The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  In many respects, the technology was improving. More powerful locomotives were able to travel faster and to haul a larger number of cars that, since weight became less of a concern, could be fitted with all sorts of extras to make travel more comfortable for passengers. Longer stretches could be covered without stopping, as a locomotive could typically travel around a hundred miles without needing to be resupplied or changed. Furthermore, longer rails, manufactured from steel rather than iron, made for a smoother ride and reduced the number of broken rails, a frequent cause of accidents. However, overall safety was lagging behind. There was no excuse. In the postwar period, the technology was being developed, but there was a lack of will to introduce it. Faced with the obvious need for better safety devices, the railroad companies were not so much resistant as downright obstructive, seeing accidents as an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of an industry in which large machines moved at high speed. They failed to see that investing in safety would improve both the reliability and the image of their product.

  Two related safety devices, the automatic coupler and the air brake, were crucial and would make the biggest difference in terms of safety, but it took a lengthy campaign of lobbying to bring about their universal adoption. Coupling and braking had been a technical and safety problem for the railroads since their very invention. The coupling between cars involved a crude link-and-pin device that required a brakeman to stand between the cars, guide the link into a socket, drop the pin in place, and, if necessary, hammer it down. Not easy, not safe. In the dark, with a slippery oil lantern in one hand, it was even more perilous. It was said that if a man was looking for work as a brakeman and claimed to be experienced, he was asked to show his hands—missing digits were the key confirmation that he had previously worked in the job. The device had the disadvantage, too, of breaking as a result of metal fatigue and causing accidents with runaway cars or wagons. Soon after the Civil War, several better couplers were devised, notably one designed by Ezra Miller that involved a platform with buffers and was adopted by several railroads. Critically, Miller’s platform prevented the oscillation that was a risk with link-and-pin devices because they allowed slack. But his invention was not perfect. Although the platform reduced the risk of “telescoping” of cars in an accident, a very dangerous phenomenon, it did not prevent the possibility entirely, especially at higher speeds. An improved device patented by Eli Janney in 1873 had the added advantage of being automatic, which meant that men no longer had to stand between cars to couple and uncouple trains (though they still had to go each time on the tracks to open “the jaws,” the mechanism that enables cars to be connected with one another).

  Braking, too, was primitive in the extreme. Locomotives had no mechanism to slow them down apart from putting them in reverse, which good drivers did only in an emergency. Instead, once the driver gave the signal to slow down, a brakeman had to clamber along the roof of the train from the rear and apply the brakes fitted on each car. Normally, there would also be a brakeman at the front who would work his way toward the back of the train. There was no end of potential for accidents with this arrangement, not least the risk to the brakemen themselves. As a former brakeman described the process, it “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance, to go over the top of a freight train—winter or summer . . . rain, snow, sleet, ice all over the roofs and on brake wheels and handholds.”18 And it was a very unsatisfactory way of slowing down trains that were becoming increasingly fast. Uneven braking could lead to a snapped coupling, with the risk of runaway cars.

  George Westinghouse, a remarkable young engineer, already had a couple of inventions under his belt before devising a solution to this problem: continuous braking. Legend has it that Westinghouse witnessed a railroad accident in which two engineers saw one another, but were unable to stop their trains in time using the existing brakes. Westinghouse’s idea was to place a compressed-air tank in the locomotive and run a hose connected to a cylinder on each car that operated the brake shoes. Switching on the air would push the shoes down onto the wheels. It took him a while to overcome various difficulties, such as how to stop the front cars from braking before those at the back, but after three years of development, the method was patented in 1872. A rival invention was the vacuum brake, which operates when air is allowed into the vacuum. There was much debate about which system was superior—both devices were certainly a great improvement on what had gone before—but ultimately it was the air brake that would win out in America, as it would in most European countries.

  Janney’s coupling and the Westinghouse brake combined well to improve rail safety. However, although some rail companies introduced one or both systems relatively quickly, many resisted or used them only on passenger trains, which meant that freight trains remained a major hazard. It took the fanaticism of one man, with the appropriate name of Lorenzo Coffin, a tall, bewhiskered farmer from Iowa, to badger the lawmakers into making the Westinghouse air brake and the Janney coupler mandatory.

  Coffin is an unlikely hero of the history of the railroads. Initially, he had no official role in the rail industry but was one of those local busybodies whose letters appear in the local newspaper when there are no others. He was a self-styled lobbyist on railroad matters and developed considerable knowledge by touring the country, mainly on freight trains, and talking to railroad workers. He had first become interested in the issue when he observed an accident in which a brakeman on a freight train lost the two remaining fingers of his right hand while coupling two cars, having lost the others in similar incidents. Coffin, who had been a chaplain in the Civil War and was blessed with both religious fervor and technical expertise, began to lobby for the railroad companies to install automatic couplers along with air brakes that could be operated from the locomotive. This system not only provided better braking but also made the brakeman’s job safer.

  Coffin traveled around Iowa promoting railroad safety and was appointed the state’s first railroad commissioner in 1883 at the age of sixty, a mostly honorary position but one that at least gave him a locus from which he could lobby the rail companies. He drafted Iowa’s first Railroad Safety Appliance Act, but even after it became state law, railroads ignored its requirements. Coffin realized that federal legislation would be required, and he became something of a one-man-band campaigner, writing countless articles in obscure journals. According to Stewart H. Holbrook, he “invited himself to conventions of railroad officials and equipment builders, and here he was as welcome as leprosy.” Eventually, the Master Car Builders Association was persuaded to hold a series of tests on an eight-mile stretch of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. The Burlington Trials, as they became known, were intended to test the ability of various braking systems to stop fifty-car freight trains. Initially, none of the systems, even Westinghouse’s, performed well, which seemed to vindicate the skepticism of the railroad companies, which doubted that these new types of brakes would ever be adequate for anything but short and light trains. However, Westinghouse adjusted his system, and at the third trial, in the summer of 1887, the test train was stopped from forty miles per hour within five hundred feet, a huge improvement on anything previously recorded. The following year the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the federal regulatory board for the industry (about which much more in Chapter 9), had begun examining safety in the industry and was influenced by Coffin’s arguments. The commission started recording statistics on the industry’s safety record that revealed, shockingly, that two thousand workers were killed and ten times that number injured on the railroads in 1888. No fewer than three hundred men died in coupling accidents alone. Coffin, no longer a commissioner, gate-crashed a meeting of state railroad commissioners that year and made a speech that proved highly influential in creating the right political climate for the legislation to be passed. He had been hired by the unions representing brakemen and conductors to lobby for the equipment to be made mandatory and used his powers as an orator to recount, in gre
at detail, numerous tales of needless deaths and personal tragedy on the railroads: “He piled horror upon horror, and interspersed the bloody statistics with pitiful tales of the aftermath of accidents.” Although Coffin’s efforts helped influence public opinion, it took another five years before Congress passed the bill that he had drafted. In March 1893 President Benjamin Harrison finally signed the Railroad Safety Appliance Act, by which all American railroads were required to adopt air brakes and automatic couplers. Coffin, whose efforts had done so much to bring about the legislation, was given the pen used to sign the bill into law: “Coffin [was] a fanatic to the last, one of the most useful fanatics this country has produced, the man Westinghouse and Janney needed to give their inventions real and widespread use.”19

  The railroads, as ever, objected. Not, of course, because they were oblivious to the mounting death toll, but because they argued it would be a mistake to tie them to a particular technology, rather like Apple being forced into using Microsoft software today. It was a familiar argument of industries wishing to resist regulation. Faced with mounting public pressure as a result of the large number of deaths, the railroads inevitably lost the argument. After the usual delays to give time for the railroads to make the necessary changes, the Railroad Safety Appliance Act became fully operative by August 1900. A further safety feature, and one that did not become widespread until the early years of the twentieth century, was the all-steel coach, which was much more fire and crash resistant than its wooden predecessors, but again it took a long time for the railroad companies to make the required investment. The act, indeed, entrenched a rather different approach to safety from that in Europe. Rather than trying to avoid crashes entirely, which was the European philosophy, America has tended to focus on crashworthiness. This has resulted, for example, in uniquely heavy coaches being mandated and, as we will see in the final chapter, has proved costly to the railroads and detrimental to their interests.

  These developments were all part of a wider process of standardization and equipment and operating procedures, which further reduced costs and made it easier for railroads to operate their trains on the lines of other companies, creating the beginnings of a truly national rail network. This was a period of rapid expansion and consolidation, during which the very nature of the rail system changed visibly. For example, many towns with two or more stations built one central “union” station, linking lines that had hitherto been separate. The first such joint station was opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1862, and the concept was picked up in subsequent decades in many major cities, though also in some relatively small towns such as Worcester, Massachusetts, where the station served no fewer than five railroads.

  A key development was the near-universal adoption of the standard gauge of four feet and eight and a half inches for the tracks, which became inevitable after Congress had decreed that the transcontinental line would use it. The decision had been hotly debated. Lincoln favored the five-foot gauge that was in use throughout much of the South, but he eventually bowed to northern interests who lobbied for standard gauge. There were some who thought it was a mistake: “That additional 3½ins of track width would have meant even more inches of car width, hence roomier seats, wider aisles—making it possible for two fat people to pass each other in the aisle without danger of throwing the train off the track.”20 Even more useful today in the age of obesity! Following the transcontinental decision, the vast majority of railroads built in the aftermath of the Civil War used standard gauge, and many other lines were converted in this period.

  As railroad companies expanded to serve national rather than local interests, the idea that it was better for a railroad to have a separate gauge from its local rivals had become redundant. Cooperation rather than confrontation was now the watchword. Railroads work best as an integrated system: the longer that passengers and freight can travel without changing trains, the better the service. Even the Erie, with its magnificent broad gauge of six feet, had to swallow its pride in order to allow through trains on its tracks. In the South, the five-foot gauge was changed to standard over two days in the early summer of 1886, large gangs of track workers moving one of the rails on thirteen thousand miles of track. The operation—staggering in its organizational scope—also required converting eighteen hundred locomotives and forty thousand coaches, although some of these already had adjustable axles. Until this time, trains heading in and out of the South had been subject to a delay of up to a half hour as their cars were lifted by hoists and attached to wheel sets of the right gauge. The efforts of tens of thousands of workers over a momentous thirty-six-hour period on May 31–June 1, 1886, created—at last—a unified railroad for almost the whole United States.

  Apart from accidents, railroad passengers faced a rather more mundane risk, but one that was all too common: robbery. Although exaggerated in films and popular culture, this was a genuine danger in the last decades of the nineteenth century. According to the Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, train robberies “grew into a uniquely American phenomenon” that plagued the railroads for a half century.21 Numerous figures emerged, many of whom have been mythologized in westerns: Sam Bass and the Reno brothers from Indiana, the Younger and James brothers from Missouri who formed a joint gang, and the Daltons from Kansas.22 Initially, most robberies were in the Midwest, but as the railroads expanded in the West, so did the number and location of attacks. Contrary to legend, Native Americans did not attack the passenger trains that now crossed their land. Although, as we have seen, they had occasionally tried to disrupt construction of the railroads, by the time the lines were completed, the indigenous peoples of the plains and farther west had been defeated, massacred, or pacified. Indeed, passengers heading out west were often excited by the prospect of coming across Indians, with romantic notions of seeing half-naked “noble savages” with feathered headdresses skillfully riding their horses, suggesting there were sexual undertones in these Victorian ladies’ descriptions of their encounters with Native Americans. The reality was sadly different. In some cases, as with the Central Pacific, the Indians had been given free passes to travel on the lines, and, as trains full of tourists and immigrants started arriving, they would congregate at stations, begging or selling a few knickknacks. Although through the car window the Native Americans might present an exciting image, travelers began to fear encountering them for rather more prosaic reasons than being attacked: “On the train or at close range in the station they did not appear to be as clean as some tourists would have liked.”23

  The white robber gangs, however, were another matter and remained a problem for the railroad companies right until the end of the century and even, occasionally, beyond. The many armed and rootless men left by the Civil War were for the most part the perpetrators of these audacious crimes. The earliest recorded attack, near Cincinnati on the Ohio & Mississippi during the last few days of the war in May 1865, was probably the result of military action. A gang of thieves derailed the train and promptly robbed the passengers, though sparing the women, and escaped over a river toward Kentucky. The first peacetime armed train robbery was in October the following year at Seymour, Indiana, on the same railroad. The target was an express mail wagon that the messengers were forced to open after being threatened with a gun. The two masked robbers snatched thirteen thousand dollars from the safe, pulled the bell cord to stop the train, and escaped into the night. This was a typical pattern. For the most part, it was the high-value mail and the safe in the mail car rather than, as in the cowboy films, the passengers who were targeted.

  Several similar successful attacks were carried out that year on midwestern railroads, and most were the handiwork of the Reno brothers’ gang. Their biggest heist, on the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad in May 1868, netted a staggering ninety-six thousand dollars and resulted in the death of a messenger, beaten and thrown from the train, but a few months later vigilantes and sheriffs caught up with the three Reno brothers along with a fourth gang member, and th
ey were later lynched. After a two-year lull, in the early 1870s there was a spate of robberies in several states, from Kentucky to Nevada, and even one in the East, on a train run by the Boston & Albany. Most of the attacks followed the same modus operandi. At a remote stop, the robbers would climb on the baggage car, where they could not be seen by either the locomotive men or the train crew, and would clamber over the roofs of the coaches to the tender, where they forced the driver to stop the train. There were, in truth, probably not as many attacks as suggested by the sensationalist publicity they attracted, but the robberies certainly had an impact on the railroad companies. Anxious to maintain the image of being a safe form of transportation, they strengthened their mail cars and improved their security. Most controversially, they employed security guards from the Pinkerton Agency to act as a kind of private army not only to protect the trains but also to pursue actively the perpetrators. The Pinkertons, whose uncompromising methods came to the fore in strikebreaking toward the end of the century (see next chapter), almost matched the robbers in their ruthlessness. The most famous of the train robbers was the James-Younger gang led by Jesse James and his brother Frank, former Confederate guerrillas in the Civil War who turned to a life of banditry. Having robbed various banks and become outlaws, in July 1873 the gang turned to train robbery on the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad near Adair, Iowa. Their method—simply removing a rail—lacked subtlety and caused the death of the driver, who was crushed under the locomotive when it keeled over, but that did not stop them from raiding the safe and grabbing valuables from the passengers. Several more robberies ensued, and the Pinkerton men were soon on the case. After a shoot-out in March 1874, in which one gang member and two Pinkerton agents were killed, it was, strangely, the Pinkertons who attracted the wrath of the public by committing a crass public-relations blunder through an unlawful attack on the James home in Missouri early the following year. Unbelievably, the Pinkerton men used the rather unsubtle method of simply shoving a hefty bomb through a window, killing a half brother and injuring the mother of the James boys, who, contrary to their information, were not in the house at the time. The resulting press onslaught against the Pinkertons’ methods did much to make the James brothers, ruthless murderers though they were, almost respectable. Their image was helped by the fact that when robbing trains, they usually left the passengers alone while they robbed the safe and took the mail. Most of the gang were eventually captured or killed in a bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876, though Jesse survived until April 1882, when he was shot in the back by a bounty hunter who had infiltrated the gang.