26. Douglas, All Aboard, 113.
27. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 122, 126.
28. John Elwood Clark, Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 97.
29. Some reports suggest 20,000.
30. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 675.
31. Westwood, Railways at War, 47.
32. Quoted in Weber, Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 199.
33. Ibid., 225.
34. Stover, American Railroads, 56.
35. Some recent estimates suggest that the figure may be as high as 750,000.
36. Gordon, Passage to Union, 146.
37. Quoted in Ogburn, Railroads, 23; Slason Thompson quoted in Weber, Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 3.
CHAPTER 5. HARNESSING THE ELEPHANT
1. Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1952; reprint, Indiana University Press, 1999), 43.
2. Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 26.
3. Dorothy R. Alder, British Investment in American Railways, 1834–1898 (University Press of Virginia, 1970), 83.
4. David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Viking Penguin, 1999), 17.
5. Clifford Krainik, “National Vision, Local Enterprise: John Plumbe Jr. and the Advent of Photography in Washington, DC,” Washington History 9, no. 2 (1997–1998): 5; Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 28.
6. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 32.
7. Oscar Lewis, The Big Four (Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 3, 23.
8. Bain, Empire Express, 137.
9. Lewis, The Big Four, 62.
10. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 75, 76.
11. Anthony Burton, On the Rails (Aurum, 2004), 94; Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 13.
12. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 52.
13. Ibid., 58.
14. Bain, Empire Express, 157.
15. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 64, 65.
16. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World (Simon & Schuster, 2000), 217.
17. Henry Stanley quoted in ibid., 219; Charles Savage quoted in Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 122.
18. According to Dodge’s autobiography, quoted in Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 220.
19. A small town exists today on the site.
20. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 102, 100.
21. Bain, Empire Express, 191.
22. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 85.
23. Ibid., 85.
24. Ibid., 101.
25. Ibid., 125.
26. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 170.
27. It is an irony of Whitney’s dream of Asian trade that today one of the main functions of the railroad lines crossing the western United States is to carry containers full of goods from China.
28. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 29.
29. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 99.
30. Amtrak ran its Sunset Limited service between Los Angeles and Jacksonville, Florida, from 1993 to 2005, when the track east of New Orleans was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. In Canada, too, there have been various coast-to-coast services.
31. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011), xxi.
32. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 115.
33. Keith L. Bryant Jr., introduction to Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, edited by William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl (Indiana University Press, 2007), 10.
CHAPTER 6. RAILROADS TO EVERYWHERE
1. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 166.
2. N. J. Bell and James Arthur Ward, Southern Railroad Man: N. J. Bell’s Recollections of the Civil War Era (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
3. Gordon, Passage to Union, 168.
4. This term comes from the Northerners’ custom of carrying their personal effects in a carpetbag.
5. Gordon, Passage to Union, 174, 173.
6. Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 43, 44.
7. Ibid., 45, 44; J. C. Powell, American Siberia; or, Fourteen Years’ Experience in a Southern Convict Camp, Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems, no. 105 (1891; reprint, Patterson Smith, 1970).
8. Gordon, Passage to Union, 166.
9. New York Times, January 21, 1863, referring to the Erie Gauge War of the 1850s, described in Chapter 3.
10. It was actually the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad until it amalgamated with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in 1872.
11. Quoted in George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 170, from Handbook for Immigrants to the United States, published by the American Social Service Association.
12. Quoted in Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 250.
13. Douglas, All Aboard, 159; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011), xxiv.
14. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 213.
15. In railroad terms, a washout denotes the erosion of the track bed by flowing water, as a result of heavy rain or flooding.
16. William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007), 729.
17. A Ponzi scheme pays returns out of sums invested by other investors and therefore makes no genuine profit. It is named after Charles Ponzi, one of the first perpetrators of this type of fraud.
18. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 76.
19. Ibid., 78.
20. The Great Northern’s premier passenger service was named Great Northern in Hill’s honor, a name that today’s Chicago–Seattle Amtrak retains.
21. Ibid., 79.
22. Douglas, All Aboard, 160.
23. Gordon, Passage to Union, 158.
CHAPTER 7. GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
1. Several sources suggest 1836 or 1837, but this seems unlikely, as the first section of line only started operating in 1837 and through-running between Philadelphia and Chambersburg began in 1839.
2. William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007), 847.
3. Baedeker’s quoted in Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 51; “London parson” quoted in Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 141.
4. Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Luxury Trains of the World (Bison Books, 1979), 13.
5. The Pullman conductor was not the same person as the overall train conductor.
6. Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 115.
7. Ibid.
8. Allen, Luxury Trains of the World, 16.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. This practice of ordering food by telegraph, incidentally, became very widespread in India right through the twentieth century, though there the meals were eaten on the train.
11. Allen, Luxury Trains of the World, 13.
12. Both quotes in Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 21.
14. Allen, Luxury Trains of the World, 15, 24.
15. I was amazed on my visit to Chicago in October 2010 to discover numerous such “diamond” crossings still exist, though now, happily, protected by sophisticated signaling.
16. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 74.
17. Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails, 35.
18. Dick Nelson in Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 175.
19. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 291, 295, 297.
20. Appendix in B. A. Botkin and Alvin F. Harlow, eds., A Treasury of Railroad Folklore (Crown, 1953), 510.
21. Middleton, Smerk, and Diehl, Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, 340.
22. The Dalton legend traveled far, since, as a child in the 1960s, I read a French comic called Spirou (Squirrel) that featured a regular comic strip about les frères Dalton, a group of cowboy gangsters who were portrayed as invariably stupid and inept.
23. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 155.
24. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 373; Gordon, Passage to Union, 164.
25. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 172.
26. Douglas, All Aboard, 179; Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 137. The latter remark was made by Robert R. Young, president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, in the late 1940s, as he was pushing for a true transcontinental service.
27. Douglas, All Aboard, 181.
28. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant (1895; reprint, Carroll & Graf, 2002), 117.
29. Ibid., 139.
30. Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, 244.
31. Stevenson, Amateur Emigrant, 139. Even today Amtrak seems occasionally to delight in failing to give adequate warning, as when during my 2010 tour I was nearly left at a tiny station in Mississippi when seeking refreshments and not warned about the imminent departure, even though the crew had said we would be stopping for a while.
32. For a time, after the introduction of dining cars on the Santa Fe, Harvey provided the catering.
33. Gordon, Passage to Union, 224.
34. Oliver Jensen, Railroads in America (American Heritage, 1975), 246.
35. Middleton, Smerk, and Diehl, Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, 309.
36. Gordon, Passage to Union, 226; Kornweibel, Railroads in the African American Experience, 242.
CHAPTER 8. THE END OF THE AFFAIR
1. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011), xxii; James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 131.
2. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 8.
3. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 354.
4. Ibid., 356.
5. Congress did not standardize time until 1918.
6. Ibid., 359.
7. Gordon, Passage to Union, 202.
8. Ibid., 212, 8.
9. The records are listed in ibid., 180.
10. Ibid., 181.
11. Ibid., 184, 285.
12. Ibid., 286.
13. Oliver Jensen, Railroads in America (American Heritage, 1975), 246.
14. Miami was known at the time as Fort Dallas.
15. William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007), 996.
16. Estimates vary between twenty-three and twenty-six.
17. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Railroads: The Nation’s First Big Business (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 23.
18. Ibid., 98.
19. Ibid., 107.
20. Ibid., 129.
21. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 206.
22. Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of American Financial Disasters (Macmillan, 1968), 180.
23. Widely cited but not properly sourced.
24. Chandler, Railroads, 130.
25. White, Railroaded, 440.
26. Ibid., 441.
27. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 119.
28. David Mountfield, The Railway Barons (Osprey, 1979), 133.
29. They had to cross the isthmus by mule until the opening of the Panama Railway in 1855.
30. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 87.
31. Not to be confused with the Erie Gauge War, described in Chapter 3.
32. Leslie A. White, Modern Capitalist Culture (Left Coast Press, 2008), 195.
33. Douglas, All Aboard, 152.
34. Mountfield, Railway Barons, 146.
35. See Appendix B in Andrew Dow, Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 287, for the background to this quotation.
36. Mountfield, Railway Barons, 179, 182; Middleton, Smerk, and Diehl, Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, 719.
37. Middleton, Smerk, and Diehl, Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, 511; Douglas, All Aboard, 204.
38. Middleton, Smerk, and Diehl, Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, 513.
39. Ibid., 11.
40. Stover, American Railroads, 120.
41. Ibid., 121.
42. Henry George, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” Overland Monthly (October 1868): 38.
43. Richard Saunders Jr., Main Lines: Rebirth of the North American Railroads, 1970–2002 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 30.
44. Stover, American Railroads, 129.
45. Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, 118 U.S. 557 (1886).
46. The Chicago Inter-Ocean, January 2, 1887, quoted in Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton University Press, 1965), 41.
CHAPTER 9. ALL KINDS OF TRAIN
1. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 137.
2. Albro Martin, Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads (Columbia University Press, 1971), 17.
3. With the odd exception, such as the Western Pacific from Salt Lake City to Oakland, California.
4. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 342; Martin, Enterprise Denied, 128.
5. Martin, Enterprise Denied, 23.
6. Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Luxury Trains of the World (Bison Books, 1979), 76.
7. Martin, Enterprise Denied, 26.
8. She was actually briefly revived in both the late 1940s and early 1960s on trains running from Hoboken.
9. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 232; Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 308.
10. There are a very small number of exceptions where towns have passed ordinances preventing trains from sounding their horns in an effort to give their residents a better night’s sleep.
11. Martin, Enterprise Denied, 26.
12. Ibid., 361.
13. Douglas, All Aboard, 241.
14. Ibid., 247.
15. Ibid., 248, 249.
16. Robert C. Post, Urban Mass Transit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 50, 58.
17. Ibid., 58.
18. George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Urban Railways in America (Stanford University Press, 1960), 12, 25.
19. Post, Urban Mass Transit, 61; Paul Mees, Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age (Earthscan, 2010), 17.
20. Hilton and Due, Electric Urban Railways in America, 3.
21. Ibid., 23, 24.
&
nbsp; 22. Ibid., 3.
23. William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007), 411.
24. Martin, Enterprise Denied, 61.
25. Different sources offer alternative figures, such as 258,000 in Albro Martin’s Enterprise Denied and 259,000 in Richard Saunders Jr.’s Merging Lines: American Railroads, 1900–1970 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).
26. Martin, Enterprise Denied, 337; Saunders, Merging Lines, 36; Rea quoted in Douglas, All Aboard, 321.
27. Martin, Railroads Triumphant, 355.
28. Saunders, Merging Lines, 36.
CHAPTER 10. THE ROOTS OF DECLINE
1. Parts of this chapter are based on my earlier book Blood, Iron, and Gold (PublicAffairs, 2010).
2. Richard Saunders Jr., Merging Lines: American Railroads, 1900–1970 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 42, 45.
3. Ibid., 55.
4. Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Railways of the Twentieth Century (Winchmore, 1983), 70.
5. Widely quoted, including in ibid., 69.
6. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 121, 120.
7. Allen, Railways of the Twentieth Century, 9.
8. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 317.
9. Martin, Railroads Triumphant, 359.
10. Lawrence H. Kaufman, Leaders Count: The Story of BNSF Railway (BNSF Railway, 2005), 74.
11. Technically, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was created by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, but Roosevelt greatly extended its scope and the amount of money it had at its disposal. The scheme bears an uncanny resemblance to the “quantitative easing” that has become almost routine following the banking crisis of 2008.
12. Ibid.
13. For the most part, these were technically diesel-electrics. In other words, the diesel combustion engine was used to run an electric motor that then powered the locomotive.
14. Allen, Railways of the Twentieth Century, 76.
15. Ibid., 76, 77.
The Great Railroad Revolution Page 48
