The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  In Frank Mckenna’s words he ‘devised methods of management and control necessary to the conduct of his employer’s business’. He also proved an excellent ‘political’ manager, scheming, combining, making secret treaties – one of his most successful campaigns restricted the spread of Brunel’s broad gauge lines. But even Huish was never made a director of the company he served so faithfully, for the railways provided an early example of that most socially divisive of British managerial structures, in which the board of directors was composed exclusively of generally well-born amateurs, while the organisation was actually run by the equivalent of non-commissioned officers, although Huish was invariably referred to under his military rank of captain.

  In the United States the railways thoroughly deserved their title of ‘the nation’s first big business’.* By the middle of the 19th century three quarters of the railroad workers in the United States worked for organisations which were large by any standards. ‘Every day, railroad managers had to make decisions controlling the activities of many men to whom they rarely talked or even ever saw … both the short-term operating decisions … and the long-term policy decisions – involving expansion by construction or purchase of tracks, equipment, terminal and other facilities and the methods used to finance such expansion were unprecedented in their intricacies.’

  American railroads matured in the decades before and after the Civil War. There was need. The first lines were usually mere sketches, tracks hastily laid on the ground. It took decades for the picture to be completed. The process was, in fact, started by some of the ‘robber barons’. It was Commodore Vanderbilt, more famous as a financier than as an improver of railways, who double-tracked and then quadrupled, some major routes, like that from Albany to Buffalo, and E. H. Harriman was famous for the improvements he effected on the Union Pacific.

  But it was the tycoons’ successor, the usually anonymous managers, who rebuilt the majority of the major routes, spending vast sums on doubling and quadrupling lines, boring new tunnels, eliminating gradients, straightening curves, laying heavier rails, transforming them into the finest piece of infrastructure the world had ever seen.

  The managers were working within an increasingly modern managerial environment. The Baltimore and Ohio’s managers ‘were the first to separate the management of financial and accounting activities from those of moving trains and traffic’. As general superintendent of the New York and Erie, Daniel C. McCallum, later the hero of Civil War railroading, ‘was the first to define clearly the duties and responsibilities of the several executive or administrative officers on a large railroad and to spell out the lines of authority and communication between them’.

  J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania, lordliest of them all, took McCallum’s ideas one stage further with a widely-copied divisional structure. Thomson established a holding company to manage the Pennsy’s interests in leased lines or those to the west of its main routes. He then introduced a traffic department which marketed and organised the railroad’s traffic, while a central office concentrated on broader issues. In 1869 Albert Fink, known as the ‘Teutonic Giant’ (he was 6 ft 7 ins tall) a distinguished engineer and inventor of the Fink Bridge Truss, became chairman of the Louisville and Nashville and introduced the modern idea of ‘control through statistics’, separating fixed from marginal costs. Since fixed costs accounted for two thirds of the total, there was a considerable incentive to increase business at almost any price.

  Some of the bigger railroads introduced systems of operational decentralisation very similar to those supposedly invented by General Motors in the 1920s. With them came an increasing formalisation of internal relationships. American railroads issued rulebooks of a hundred pages or more: that issued by the Pennsylvania in 1875 included 410 regulations, ‘which in minute detail outlined the expected activities of every grade of operative from foreman to road repairmen,’ wrote Walter Licht.

  In Britain the first railway workers had come largely from the armed services, domestic service, and other occupations marked by the habit of obedience – unlike employees in other industries the workers were called ‘servants’, a status recognised even in the name of one of their unions. In the lower grades, both in Britain and the United States,* agricultural labourers predominated, largely because railways were the biggest industry in rural areas otherwise largely untouched by industrialisation; indeed, in many countries it was the railways which first brought an extreme and specialised form of industrial discipline into the countryside. In Britain the workers from agricultural backgrounds were resented by their urban colleagues because it was thought that they were more docile, and accustomed to lower wages than urban recruits.

  Except for a minority of workers on the fringe, like part-time porters or men employed on the permanent way, railwaymen enjoyed a greater degree of security, a greater regularity of payment, than in other industries at the time, so the jobs were much sought-after. Even the almighty directors did not neglect their powers of patronage – in one company, for instance, the chairman was allowed to nominate twelve clerks. Nevertheless by the 1870s the companies did face competition from the police, another body where obedience was a key requirement.

  The quasi-military atmosphere in the railway world extended to an obsession with rank. In Britain there were over a hundred grades by 1870. ‘The goods porter was looked on as an inferior animal by the shunter,’ wrote P. W. Kingsford, in Victorian Railwaymen; ‘the shunter was tolerated as a necessary evil by the goods guard, who had wild hopes that some time he would be able to look a passenger guard squarely in the eyes as a man and brother of equal rank.’ More fundamental was the strict distinction, drawn the world over, between mere ‘workers’, paid weekly or even daily, and the monthly-paid salaried employees.

  In France the hierarchy was even more formal. By 1900 the mighty Northern Railway included seventeen grades, each with a formal minimum and maximum salary, with carefully graded equivalent ranks in each branch: administrative, operational, permanent way, and mechanical engineering. Lowest paid were female employees (whatever their work, it seems), taking home a few hundred francs annually, even if they were full-time employees, while Grade I, the chief engineers and their brethren, earned up to 35,000 francs a year (the equivalent of £1,400, an immense salary for the period).25

  Nevertheless most railway systems included a clearly visible promotion ladder, itself a considerable innovation in industrial practice. As Kingsford remarks, there was ‘much more freedom of movement between the manual worker, unskilled as well as skilled, and the clerical and supervisory worker than there was in the twentieth century’, when the railways’ managerial arteries had seized up. Most senior British railwaymen, remarks Michael Robbins in The Railway Age, ‘began their careers straight from school. It was not often a public school; and a university man was very rare indeed in the railway service.’ Sir George Findlay, for thirteen years general manager of the London & North Western, was the son of a railwayman. His career was typical in that ‘the father had a railway connexion; that it began early; and that it owned nothing to any influence except the man’s own work and the impression that it made on his superiors. There were no examinations passed, no careful training courses.’ He was transferred so often that ‘the railway service engrossed all his interest; it was his community, much more so than the place where he happened to be living’. The same pattern – of fast internal promotion of likely lads – applied in the United States where one in every six railwaymen received some form of promotion every couple of years.

  Outside Europe, and not only in colonies like India, the hierarchy was openly racial. In Railways of the Andes, published in 1963, Brian Fawcett, a veteran railwayman, shows how late and how grudgingly the natives were trusted to run their own railways. The replacement of expatriate experts ‘was gradual, nationals taking over when the foreign incumbents retired, died or drank themselves out of a job … and so it went on until virtually the only foreigners remaining were the officers. It
stopped there. As long as British companies operated South American railroads they kept a majority of British officials.’

  Fawcett’s book is redolent of his obviously genuine affection for native Andean railwaymen. But he dismisses the ‘young men of Spanish ancestry’, refusing to sully their hands with hard work, and whose tradition ‘militates against the donkey work that goes into the making of a good operating official’ – an accusation he could have levelled with equal validity against the well-brought-up young English exiles, who sometimes found themselves in charge of some far-away railways.

  The distinctions were not merely between expatriates and natives. The Cholos, the mountain Indians, did the dirty work in the engine sheds and on the track, while the mestizos, men of mixed blood, could aspire to higher ranks; although, Fawcett warns, ‘the mestizo of the coast is generally at the bottom of labour disputes’.

  The same divisions were found in the Indian railways, then the largest single employers of labour in the railway world. Naturally the officer class was exclusively British, and even the expatriate engine-drivers considered themselves a cut above those recruited locally. But the mass of middle-rank jobs, operational and clerical, in India, as in the Andean countries or Malaya, were filled by men of mixed parentage. This may have been because, despite the obvious cut-off point at managerial level, railways provided a career ladder higher than any other occupation, and one where intelligence and a variety of skills brought their appropriate rewards.

  The social distinctions ‘were reflected in the residential patterns of workers associated with the stations. At the bottom of the scale, some “third-class” stations, which were expected to be used only by Indian travellers, were staffed entirely by Indians. The Anglo-Indians … were always accommodated in their own railway settlements not far from the larger stations.’26

  As railway systems grew throughout the world, so their operational requirements grew more complex. Typical was the ‘chief despatcher’, responsible for operational complexities today handled by a computer. In Fawcett’s words, ‘His knowledge of the whole system must be encyclopedic; he must know the traits of every engine, every engineer and every conductor … he must be capable of concentrating for hours at a time on the train-sheets without letting his mind wander a degree off course … he must be a diplomat by nature; and of course he must be an authority on train movements and “the book” in general.’

  But the most romantic post was that of engine-driver, or engineer. Even Freud dreamt of being an engine driver: the two most popular American railway ballads, ‘Casey Jones’ and ‘The Wreck of the Old 97’, both concerned the fate of engineers. Neither song dealt with a major crash and both the engineers were painted as heroic figures, even though both were driving with extreme recklessness and Casey Jones had been reprimanded for the same offence on nine or ten occasions before his fatal crash.

  ‘Pioneer drivers,’ noted Walter Licht, ‘guarded their machines as prized and personal possessions. The engines were painted a variety of colours, that is until Commodore Vanderbilt clamped down on personal exuberance by insisting that all the locomotives on the New York Central should be painted a funereal black.’ Nevertheless some drivers retained their status. Photographs of Russian engine-drivers show them as ‘proper middle-class gentlemen, complete with starched collars’.

  But for all the romance, all their pride in their job, their engine, their status, all their insistence on representation by a separate union, the job was limited, more so even than the modern equivalent, the driver of a long-distance lorry. In Wolfgang Schievelbusch’s words, ‘Because a train runs on a predetermined line, an engine-driver can never aspire to the social role of a “captain on dry land”.’ Even at the time there was a fundamental status conflict between the engineers and the conductors, the ‘hogheads’ and the ‘brains’. ‘An engineer’, it was said, ‘is a fireman with his brains baked out.’

  The very specialised corps of railway policemen played a major role in the lives, and the folklore, of the railway community. By 1905 the Russian railways employed 8,000 policemen, more than one for every hundred workers. In Fawcett’s Andean railways the key figure was the ‘Comisario’, a highly special type of chief of police. ‘His methods are his own business; they are not questioned by wise management. He enjoys a large measure of independence, his official reward is good and his unofficial rewards remain his own secret.’

  He and his equivalents elsewhere had plenty to occupy them. Workshops were used for private jobs, and a superintendent on the Pennsylvania, quoted by Licht, complained that ‘most of the brass is carried off and taken by workmen in their dinner buckets or else wrapped up in their overalls.’ On the Baltimore and Ohio trainmen would throw coal overboard to be collected by their families.

  Institutionalised crime centred around the railways’ procurement departments, where even the top officials might well be involved, and, operationally, on the sale and checking of tickets. In 1866 the Northern Argentine Railway discovered that a group of their employees had set up a ticket office of their own outside the northern station in Buenos Aires where they sold tickets a third cheaper than the standard fares. Once on the train things were worse. Whether they were called guards, as in Britain, conductors, as in the United States, or inspectors, as in Russia, the scams were much the same. American conductors, it was said, practised the art of ‘knocking-down’. They would throw the cash they had collected in the air: any that stuck to the roof of the carriage belonged to their employers; the rest they kept for themselves. In 1865 things got so bad that one railroad discharged its whole corps of conductors.

  In Russia the inspectors would let passengers travel without a ticket or in a better class of carriage than they were entitled to, and if the inspector asked for your biletchik and not for your bilet, it meant that he might cut up nasty if no tip was forthcoming. But the passengers – and the authorities who issued over-many free passes – were just as much to blame. In 1908 an official enquiry27 discovered that nearly 33,000 passengers travelled without tickets from Moscow to St Petersburg. Most had passes: few were entitled to them; only 716 transgressors were fined, and a mere seventeen railway officials dismissed.

  Working on the railways was more dangerous even than in a traditionally high-risk industry like mining. Not surprisingly the companies tried to keep this damning fact quiet, especially as they had an appalling record in introducing even the simplest of safety devices. In Britain railway companies managed to disguise the figures for accidents until 1871. It then emerged that every year one in 167 of their workers was killed or injured. In the United States in the late 1880s three men in every hundred were injured every year.* In France 43 per cent of a sample of retired railwaymen surveyed in 1900 had suffered at least one accident while working for the railways – not surprisingly, since the Nord network alone was averaging an injury a day at the time.

  In the half century before corridor trains became standard in the last decades of the century even the guard on a passenger train had a dangerous job. In The Uncommercial Traveller Dickens recounts how the guard came ‘clambering round to mark the tickets while we are at full speed (a really horrible performance in an express train, though he holds on to the open window by his elbows in the most deliberate manner), he stands in such a whirlwind that I grip him fast by the collar, and feel it next to manslaughter to let him go.’

  The worst danger, accounting for a third of all the injuries suffered by American railwaymen in 1889, came from the links between the coaches or wagons, a primitive link-and-pin coupling device. The switchmen (also known as ‘fielders’) had to work at the ends of the cars to drop the coupling pins into the hooks just as the cars came together. Veteran fielders could be distinguished by their missing fingers. If the buffers (‘drumheads’) at the end of the cars failed to withstand the impact the fielder was smashed to death or knocked down between the cars to be run over by the wheels.

  The automatic coupler was perfected in 1873, but human life was c
heap, railway companies mean, and it was introduced only slowly into service. Even in 1912, couplings were responsible for 2,300 deaths among railroad employees in the United States, nearly four fifths of the total. But accidents only hit the headlines when passengers were involved. The sufferings of ordinary railway workers were so commonplace that the phrase ‘only a brakeman was killed’ became commonplace, familiar enough to be immortalised in yet another bitter railway ballad.

  ’Twas only a poor dying brakeman,

  Simply a hard lab ’ring man …

  ’Twas only a poor mangled being,

  Nobody knew ‘What’s his name’ …

  Railway companies did make some attempts to improve their employees’ lot. ‘The picture which emerged from the evidence of railway servants,’ wrote Geoffrey Alderman in The Railway Interest about a report from a Royal Commission of the mid-1870s, ‘was of a benevolent despotism exercised by the companies over the men for the latter’s own good.’ Moreover and crucially, ‘higher wage packets meant much more to them than longer hours’. Many companies provided blocks of flats or houses at railway centres like Glasgow, Manchester, Stratford in east London and at Peterborough, where the estate was known as ‘The Barracks’. Some even provided schools: the mighty London & North Western had twenty. But most benefits, like free passes and clothes, were confined to the superior grades, and, at lower levels, proved useful to divide militants from more peaceable workers.

  In Britain the companies also ran the only savings institutions then available to employees. As a commission of enquiry noted in 1874, the Friendly Society ‘as a means of thrift existed only for a minority, and that minority was the better-paid … many disputes between workers and servants in which the existence of a [Friendly] Society enables a company by dismissing a servant to inflict a heavy fine as well’, the former ‘servant’ could not reclaim the money the company had paid into the society on his behalf.