The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  The decline of the US railroads after 1945 was at first so gradual that it was almost imperceptible. Instead of the expected postwar downturn in the economy, there was a boom, and railroads always do well when the economy is flourishing. The successful economy, however, only served to offset the underlying difficulties of the railroads and, in a way, by enabling more people to buy cars, exacerbated them. It was the passenger business that suffered worst initially, but later whole categories of freight also began to leach away at a frightening rate. The railroads had come out of the Second World War imbued with a sense of optimism. Not only had they regained the respect of the public, but they thought they would retain a vital role in the provision of passenger travel in the postwar period. They looked back on the success of the prestige diesel trains of the 1930s and thought that by just continuing to improve the service and speed up the timetable, they would retain a sizable proportion of the market.

  The widespread conversion to diesel locomotives did indeed give the railroads a new lease on life, both by making the operation of services cheaper and by making journeys quicker and more pleasant. Diesel proved more popular than electrification, since it did not require massive new investment in the infrastructure. Once the higher price of the engines was covered—around twice the cost per horsepower—the savings in operating costs were considerable, since the diesels’ greater efficiency meant they provided at least three times as much mileage from the same amount of fuel. Diesel locomotives, too, could be operated in twos or threes with just one engineer. Given that there was nothing left for the “fireman” to do, the savings would have been even greater had the railroad companies’ management tackled the unions’ insistence on retaining double manning of the locomotives. In fact, when the early Burlington Zephyrs had started running, there was only one driver in the cab, but in 1937 the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen decided to oppose this change strenuously. At the time, against the background of the Depression and the need for jobs, the public sided with the firemen, but according to Saunders, this was a crucial missed opportunity for the railroads: “The railroads themselves had little idea how important diesel was going to be. Steam men, who dominated railroad mechanical departments, assumed that the diesel’s use would be limited to certain kinds of passenger trains and gimmicky ones at that.”4

  Although trying to retain firemen on diesels was ultimately indefensible, the unions had a good case in respect to their overall working conditions. The engineers were still expected to be on call at all times, with no extra pay, and be ready to drive a train safely for up to sixteen hours at a moment’s notice. However, it was the issue of the firemen that came to a head in the late 1950s. North of the border, the Canadian Pacific had challenged the unions over double manning, and, after a brief strike, a royal commission was established that found in favor of the railroads. The two main railroads, the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National, were allowed to stop hiring firemen, and several American companies wanted to follow suit. The unions were having none of it, however, and, as in Canada, a commission was established by the federal government to decide on the issue. It was headed by federal judge Simon Rifkind who, in his five-hundred-page report, produced “a reasoned set of recommendations that actually would have meant higher wages for most rail employees but at honest jobs of productive work.” No new firemen would be hired, and, in part, the rigid structure of demarcations would have been broken. For the unions, though, these proposed measures were unpalatable, and they took the issue to court. Eventually, in April 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened and managed to convince the unions to postpone a threatened strike for two weeks. Johnson then summoned all the parties to the White House and showed them to the Cabinet Room, where they embarked on a marathon negotiating session—the equivalent of beer and sandwiches at No. 10 Downing Street, which in the 1960s and 1970s was the method of dealing with the unions preferred by the British prime minister, Harold Wilson. Eventually, the unions agreed to an end to the hiring of firemen, provided the existing ones would be allowed to continue working until they retired or left the industry. Nothing better illustrates the continued importance of the railroads as late as 1964 than the fact that the results of the successful negotiation were announced by a jubilant President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was so eager to inform the nation that he rushed to CBS’s studios in a motorcade rather than wait for the cameras to come to the White House: “This settlement ends four and a half years of controversy. I tell you quite frankly there are few events that give me more faith in my country and more pride in the free collective bargaining process.”5 The fact that this statement came from a president from Texas shows the extent to which it is not only the role of the railroads that has changed in the intervening half century, as one could hardly imagine that more recent Texas president, George W. Bush, sorting out either the railroads or the unions.

  The double-manning issue had, in fact, not really been resolved and would continue to burden the railroads with unnecessary expense for many years, since the deal announced by Johnson covered only three years and the unions were soon, once again, pressing for firemen to be retained. They were eventually phased out completely, though even today there is still an engineer and a conductor, who without a caboose now rides in the front, on every freight train. The conductor, in fact, still has a role, as there are many points in remote places that need to be operated manually or occasions where reversing movements are required. Even while firemen were retained, however, converting to diesel was still worthwhile for the railroads, since the plethora of cleaners and maintenance staff required to repair and run steam locomotives was no longer needed. Moreover, diesels could be used constantly, running 1,000 miles or more without needing any attention, whereas steam locomotives not only needed to be cleaned after every long trip, but also required hours to be fired up. Whereas a steam locomotive could be in productive use for around 150,000 miles a year at most, the best diesels could be used for almost double that mileage. One small detail encapsulates the extent of the savings from the shift to diesel: steam engines, as their name implies, need vast quantities of water, and when they were finally phased out, the railroads were able to dispense with the staggering amount of $50 million worth of water-supply equipment.

  Nevertheless, the steam locomotive manufacturers tried to resist the inevitable. Even into the 1950s, bigger and better steam locomotives were being produced by the major manufacturers like Baldwin, but by 1960, all the main railroads had abandoned steam.6 Once under way, the dieselization process was remarkably fast. Whereas at the end of the war, three-quarters of freight was still hauled by steam, by 1959 it was less than 1 percent. Diesel locomotives saved, at least temporarily, countless branch lines from closure, not only because they were cheaper to operate but also because, as they were lighter than steam engines, the track required less maintenance. The heavier and more powerful steam locomotives that had become standard on the main lines could not venture onto smaller branches as railroads cut back on maintenance to save money, and therefore it was the use of lighter diesel engines that extended the life of services on these lines. The introduction of diesel locomotives, therefore, together with other money-saving measures, notably cutbacks in passenger services, gave the railroad companies a final bit of breathing space, enabling productivity per employee to double between 1940 and 1960.

  On the passenger side, improvements were still being made to the prestige passenger services in the immediate postwar period. Now “vista-domes” were added to the streamliners, special coaches with a glass-roofed upper deck that gave passengers an unparalleled panoramic view of the passing scenery. The ultimate development came in the early 1950s with “super-domes,” with bigger and better viewing points, used by several railroads, principally on the long scenic trips through the Rockies and the western deserts. In order to attract leisure passengers, timetables were adjusted so that the train went through the most picturesque areas in daylight. The Baltimore & Ohio experimented with
flashing a spotlight into the wilderness during nighttime hours to give the passengers in the upper deck something to see, but this daft idea was soon abandoned. A stranger—even rather surreal—experience could be had on the California Zephyr, where the coaches with their passengers on board were routinely put through a car washer to ensure that the windows were clean so that passengers could enjoy the view unrestricted by dirt.

  These domeliners represented the apogee of train travel, making the journey itself fun, and stimulated the response of the airlines, who felt it was essential to provide similar levels of service. The first domeliner was introduced by that pioneering railroad man Ralph Budd of the Burlington, and soon about a dozen major American railroads were using them to attract passengers. The Great Northern’s Empire Builder was the “supreme example” of the concept, according to Geoffrey Freeman Allen, as the railroad repeatedly spent millions of dollars on providing ever more luxurious train sets: “[On the] Empire Builder, the upper floor of the ‘Super-Dome’ seated 74 on settees angled towards the side-windows for comfortable viewing: the lower floor housed an enticing 35-seater lounge bar and writing room; an electrically powered dumb waiter made it simple to hoist drinks and snacks from the bar to passengers relaxing in the air- conditioned solarium above.”7On the Twin Cities Hiawatha, drinkers in the “Tip-Top-Tap” lounge were advised of the next stop, as the name was illuminated on a display below the clock, whereas on the Santa Fe’s Super Chief, passengers were kept up to date with news bulletins and stock reports and could write letters on special letterhead. And so on.

  But it could not last. It was to prove a short-lived fad, an all too brief swan song for the railroads. For a while these trains made money, as they were frequently full and commanded premium fares, but the economics ultimately weighed against them. The airlines were gathering like paparazzi around a starlet, and their planes were becoming more efficient, faster, and bigger. Whereas a DC-3, still the workhorse of the skies in the late 1940s, could accommodate only 21 passengers and make four round-trips to the railroads’ one, a decade or so later the Boeing 707 was carrying 176 and was able to make eight round-trips in the time it took a train to trundle across America’s vastness. The choice between traveling overnight on a train from, say, New York to Chicago or hopping on a jet became a no-brainer, especially as airline fares plummeted.

  With the rapid loss of their passenger market to the airlines in the 1960s, the railroads soon found the cost of providing an upmarket service on their long-distance services was unsustainable. Yet cutting out the creature comforts merely accelerated the decline in passenger numbers. To look after a maximum load of 323 passengers scattered royally in fifteen expensive cars, the Empire Builder required 25 service staff in addition to the locomotive crews and the conductor. Worse, under a national agreement with the unions dating back to the 1920s, locomotive staff were paid on a mileage basis, with a mere 100 miles constituting a full day’s pay, whereas for the conductor and other on-board staff, it was 150 miles. These rules, drawn up when trains were far slower, proved crippling for the industry, but the unions steadfastly refused to recognize them as obsolete. It meant, for example, “it took eight crews to forward the Burlington Zephyr the 1,034 miles between Denver and Chicago, a feat done in 16.5 hours.”8 In other words, each crew member was receiving a full day’s pay for a little more than two hours’ work. Many staff had the choice of either collecting multiple wages for a day’s work or simply performing a very short shift. It was easy money, but it was contributing to the death of America’s passenger railroad.

  The costs were so high that it was not uncommon for these luxury services to be killed off despite remaining popular and being well loaded. For example, according to Saunders, “The California Zephyr had an average occupancy rate of nearly 80 per cent (that would make any airline envious) right up to its last trip on March 22, 1970.”9 However, the economics just did not stack up in a world where railroads had lost their monopoly and the alternatives had become cheaper. Overall, passenger numbers were in steep decline. Whereas in 1944 there had been 600 million intercity passenger journeys, already by 1949 this had halved, as gasoline was no longer rationed, and by 1966 the number was just 105 million.

  Commuter journeys, too, were falling, as cars became universal and jobs were less concentrated in downtown areas accessible by rail. By the late 1950s, all but a couple of railroads were losing money on their passenger services: the New Haven, centered around Boston and Connecticut, which had just about broken even but would soon go under and have to be taken over unwillingly by the Penn Central; and the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter railroad in the country, which had gone bust in 1949 and was partly subsidized by the State of New York, which eventually took over the railroad in the mid-1960s. There was a similar pattern elsewhere— either the commuter networks were simply abandoned, or they were taken over by local city or state governments. The paradox was clear. As David P. Morgan, the editor of Trains magazine put it, commuter services were “a civic blessing” but “a corporate horror.”10 In other words, they lost the railroads a fortune but made life far more pleasant both for the passengers and for motorists who found the roads clearer. They saved city administrations a fortune, since, without them, more expensive roads and parking lots would have had to be built, but this basic fact was rarely taken into account in the rush to create the car-based economy.

  Streetcar networks, which had started being pruned in the 1930s, were mostly closed down in the 1940s and 1950s. There were, however, a few exceptions, including the heritage systems in San Francisco and New Orleans and parts of the network in major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh as a result of particular geographical circumstances such as tunnels running into hills that would have been difficult to turn into highways. The story of the closure of the Los Angeles network of streetcars and interurbans became a cause célèbre because it was widely seen as a conspiracy by the automobile industry, but the truth was more complex. The huge networks of “big red cars” of the Pacific Electric Railway that served the suburbs and the “big yellow cars” of the Los Angeles Railway that ran the streetcars in the central urban area both started struggling in the interwar period. Ridership had peaked in 1924 and then declined steadily, with a small recovery in the run-up to the war. There was much local debate about what to do with the system, and considerable hostility toward it was generated as car ownership rose and accidents between streetcars and automobiles became frequent. In 1940, the interurban Pacific Electric Railroad system was taken over by National City Lines, a subsidiary of the huge car manufacturer General Motors, and closed down. Four years later, the same company took over the Los Angeles Railroad and by the late 1950s had similarly abandoned the system. It was, therefore, easy to sense a conspiracy, especially as this was a nationwide phenomenon. Overall, between 1936 and 1950, National and another General Motors subsidiary, Pacific City Lines, took over more than one hundred streetcar systems in forty-five cities and converted them to buses provided by General Motors. The story in Los Angeles was one of the key cases used in a successful prosecution in 1949 of General Motors, along with Standard Oil and Firestone Tires, which had backed National City Lines, for breaking antitrust laws, and it featured as a subplot in the 1988 Steven Spielberg film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? General Motors and its codefendants were found guilty of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses, gasoline products, and tires used by local transportation companies but not of forcing the replacement of electric-driven streetcars with buses. That was a key difference and rather dented a hole in the conspiracy theory.

  Paul Mees, a strong supporter of public transportation, who has examined the story in detail, suggests that the streetcar systems were doomed anyway, since their problems stretched back to the end of the First World War. The number of passengers was falling rapidly just at the time when big sums of money were needed for reequipping them. Moreover, the local authorities responsible for the services were often lumbered with long-ter
m franchise arrangements with private operators that they could not change and therefore found it difficult to raise fares or close down unprofitable lines or increase service levels on profitable ones. When buses, which were far cheaper to operate, were offered by General Motors to replace the decaying streetcars, the local authorities grabbed the chance to close down their burdensome streetcar systems. Of course, the very fact that General Motors bought up all these streetcar systems suggests that there was at least in part an ulterior motive, as the company stood to benefit from bus sales, but, as Mees suggests, without the type of intervention by local or national government that became commonplace in Europe, the streetcar systems were doomed: “Problems with privately operated, government-franchised urban public transport had arisen by this time all over the developed world. The solution virtually everywhere except the US was a public takeover upon the expiry of the franchise or even earlier.”11 In the United States, however, nationalization was seen as impractical and even unconstitutional by the federal government. It was, therefore, not so much General Motors and its fellow automotive industry companies that were at fault, but rather the strong American antipathy toward government involvement in the provision of services that led to the demise of the streetcar networks. Of course, the increase in traffic as the people took to their cars was another factor in their downfall, because the streetcars became embroiled in jams on the busy streets. However, when it came to the threat to all passenger rail services in the United States a few years later, as we see below, a public-sector solution was found at the instigation of the federal government.

  It was not just the competition from the car and the airlines or the rigidity of the unions that was killing intercity passenger rail. Government policy, which had once so helped the railroads, was turning against them. The real killer was Eisenhower’s curse, the creation of the interstate network of superhighways linking every town of significance in the United States. When Eisenhower became president in 1953, he had not forgotten his awful experience on his trip across the continent as a young officer, and he supported a bill to create the interstate network of superhighways that would not only ensure it was quicker to drive than take the train on most journeys but also, in effect, be a vast hidden subsidy to the trucking industry. Created by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the forty-six-thousand-mile system, officially named after Eisenhower, was built over a period of thirty-five years and cost in excess of $425 billion.12 Federal funding was allowed because the system was seen as essential for military purposes and for use at times of national emergencies, and consequently the roads were engineered to very high standards, paid for by a national tax on fuel. It was the biggest construction project in American history and represented a crippling blow to the railroads, especially as road construction has continued to be supported through related highway-funding legislation also enacted by Eisenhower’s administration in 1956.