Once R.L.S.’s inferior status had been established he found he
was to be branded once more and put apart with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of Emigrant House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us and called name after name in the tone of a command. At each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The second, or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese.
The conditions were spartan. The emigrants’ railroad cars were ‘only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering into any part of their constitution’. And the train was slow. ‘Haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so.’ The trip was a trial, the nights worse than the days. Stepping over the ranks of groaning, snoring, restless bodies ‘gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle … they that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I.’
Most of R.L.S.’s fellow-travellers were not travelling directly from Europe, but moving from the East to try their luck in the West. He found them ‘mostly lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad I should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour and little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external curiosity.’ But the last days’ travel over the high Sierras made up for the weariness. ‘All the passengers on board threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shiny eyes upon the platform, and became new creatures within and without … At every turn we could see further into the land and our own happy futures … this was the “good country” we had been going to so long.’
Paradise was awaiting them when ‘the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight’.
* Wittles = victuals = food.
* Originally the compartments were locked, which greatly increased the loss of life in the famous accident of 1842 at Meudon.
* In Surtees’s words, Second Class ‘only needed cushions to be as comfortable as First Class … in the summer there was less dust from the cushions so it was more comfortable even in open 3rd class’.
† At first the Japanese removed their shoes before getting into a carriage, a natural gesture since they were going indoors (hence numerous, probably apocryphal, stories about how shoes were left strewn all over stations).
* From Chicago eastwards not even the most special train could compete with the Twentieth Century Limited. But only a tycoon of Cheyne’s eminence could hitch his private car to such a train.
* One of the few delicacies permitted by the fragile state of the tycoon’s digestion. His doctors also allowed him the milk from the cow which travelled in a special baggage car attached to the train.
* Allegedly based on Wolverton, half way between London and Birmingham.
* The narrow-gauge New Zealand railways have never had room for dining cars.
* The newspaper boom was triggered by the abolition of stamp duty, not by the spread of the railways, however. Indeed, far from bringing greater centralisation, the two forces heralded the great age of the British provincial press.
* In 1860 a book, The Railway Accident, was published in a series of ‘Tales for the young men and women of England’.
2
The Habits the Railways Changed
The railways may not have transformed society, but they did change a lot of habits, broaden people’s horizons in a dozen different ways, and impose their own ‘industrial’ discipline by standardising time itself. Before the coming of the railways, time had been an indefinite concept related to the movements of the sun. Towns even a few miles apart kept different times. The railways’ need for regularity inevitably led to something of a revolution.
According to Michael Robbins in The Railway Age, early time-sheets have footnotes converting Greenwich time to local times; and the general adoption of a standard ‘railway time’, even in Britain, had to wait until 1852, when the railways’ partner, the Whetstone telegraph, had spread throughout the country. Nevertheless a handful of towns retained their own time until Greenwich Mean Time was officially adopted in 1880. Even then a few older habits persisted. For another half a century a specially-regulated watch was sent daily from Euston to Holyhead to time the departure of the mail boat to Ireland, and the clock at Christ Church, Oxford, remained on local time for over a century.
It never occurred to the British that other people might have different ideas about the time. On a journey to Paris Charles Dickens found that one of his fellow-travellers was ‘a compatriot in an obsolete cravat, who thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they don’t keep “London Time” on a French railway, and who is made angry by my modestly suggesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their way.’
Dickens’s journey, in 1851, could be checked by that new-fangled idea, the railway timetable. In 1839 William Bradshaw had published his first timetable covering all the passenger services in Britain. Eight years later he provided a similar volume for the railways on the continent of Europe. After he died of cholera in Norway in 1853, his name lived on as a symbol of reliability and devilish complication.
Standardisation was a slow process. Miller’s Wintering on the Riviera, published in 1879, complains that ‘in Menton no two clocks were alike. By common consent they all differed. On going south to Avignon, the time is nearly a quarter of an hour in advance of Paris time; at Menton it is twenty minutes.’ Not surprisingly ‘one of the first inquiries on first reaching a hotel is, “What is the time of your town?” and to note the difference between that and railway time.’ Fortunately ‘the complex and extraordinary mode of measuring time formerly in use in Italy, by counting twenty-four hours from the varying time of vespers, seems to be now wholly abandoned.’
The Americans learnt from others’ errors. Although their continent could not be linked in a single time zone, the railroads performed a major act of unification, or, rather, had it thrust upon them. Until the adoption of Standard Time on 18th November, 1883, Americans ran their lives by ‘sun time’ which varied by about one minute for every thirteen miles.
The first suggestion for a system of time zones came from an unlikely source, Professor C. F. Dowd, principal of the Temple Grove Seminary for Young Ladies at Saratoga Springs. He had found that the clocks in the station at Buffalo showed three separate times. Further investigation revealed a total of eight thousand in the country as a whole, a total he proposed to reduce to four time zones. Although he was only an amateur he developed the necessary intellectual framework including time zones and linkage to the Greenwich meridian. His ideas were ignored by the railroads, since he was presenting the passengers’ viewpoint, not that of the operators. In standardising their times – an eleven-year process – the railroads developed their own trade organisation. A ‘Time-Table convention’ met in 1872 to arrange passenger train schedules. The convention changed its name several times as its role broadened, until it became the still-flourishing Association of American Railroads.
Under the guidance of William F. Allen, editor of the Railroad Guide and the Association’s founding secretary, the railroads adopted the General Time Convention on 11th October, 1883. It came into force a mere five weeks later, on 18th November – a Sunday because there was less traffic. The ‘day of two noons’ passed off quietly, though some towns on the boundary between zones, like Pittsburgh, found it difficult to decide what time they should adopt; and one town,
Bangor, Maine resolutely refused to accept the power of the railroads to dictate people’s lives, declaring that no one had the power ‘to change one of the immutable laws of God’. Moreover, the council had touched a raw nerve: the railroads had acted quite independently of the federal government, and as a result Congress only ratified their decision in March, 1918.
‘Railway time’ remained a symbol of national unity: in Russia all the clocks on the immense journey across Siberia remained on Saint Petersburg time; and the British imposed standard – railway – time in South Africa after the Boer War. Nevertheless pockets of anarchy remained. In 1900, the Railway Magazine reported from Portugal that ‘town time’, especially in the country’s second city, Oporto, remained between eight and twelve minutes ahead of railway time, which was supposedly derived from the Lisbon Observatory.
*
The railways may have imposed their own time, but they could not guarantee that countries would take the opportunity they offered to organise their food supplies more rationally. Famine relief was a leit-motif in discussing railway-building in China or India, where bullocks consumed more food than they transported in the carts they pulled. By 1880 the British in India had found that railways had their limitations, most obviously that railheads in such a vast country were often far from the seat of the famine. Nevertheless railways could bring dramatic relief. In China an estimated thirteen million people died from starvation in the great northern drought of the 1870s, against a ‘mere’ half million in a comparable drought in 1920–21, after the construction of a railway through the affected regions.
Railways were needed to prevent famines even in apparently well-provided countries, including France. As late as 1846–47 there had been desperate food shortages in much of rural France, with their usual accompaniment of profiteering. In Roger Price’s words,* ‘The existence of the railway helped to establish a climate of confidence, so that a poor harvest no longer resulted in a panic rush to buy up foodstuffs … after 1856 there were no more cases of wheat prices doubling at times of shortage, and after 1867 no more increases of 50 per cent or more.’ In the process the previous substantial regional differences were ironed out. In the early 19th century wheat cost four times as much on the Côte d’Azur as it did round Paris: by the 1860s the difference was merely the few francs required to transport the wheat across the country by rail. The same theme is found in Germany and Eastern Europe. Even before the arrival of cheap American grain, agrarian societies used railways to balance the local shortages, which were far more common than any general threat of famine.
Even where famine was not a threat, railways served to regulate the price of basic foods. In the 1830s Bostonians had advocated the construction of railways westwards to provide cheap food for the workers, and after the Western Railroad was completed in 1841 it became known as the ‘regulator to the bread market of Boston’, wrote R. O. Cummings in The American and his Food. The effect could be even more fundamental. It was the railways which transformed the whole of Japan into a rice-eating country. Previously the potato had been the staple food in quite a number of rural areas.
Railways altered the balance between foods available at a price, and those affordable by the mass of the population. In Zurich, Switzerland’s first railway became known as the Brötlibahn because it brought delicious bread rolls from Baden in time for the breakfast tables of most of Zurich’s population. By contrast the boxes of Japanese tea whisked across the United States in the first transcontinental freight train were destined exclusively for the better-off.
Railways provided the mass of urban populations with supplies of healthy milk for the first time. Before the construction of the first stage of the Erie Railroad in 1842–43 New Yorkers drank almost exclusively thin, sour skimmed milk, usually of dubious cleanliness. By 1849 the Erie was delivering nine million quarts of milk to the city, and in the post-Erie decade average consumption had multiplied several times.
Even before the railways London was self-sufficient in milk. Somehow the Metropolis supported enough cows to provide milk – of a sort. In 1852 Punch said that a clean glass of milk would be one of the seven wonders of London, and asked if the capital would have to wait for it until 1922 – the next year when there would be a February with five Saturdays in it.
In the event Londoners had to wait less than fifteen years. In 1865 a major outbreak of cattle plague led to a court order to destroy all the cattle in London. ‘Within a week there was not a cow left legally alive within the boundaries of London and the inner home counties. And the capital faced a milk famine’, according to Bryan Morgan in Express Journey. An enterprising dairyman, George Barham, took the opportunity to bring in supplies of milk by rail from round London, emphasising its freshness by calling his company – which still supplies London with much of its milk – Express Dairies.
Barham had greatly expanded the radius from which London drew its supplies – the Great Western’s lines from Berkshire and Wiltshire became known in time as the ‘Milky Way’. Paris’s ‘zone of provisioning’ for every type of fresh foodstuff expanded five-fold to over 150 miles in the quarter of a century after 1830. In Russia the distances were even more spectacular. By 1911 half the meat eaten in Moscow and Saint Petersburg came from Siberia.
The most obvious ‘railway foods’ were naturally perishable items like fresh fish. ‘Those who came from Boston,’ declared Daniel Webster at the opening of the Northern Railroad in 1847, might have brought along ‘fish taken out of the sea at sunrise’. He was being rhetorical, but speaking truer than perhaps he realised. Oysters were probably the first new delight to be introduced to the tables of both New Yorkers and Parisians by the railways, and there was great excitement in Chicago in 1842 at the arrival of the first lobster. Twenty years later the Chicagoans were eating fish from Boston as a matter of routine. The benefits were universal. Live fish was brought from Scandinavia to Germany, and one of the first cargoes carried by Japanese railways was live carp for gourmets in Tokyo. Forty years earlier, in 1848, Londoners were already eating over 70 tons of fresh fish a week brought by rail from Yarmouth and Lowestoft, thus reducing their previous dependence on smoked or dried fish.
Londoners’ fish came courtesy of the Eastern Counties Railway and it was not unusual, especially in the United States, for the increased supply of a particular commodity to be associated with an individual railway. The Erie not only improved the New Yorkers’ supply of milk. It was also responsible for ensuring that more strawberries were consumed in New York than in any other city in the world. Previously New Yorkers had to pay twelve times the price paid by the inhabitants of Baltimore, who were much nearer the strawberry fields. Another railroad, the Camden & Amboy, became known as the ‘Pea Line’ after the vegetables it brought from New Jersey, although it could just as well have been called the ‘Peach Line’ after another major speciality.
Urban catchment areas could be enormous. By 1852 Chicagoans were able to buy fresh green peas brought by express freight from New Orleans, a thousand miles away. The opening of the transcontinental railroad provided another surge: not just Japanese tea but, in much greater quantities, deciduous fruit, apples and pears from California.
Railways not only broadened urban menus: they also lengthened the season for previously short-lived delicacies. New Yorkers could enjoy strawberries for four months because the railroads enabled them to bring in supplies from such a wide area, while tomatoes became available the whole year round. By the late 1860s the Parisians could indulge in one of their favourite snobberies, the consumption of expensive primeurs, early fruit and vegetables brought from far and wide for the delectation of jaded metropolitan palates, sometimes more interested in the earliness than the taste. The fruits came from all over France: tomatoes grown at Perpignan, near the Spanish border, grapes from the south, and other specialities from every corner of ‘l’Hexagone’.
Transporting such perishables demanded increasing quantities of ice (see Chapter V). By the 1850s fresh strawberrie
s from Southern Illinois were being transported in refrigerated cars to Chicago, and even stored through the year. The first refrigerated beef was shipped from Chicago in 1857, and within a couple of decades the railroads had perfected proper mobile refrigerated cars in time for the first oranges to be shipped from Florida in 1886. Florida’s great rival, California, followed a year later.
By then the world market for meat and for tropical fruits, especially bananas, had been revolutionised by the development of refrigerated ships, but these would have been useless without proper railway links at both ends – across the pampas of Argentina and the jungles of central America, and into the heart of the consuming countries.
Most of these foods were destined for a mass public. In times of relative economic progress and constantly increasing competition among railways, there was a considerable ‘trickle-down’ effect, above all in the biggest cities, where the diet of the poor had been appallingly narrow. Everywhere railways introduced fresh produce from far and wide onto urban menus for the first time. The majority of the population in the United States and Western Europe seem to have benefited from the increased availability of fresh meat – average consumption in Germany doubled between the 1830s and the 1870s, and rose another thirty per cent in the 1880s and 1890s.
The World the Railways Made Page 31
