16. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 345.
17. Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails (Routledge, 2003), 11.
18. Welsh poet and vagabond W. H. Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and a frequent rider of the rails in the United States and Canada in the decades on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was one such victim when he fell under a train in Ontario, crushing his foot and resulting in the loss of his leg below the knee.
19. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 225–226.
CHAPTER 11. A NARROW ESCAPE
1. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 383.
2. Quoted in Richard Saunders Jr., Merging Lines: American Railroads, 1900–1970 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 77.
3. Ibid.; Douglas, All Aboard, 382.
4. Saunders, Merging Lines, 73.
5. Ibid., 153, 155.
6. A few trains powered by steam locomotives were run by the Grand Trunk Western in 1961.
7. Geoffrey Freeman Allen, Luxury Trains of the World (Bison Books, 1979), 101.
8. Saunders, Merging Lines, 108.
9. Ibid.
10. David Morgan, “Who Shot the Passenger Train?,” Trains (April 1959).
11. Paul Mees, Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age (Earthscan, 2010), 17.
12. In today’s money, but a precise figure is difficult to arrive at, as local road improvements were at times included in the contracts.
13. Saunders, Merging Lines, 107.
14. Ibid., 102.
15. Albro Martin, Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads (Columbia University Press, 1971), 367.
16. Rush Loving Jr., The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry (Indiana University Press, 2006), 57.
17. The Penn Central was not the only railroad that tried to set itself up as a conglomerate—bizarrely, the Illinois Central at one time owned El Paso Mexican foods.
18. Loving Jr., Men Who Loved Trains, 68.
19. Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Wreck of the Penn Central (Little, Brown, 1971), 339.
CHAPTER 12. RENAISSANCE WITHOUT PASSENGERS
1. Amtrak’s official name is the National Railroad Passenger Corporation.
2. Richard Saunders Jr., Main Lines: Rebirth of the North American Railroads, 1970–2002 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 59; George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 393.
3. Don Phillips, “The Road to Rescue,” Classic Trains (Summer 2011): 28.
4. Saunders, Main Lines, 59.
5. Bob Johnston, “Amtrak’s Critical Turns, ”Trains (July 2011): 27.
6. Saunders, Main Lines, 36.
7. Ibid., 3, 21.
8. Richard Saunders Jr., Merging Lines: American Railroads, 1900–1970 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 294.
9. Others have popped up too, notably at Folkston, Georgia.
10. The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway is just 150 miles longer.
11. Douglas, All Aboard, 255.
12. Dan Machalaba, “What to Do About NIMBYs,” Trains (September 2010): 42–49.
13. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 280.
14. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 217.
A Note on Sources
Compiling a concise bibliography out of the wealth of American railroad literature is as difficult as making the choices over the content of this book. So this list is by no means comprehensive, but merely reflects my sources, prejudices, and preferences and is highly selective, as I have only included those that I found particularly useful. There are many other books that I have quoted, and the references can be found in the Notes. Nevertheless, this brief bibliography will give a few sources for further reading. I would, too, be dishonest if I did not confess to using at times that wonderful resource Wikipedia, which has definitely improved in terms of accuracy over the years, even if there are, inevitably, some errors. However, books are not infallible, either, as I have discovered when coming across conflicting sources.
First, the general books. Of course, one of the reasons I was stimulated into writing this one was the lack of a recent concise book on American railroads. Two of the best are more than a half century old. Stewart H. Holbrook’s work The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947) is idiosyncratic, lengthy, anecdotal, and fun. John F. Stover’s American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961) is rather the opposite, sober and full of hard facts. Charlton Ogburn, Railroads: The Great American Adventure (National Geographic Society, 1977), is an eccentric pictorial account with a lot of good anecdotes, and High Iron: A Book of Trains (Bonanza Books, 1938) is an evocative tome by the legendary railroad writer Lucius Beebe. Railroads Triumphant by Albro Martin (Oxford University Press, 1992) has plenty of good history but is rather marred by the bad-tempered tone and the incoherent structure. The best of the more recent ones is probably George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), a solid and well-written book. These general books cover the early years of the railroads, while The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (1951; reprint, Harper Torchbooks, 1968) by George Rogers Taylor puts the development of the railroads into a wider perspective.
There are numerous coffee table–type books that are dominated by pictures, and I can’t really recommend any because of the lack of narrative and the rather random selection of material. The Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007) edited by William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, on the other hand, is thorough and informative, though as with all such books it is sometimes not as comprehensive as you expect when you are after that little nugget of information.
My focus on social history led me to two thoughtful but very different books. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), examines the psychology that led to the widespread support for the railroads, while Sarah H. Gordon’s Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997) is a thorough analysis of their impact for that period and is the best sociological assessment I came across.
On the Civil War, the vast literature rarely examines the role of railroads. Two classic exceptions are Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1952; reprint, Indiana University Press, 1999), and George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953). The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 (1956; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2003) by George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu provides an excellent perspective on how much railroads had progressed by the end of the Civil War. This is an area, I suggest, that could do with a lot more mining, and I did come across a nice ghostwritten “memoir,” Reflections of a Civil War Locomotive Engineer by Diana Bailey Harris, based on contemporary letters (self-published, 2011).
The literature on the transcontinentals is so great that it is almost a whole category of its own and rather reflects the imbalance in American railroad history, which places far too much importance on this story in relation to the rest. I therefore confine myself to just a couple of mentions. The best standard works I found are David Haward Bain’s Empire Express (Viking Penguin, 1999) and Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants (Frederick Muller, 1962), but there are countless more good books. A fascinating recent addition, which questions much of the conventional thinking and many of the myths on the building of the first transcontinental, is Railroaded by Richard White (W. W. Norton, 2011).
Dee Brown’s Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994) is a classic account of how the railr
oads conquered the West, and Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford (Three Rivers, 2002) is a detailed roller-coaster account of the crazy Florida Keys scheme by Henry Flagler. One other little gem I came across is Robert Louis Stevenson’s account of slumming it across America by train, The Amateur Emigrant (originally published posthumously, in 1895, but widely available, including with Carroll & Graf, 2002). Albro Martin, Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads (Columbia University Press, 1971), is excellent on the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission and its role in stymieing railroad investment. The old and dry Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 by Gabriel Kolko (Princeton University Press, 1965) proved to be a gem as a reliable account of the period. Geoffrey Freeman Allen’s Luxury Trains of the World (Bison Books, 1979) has superb detail on the heyday of great American trains, as does his Railways of the Twentieth Century (Winchmore, 1983).
For more modern times, the two books by Richard Saunders Jr. are superb accounts of the railroads in the twentieth century: Merging Lines (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), which covers the period 1900–1970, and its sequel, Main Lines (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). Alfred Runte’s rather angry Allies of the Earth (Truman State University Press, 2006) is an evocative study of how America allowed its passenger rail services to wither away, while Joseph Vranich’s Derailed (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) highlights Amtrak’s failings.
I made extensive use of several histories of particular railroads, notably Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Wreck of the Penn Central (Little, Brown, 1971), written soon after the collapse, which gives it a nice immediacy; Lawrence H. Kaufman, Leaders Count, published by the Burlington Santa Fe itself in 2005 and therefore rather hagiographic; and H. Roger Grant, Erie Lackawanna (Stanford University Press, 1994). Another good account of the postwar crisis in the rail industry is Rush Loving Jr., The Men Who Loved Trains (Indiana University Press, 2006).
On specific aspects of the story, George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Urban Railways in America (Stanford University Press, 1960), provides an almost encyclopedic account of the tragic story of the interurbans, a tale that is often neglected in railroad history; Mark Aldrich’s book on safety, Death Rode the Rails (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), includes a lot of data on accident rates, as well as offering a coherent narrative; and Robert C. Post tells the story of city transportation technologies in Urban Mass Transit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Finally, if I were to award a prize for the best book on a railroad topic, it would have to go to Theodore Kornweibel Jr.’s Railroads in the African American Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which is groundbreaking, comprehensive, beautifully illustrated, and superbly written and highlights an area that has been widely neglected.
Index
Accidents, 190–200, 194–196, 226, 227, 318, 351, 354
and bridges, 161, 193–194, 256
Frankford Junction accident, 323–324
and livestock, 42, 81–82, 196
Picnic Train disaster, 195–196
and Vanderbilt, and Camden & Amboy Railroad, 80–81, 240
See also Derailments Acela Express, 351
Adams, Alvin, 82–83
Adams, John Quincy, 81
Adirondack Express, 263
Adirondacks, 224
Adler, Dorothy, 124
Alaska Railroad, 307
Albany & Schenectady Railroad, 67
Albany & Susquehanna Railroad, 247–248
Alcohol, 143, 206
Aldrich, Mark, 191, 195
Allen, Geoffrey Freeman, 188, 190, 314–315, 328
Allen, Horatio, 17–18, 20
Allen, William Frederick, 219
Ambrose, Stephen E., 143
Ambulance and hospital trains, 115
American Railroad Journal, 60, 89, 121, 154, 191
American Railway Union, 235–236, 246
Ames, Oakes, 137, 157
Amtrak, 261, 334, 341–345, 350–352, 356–357, 358
Andrews Raid, xxii
Androscoggin & Kennebec Railroad, 61
Annapolis & Elk Ridge Railroad, 98
Anthracite, 17, 268–269, 334
Antietam, Battle of, 106
Arlington National Cemetery, 98–99
Armored trains, 116
Army engineers, 33
Ashe, William A., 103
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (Santa Fe), 135, 141, 176, 235, 270
and aviation, 302–303
branch line closures, 316
diesel services, 316
gas-engine trials, 310
and Harvey restaurants, 209
and immigrants, 172, 173
prestige services, 301, 313, 328
and Western expansion, 173–174, 175–176, 179
Atlantic & Great Western Railroad, 168
Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad, 40
Auburn & Syracuse Railroad, 67
Australia, 60, 176
Austria, 21
Averell, Mary, 248
Aviation, 302–303, 318, 321, 328–329, 337, 350, 352
Ayres, Henry “Poppy,” 79–80
Baedeker guides, 184, 223
Baldwin, Matthias, 42–43
Ballast, 46
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 12, 58, 60, 68–69, 70–71, 168, 230, 250, 303–304, 308
branch line closures, 316
and Civil War, 95, 97–98, 104, 111, 113, 118
electrification, 286–287, 297
and first US railways, 1, 18–23, 32, 33, 125
labor relations, 233, 238
prestige services, 264–265, 327–328
Baltimore Riot, 97–98
Barnard, George C., 242
Baseball, 226–227
Bass, Sam, 202
Bay Area Rapid Transit, 353–354
Beauregard, P. G. T., 101
Bell, Nimrod, 161–162
Belt Railway, 71
Benton, Thomas Hart, 7
Best Friend of Charleston, 20
Bevan, David, 337
“Big John” case, 346–347
Black Diamond, 334
Blenkinsop, John, 15
Blücher, 15
Boiler explosions, 192
Bolshevik Revolution, 294
Boston
commuter services, 211
rail connections, 52–53
South Station, 261, 344
Boston & Albany Railroad, 203
Boston & Lowell Railroad, 34, 47, 52, 73, 77, 193
Boston & Maine Railroad, 223, 287, 297, 338
Boston & Providence Railroad, 84
Boston & Worcester Railroad, 35
Boulton & Watt, 5–6
Boy Scouts, 311
Bragg, Braxton, 112
Braking, 49, 196–199
Branch lines, 210, 307, 316, 327, 333–334
Brassey, Thomas, 39
Bridges
accidents, 161, 193–194, 256
and beavers, 210
Dale Creek bridge, 147
destruction of, 106, 109, 110, 112
Missouri bridge, 155, 207
Rock Island bridge, 86, 147
Bridgewater Canal, 8
Brighton Beach & Brooklyn Railroad, 223
British Railways, 334, 348
Broadway Limited, 266–267, 309
Brown, Dee, 42, 127, 135–136, 139–140, 146, 149, 152, 172, 206, 208
Brown, George, 18
Brown, John, 94–95
Brown, Joseph E., 103
Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 59
Bryant, Keith L., Jr., 158, 178, 251
Buchan, John, 109
Budd, Ralph, 310–312, 328
Buffalo, Bradford & Pittsburgh Railroad, 242
Buffalo & Rochester Railroad, 67
Buffalo & State Line Railroad, 60–61
Buffett, Warren, 357
Bull Run, Battle of, 101–102, 112
Burkhardt, Ed, xxviii,
354–355
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, 257, 258
Burlington Railroad. See Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad
Burlington Trials, 199
Buses, 303, 331
Bush, George W., 326
Business travel, 263
Caldwell, Charles, 35
California Northwestern Railroad, 283
California Zephyr, 327, 329, 345
Calkins, Earnest Elmo, 268
Camden & Amboy Railroad, 23, 30, 52, 60, 82, 108, 161, 219
accident, and Vanderbilt, 80–81, 240
and locomotive technology, 42–46
Canada, xxvii, 53, 96, 178, 252, 287, 288, 309, 325, 358
Canals, 4, 8, 12–13, 19, 27, 29–31, 47, 53, 65, 84–85, 217, 228
Carnegie, Andrew, 98
Carpetbaggers, 163
Carriages, 44–45, 73–76
all-steel, 200, 212
classes of, 73
lighting and heating, 210, 269
and stoves, 75
and toilets, 44, 185
See also Dining cars; Pullman cars; Sleeping cars
Carroll, Charles, 1, 20, 22
Cascade Tunnel, 287, 310
Casement, John and Daniel, 138–140, 143, 146, 152
Cassatt, Alexander, 261–262, 285
Catch Me Who Can, 14
Catholic Total Abstinence Society, 256
Causey Arch, 3
Central Ohio Railroad, 113
Central Pacific Railroad, 124, 175
and corruption, 128, 132–134, 144, 156–158
death toll, 142
and meeting of railways, 57, 150–152
and Native Americans, 147, 202
and transcontinental railroad, 128, 130, 131–158
workforce, 141–142, 143–144, 146, 150–152, 160
Central Railroad of Michigan, 49
Central Railroad of New Jersey, 213, 310
Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, 19–22, 32–34, 60, 91, 125, 216
Charlotte Dundas, 5
Chattanooga, 104, 109, 112–114
Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, 10
Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, 248, 299, 347
Chesterfield Railroad, 23
Chicago
commuter services, 353
elevated railways, 279
jazz culture, 302
as rail hub, 68–72, 86–87
The Great Railroad Revolution Page 49
