The tradition of popular support was maintained in the 1870s when Frank and Jesse James ranged the Mid-West for several years with apparent impunity. Stewart Holbrook8 explains how ‘Farmers who felt they had been cheated … other men who had lost their savings in wild-cat railroad stocks and bonds … laboring men [who] felt the railroads were grinding them down were not going to help the strike-breaking “Pinkertons” to hunt them down’.
The most famous such incident was the so-called ‘Battle of Mussel Slough’, when five farmers and two agents were killed when trying to arrest two train robbers, Christopher Evans and John Sontag. Evans, a former warehouse manager for the Bank of California and Sontag, a former railroader crippled while a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, systematically robbed five trains. Eventually two detectives turned up at Evans’s home. He lost his temper and opened fire. As a result he and Sontag became the objects of the biggest manhunt California had ever seen. Yet they holed up happily in the hills for nearly two years, living very well and ‘eating at logging camps, where no questions were asked.’ In the end they were caught in an ambush. Sontag was killed, but Evans managed to travel six miles with ‘his clothing soaked with blood, both arms hanging by his sides, one of them mere strips of flesh and bone, and with three shots embedded in his head.’ He was caught, tried and given a life sentence. His wife and daughter raised funds by appearing as themselves in a melodrama, Evans and Sontag. Eventually he was pardoned by an anti-railroad governor and spent his retirement writing a book envisaging a Utopia in which prisons were genuine reformatories.
Surprisingly, ‘Train robberies were perhaps as frequent in Russia as they were in America,’ wrote J. N. Westwood (A History of Russian Railways). But the Russians did not hate their railway tycoons, so did not glorify their train robbers, who consequently remain anonymous figures compared with the anti-heroes of American folklore. This is a pity. One would like to know more about them. ‘The robbers were sometimes professionals, like those who terrorized the Tashkent Railway until troops were sent to dislodge them, or amateurs like those peasants in Tula province who in 1913 had the idea of bettering their lot by loosening the rails of a local main line, causing a train to derail and fall down an embankment, where its injured passengers could be robbed at leisure.’
Trains, like ocean liners, also became notorious as the haunts of fraudsters and conmen of every description. In the United States a pack of cards became known as a ‘railroad bible’. Some 300 card sharps operated the Union Pacific, including George Devol, who was supposed to have pocketed some $2 million of travellers’ cash, and the lovely ‘Poker Alice’ Invers, a fair haired, blue-eyed wisp of a girl who retired to run a brothel in Deadwood, South Dakota.
Stations were even more crime-ridden than trains. They were favourite haunts of pickpockets, and notorious for the sort of steady, if petty pilfering associated with any major staging point, the sort which gave rise to the famous soubriquet ‘Thiefrow’ for London Heathrow airport. As early as 1853 the managers of the London & North Western ‘were at our wits’ end to find out the blackguards. Not a night passes without wine hampers, silk parcels, drapers’ boxes or provisions being robbed; and if the articles are not valuable enough they leave them about the station. A roll of chintz was found on the station this morning; of course mistaken at first for silk, but on tearing the paper the plunderer discovered it to be chintz and threw it away in disgust.’9
Accidents were as regular a feature of rail travel as crimes. But, as with railway murders, only a select few permeated the public consciousness. The most famous of all was the very first: the death of the eminent statesman, William Huskisson, under the wheels of the engine at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. One of the few famous nineteenth-century figures to be involved in an accident was Charles Dickens, injured in a terrible crash at Staplehurst in Kent in which ten people were killed. He recorded his impressions in a vivid letter, recalling how he ‘was not in the least fluttered at the time. I instantly remembered that I had the MS of a number with me and clambered back into the carriage for it. But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shakes and am obliged to stop.’ He wrote nothing publicly about the accident and avoided the inquest not, as he claimed in the letter, for reasons of modesty, but because he was accompanied by a girl friend.
Charles Dickens’s accident at Staplehurst.
In 1866, the year after Dickens’s accident, a number of medical reports analysed the fact that ‘There is something in the crash, the shock, and the violence of a railway collision, which would seem to produce effects upon the nervous system quite beyond those of any ordinary injury.’10 Other authors wrote about the ‘emotional or hysterical state’ peculiar to railway accidents, a state previously dismissed as purely physical, as ‘railway spine’.
‘Mechanical shock’ was a direct result of the revolutionary nature of the railways as the first means of transport unrelated to nature and their effect on the human psyche as well as the human frame. It was naturally of considerable medical – and more especially psychological – importance in leading ‘alienists’, as psychiatrists were then called, away from purely physical explanations of human ills. It also had a demonstrable follow-on effect on legal settlements compensating those victims of accidents who, like Dickens, were physically unharmed but shaken up.
But this interest was confined to the victims themselves and to relatively narrow legal and medical circles. The public was more interested in blood.* Sometimes a major accident produced repercussions which lasted for years. One such was the famous accident on a train from Paris to Versailles in 1842. This delayed the spread of railways in France, and in Britain affected the public’s attitudes to travelling on the Sabbath and the locking of individual compartments.
There was no necessary correlation between the numbers killed in an accident and its long-term fame. This often depended largely on the quality of the works – generally the ballad – it generated. In Norm Cohen’s words11 ‘The big takers of human life have not been immortalized in song, as if strength of numbers conferred silent anonymity to the victims … The wreck ballads of the 1890s and later were built upon an already traditional verse style that was used in early poems, if not songs.’
In a century which liked some of its amusements to be bloody the American public lapped up simulated accidents. In the 1890s collisions involving two locomotives were featured at almost 150 fairs in the United States. But these were sideshows: more importantly the railway freed one major form of entertainment, the circus, from previous restraints imposed by the size, speed and range of horse-drawn wagons. The older type of ‘wagon show’ gave way to the railway circus only as the rails connected enough cities to form an adequate touring base. By 1854 Dr Gilbert Spalding, ‘perhaps the most innovative circus manager of all’12, was master-minding such revolutionary new shows as the Great Western Railroad Circus – which had none of the wagons required to stage the parade a circus traditionally used to announce its arrival in a new town.
A single train could carry a whole circus.
By the mid-1860s the ingenious doctor was ordering special circus wagons, adaptable for different gauges. But even he was upstaged by William Cameron Coup, the brains behind the great showman, P. T. Barnum. It was Coup who created the modern circus, mounted on uniform platform cars, which could ‘travel 100 miles a night and still have time to put up tents and seats, give a street parade and present two, even three, performances per day.’ These new giant shows played only in major towns, where, in another Coup touch, circus agents working in advance arranged for special trains from outlying towns and villages on circus days.
When Coup sold out, fed up with Barnum’s habit of franchising his name, he bequeathed a system which lasted until lorries took over from railway wagons, a system in which the size of a circus was measured by the number of rail cars it took to transport. By 1911 there were thirty-two shows roaming the United States by rail, ranging from Ringling Bros and Barnum &
Bailey, each with 84 cars, to the humble Bulgar & Cheney outfit with a mere five cars.
Railways also enabled theatrical troupes and individual artists and singers to wander fast, far and frequently, thus opening the way to the truly international star, not only on the stage but, perhaps more importantly, as prima donnas of the opera house and concert hall, very much the creatures of the railway age, complete with their own private cars.
Playwrights and stage designers could not resist the challenge involved in presenting a train, particularly one in motion. As early as 1844 the desire to exploit its dramatic possibilities led to the first ‘railway play’, London by Night, in which the heroine, peering through a convenient grating, sees a man lying across the rails whom she saves at the last minute. The cardboard train used for the play was speedily replaced, but even at the end of the century ‘a bundle of steel umbrella ribs, beaten vigourously against a piece of sheet iron, still proves the best method of imitating the clattering of the wheels’, wrote W. J. Lawrence in The Railway Magazine.
The most successful of all the sets portraying a proper, substantially-built train was originally built in London for an unsuccessful play about George Stephenson. The set was salvaged and adapted for another, successful, play, The London Arab, as well as for quite different plays in Paris and New York: result one set, four plays, three cities. Twenty years later they were upstaged by Hanlon Lees in his farce La voyage en Suisse, featuring a Pullman car with four compartments full of unlucky honeymooners, customs men etc etc.
Cheaper and easier to present were slide shows on railway themes, which grew steadily more complicated as photography and the projection of images became increasingly elaborate and life-like. As early as 1833 the Bazaar in Portman Square in the West End of London showed the Disyntrechon, ‘a mechanical-graphicoramic view of the Liverpool Railroad’. By the 1870s a former school-teacher who called himself ‘Professor’ Stephen James Sedgwick made a handsome living taking ‘lantern shows’ round the New York suburbs. His glass slides were so skilfully arranged that by the time he had finished his audience felt they really had travelled by rail to the Western Sea.
But these displays were merely a foretaste of the motion picture, an art form seemingly devised with the railways in mind. Not surprisingly the very first truly moving picture was Louis Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at a Country Station and the first box-office hit was Edwin S. Porter’s Great Train Robbery. Of all the railways’ ‘secondary’ ‘delayed’ effects, that on motion pictures was as strong as any. Regrettably no writer seems to have tackled the way the cinema exploited the railway itself, its stations, its locomotives and trains, the landscape it ran through, not to mention the heroes, villains and comedians it transported and the dramas, the laughs and tears film-makers have wrung out of the trains and their passengers.
Dream train: the first Orient Express.
Expresses to the Orient
No train could compare with the Orient Express. Thanks to the novelists (Graham Greene with Stamboul Train, Maurice Dekobra with the world-wide best-seller, La Madonne des Sleepings, Agatha Christie with Murder on the Orient Express) and the film-makers (Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, was based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, a spy story set on the train) the name still conveys an aura of glamour and international intrigue. Which was just what the train’s promoters intended.
The Orient Express first ran in 1883, making its way from Paris via Vienna and Budapest to the Black Sea. Passengers reached Constantinople itself by ship, first from Varna in Bulgaria, then from Constanta in Roumania, a day’s steaming from Constantinople. It was, and remained, a by-word for glamour, an element built into the train by George Nagelmackers. This young Belgian created the whole network of international sleeping-car expresses, using German-built sleeping cars running on bogies, which provided a far smoother ride than traditional coaches with fixed axles.
The first train marked ‘Compagnie Internationale de WagonsLits’ had reached Vienna in 1882, but its extension to Constantinople required negotiations with eight different countries. These were concluded in May 1883, and on Sunday 4th October that same year the first Exprès d’Orient left the Gare de L’Est, accompanied by the head-shaking of pessimistic wiseacres. The train held only forty people, two of whom provided an eagerly waiting public with full accounts of the journey which ensured its lasting fame as the epitome of glamorous travel. The well-known Parisian man of letters, Edmond About, wrote a whole book about his journey. But The Times’ special correspondent, the extraordinary Henri Stefan Opper de Blowitz, ‘The Prince of Journalists’, transformed the journey into a major international news event when he secured interviews with the King of Roumania and, for the first time, with the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid.
The train immediately became news, although for a long time it remained basically a daily service from Paris to Vienna, running into the deep, sinister Balkans only twice a week. But it was this venture into the unknown which gave the train much of its glamour. ‘Once off the great international route, but whilst still within a few days from London, he might just as well be in the heart of some unexplored continent. Many parts of the Balkan Peninsula are stranger to the ordinary Englishman than are the wilds of Central Africa,’ wrote H. Charles Wood (in the Geographical Journal, 1916). The dangers were real enough. In 1891 the train had been held up sixty miles from Constantinople by a gang headed by one Anasthatos, a bearded German-speaking giant, creating an international incident, with the Kaiser threatening to send troops.
The train’s limited capacity endowed it with the same sort of clubby atmosphere found today on Concorde, and for the same reason – the passengers were interested above all in money, and, more especially, in international loans. The Orient Express was the quickest route to Constantinople, destination of all the world’s shadiest financiers because of the Sultan’s unquenchable thirst for funds.
Unlike Concorde, however, the Orient Express was a hot-bed of sex, mostly of the simple, straightforward paid-for variety. The conductors would telegraph their customers’ requirements to the next stop where the girls would board the train. One bishop, known to the train’s staff as the Archimandrite Cyril, travelled on the Orient Express between Sofia and Belgrade for purely sexual purposes for several years, free from the prying eyes of his co-religionists. One romantic exception was the encounter of Basil Zaharoff, most sinister of arms-dealers, with a lovely lady, the Duchess Maria, distraught at the attacks of her homicidal husband, the Duke of Marchena. By the time the train reached Vienna Zaharoff, the ultimate cynic, had fallen firmly in love with her and she remained the only love of his life.
After World War I the Orient Express itself was only one of a number of luxury expresses which headed through Europe to Constantinople. The most glamorous was probably the Simplon Orient from Paris through Northern Italy to Belgrade and Sofia; but after 1945 all these trains decayed until they ended up transporting mainly impecunious students until they were discontinued in the 1960s and 1970s.
Fred Harvey – The Man and the Movie
In 1875 Fred Harvey, a former freight agent, persuaded the Santa Fe railroad to let him manage a small restaurant in Topeka. He called it Harvey House, a name which became famous for civilised eating throughout the whole sprawling Santa Fe system from Topeka to Los Angeles. From the beginning Harvey determined to maintain only the highest standards of food, drink and delicacy of presentation, and his first step was to hire a chef from the Palmer House in Chicago, supposedly America’s finest hotel.
Harvey’s brilliance showed itself, not only in the food, but in the meticulous preparation which enabled travellers to feel they had plenty of time in which to eat, since their orders had been telegraphed through in advance. He even ensured that menus were rotated so that travellers could not complain of monotony – although he imposed standard menus, ignoring the local delicacies which had previously brightened buffet menus.
Harvey encouraged local arts and crafts, and his restaurants
were carefully designed in accordance with local tradition. The formula was carried through to a number of resort hotels which were famous in their time; alas, only one – at El Tovar on the rim of the Grand Canyon – still remains. In its day the most famous was at Montezuma Hot Springs six miles from Las Vegas, New Mexico, renowned for the fact that none of the food served there was canned. Harvey even had a contract with an Indian tribe on the Gulf of California to supply green turtles for transformation into soup for his restaurants.
Harvey was immortalised by the Harvey Girls, the highly respectable and presentable waitresses he employed, most of whom stayed only a few months before marrying, generally very well. The label became so desirable that a great many girls got jobs by pretending to have been Harvey Girls. A generation later they, and he, were accorded the greatest of accolades, a musical named The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland – with a song which remains a show-stopper, ‘The Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe’.
The Reluctant Emigrant
In 1879 the poet and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, looking for experiences to provide raw material for his books, travelled by emigrant train across the United States and recorded his experiences in The Amateur Emigrant. Even in that democratic country immigrants were treated as inferior citizens, travelling in separate trains, eating and sleeping apart. At the stations they huddled in separate waiting rooms, labelled ‘second-class’. Such separate facilities were not confined to the United States. The Paragon Station in Hull, the port of entry for Eastern European immigrants travelling through Britain to Liverpool and the United States, had a separate waiting room especially for them. The photograph I saw is dated 1887, the year my paternal grandfather entered Britain through Hull. He intended to emigrate to the United States, but in Liverpool his ticket was stolen and he was forced to settle in Britain.
The World the Railways Made Page 30
