set by a special steam train back in 1906, by no fewer than fourteen hours, crossing America from Los Angeles to New York in just fifty-seven hours and demonstrating the extent to which the railroad companies had failed to pay sufficient attention to cutting journey times. This was, however, only a publicity stunt to show the potential of diesel, and even with the new trains there was still no proper coast-to-coast service that did not involve changing trains—usually in Chicago, which had continued to flourish through its position as the main hub (Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans were the others) of the US railroad network and now boasted a half-dozen terminal stations.

  The Union Pacific train was immediately put into service as The City of Portland between Chicago and Portland, Oregon, and the Milwaukee Road soon launched the Twin Cities Hiawatha, running between the same two cities as the Burlington’s Twin Cities Zephyr but powered by new steam locomotives designed to run at a hundred miles per hour. Diesel, though, was now the fashion, and within a couple of years there were more than a dozen of these new diesel services, trying to outdo each other with the extra facilities and comfort they provided. Pullman joined in the craze by providing streamlined lightweight cars for several of these trains, but it was the decision of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to create an all-Pullman service that resulted in the service that could, justifiably, lay claim to being the most luxurious train in the world, pace the Orient Express. This was the Super Chief, which started running between Chicago and Los Angeles in 1936 in just under forty hours, a timetable that saved a full half day on its steam predecessor, the Santa Fe’s old Chief, a prestigious steam train introduced a decade before. The Super Chief became the train of choice for movie stars and studio moguls for their trips between the coasts and undoubtedly set a new standard of comfort for its passengers: “Designed within by a group of eminent architects and stylists, its restaurant, observation lounge, bar and wide choice of overnight accommodation—every room richly panelled in wood veneers from the four quarters of the world—were very reasonable replicas of the hotel accommodation to which the Hollywood haut monde who frequented it were accustomed.”14

  These new streamliner services invariably offered all the accoutrements of the trains of the previous generation, but with modern extras such as air-conditioning and electric-razor outlets. The more spacious offered lounges, cocktail bars, and office facilities, and all provided meals that today would earn them a Michelin star or two, elegantly hosted by a dinner-jacketed maître d’, as well as offering various sleeping-car options. There was, too, a great emphasis on making the trip itself into a pleasure rather than merely a trial to be endured, with a great emphasis on the smoke-free views afforded by the much larger windows.

  The result of this feverish activity was that, for a short period in the late 1930s, the ten fastest regular train services in the world were all American streamliners. It was not so much the speed or the diesel-powered engines that caught the public’s imagination, but rather their streamlining. They were, quite literally, beautiful behemoths, a source of pride and modernity in an era of economic struggle and austerity. The size and power of the elegant diesels seemed to epitomize American values and gave people something to celebrate.

  Whereas the steam engine had conquered th
e West, the streamliners solidified the bonds holding the Union together. Even those people who were not able to ride on them could, at least, admire their shape and form and appreciate the speed with which they thundered through America’s vast prairies and deserts. The papers were constantly hailing the latest development or extra service, as well as filling their gossip columns with the details of which celebrities graced particular trains. As a result of this extensive press coverage, streamlining became all the rage. Several railroads that did not introduce diesels nevertheless streamlined their steam locomotives, but while they looked very elegant, the improvement in fuel efficiency was minimal. But it was not just railroads. Streamlining became a byword for “modern,” and all kinds of objects from cars and stoves to buses and ballpoint pens took on the look. Although the railroads had emulated, rather than invented, the streamlining designs with their eclectic mix of art deco and modernist features, they were responsible for spreading the message, as the trains were the most visible and ubiquitous embodiment of the style. It was, perhaps, the last time that the railroads, which had changed so much in American society, would exert a powerful influence on the fashion of the age.

  The introduction of these new trains proved, too, to be good business. The favorable publicity they generated, and the lack of a realistic alternative mode of transportation on most of these long-distance routes, ensured that passengers flocked to them. Indeed, it was not long before they were unable to accommodate the demand, and the railroad companies’ ability to respond was hampered by the very design that attracted the great numbers, since many of these trains were in fixed formations—which meant that additional cars could not be added at busy times. Nevertheless, the revenue they brought in was considerable: “A consultancy which analyzed the performance of 70 of the new high-speed diesel trains in 1938 found that all of them had stimulated new business and generated substantially more net revenue than their steam predecessors.” Taken individually, many of these prestige trains were profitable, but their total income could not redress the losses being made by US passenger services as a whole. Traveling numbers declined rapidly in the early 1930s as a result of the Depression, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, losses on passenger services amounted to around $250 million annually. Worse, according to Geoffrey Freeman Allen, a chronicler of the history of luxury trains, the railroads were storing up trouble for themselves: “The more elaborately they furnished the trains and the more lavish the on-board service they presented, the more daunting they would find both renewal and staffing costs in the post-war inflationary era.”15 Providing the epicurean meals was unsustainable for many companies, with the Pennsylvania, for example, losing $1 million per year on its dining service before the war and four times that much by 1949.