Although passengers were rarely targeted in these robberies, one attack did have catastrophic results. In December 1896, a gang dislodged a rail on a bridge on a branch of the Louisville & Nashville, sending a local train plunging into the Cahaba River near Birmingham, Alabama. The death toll was twenty-seven, and the robbers compounded their calumny by going through the cars to steal from the dead and injured before help could arrive.
An attack such as this was, however, very much the exception, which explains, perhaps, why the public attitude toward these attacks was surprisingly sympathetic. The James gang, in particular, attracted favorable publicity, thanks to the support of the founder of the anti-Republican Kansas City Times, John Newman Edwards, who saw Jesse James as a potential leader of a revived Confederate insurgency and published a series of letters from him proclaiming his innocence. The action of the gangs, too, reflected, albeit in extreme form, the growing public dislike of the railroads as corrupt and domineering organizations that had become too powerful. Indeed, Stewart H. Holbrook suggests the James gang was able to continue operating for so long because “the public attitude towards the railroads in the 1870s . . . was one of fear and hatred combined.” The robbers were perceived as Robin Hood figures, with the wealthy railroad companies and the more affluent travelers as their target—even though in truth for the most part the robbers were intent only on getting their hands on large amounts of cash. A few attacks, however, notably by the outlaw Chris Evans and various associates against the Southern Pacific in California, were motivated by anger at the railroads’ exploitation of their monopoly position against the interests of local settlers: “Many people had no sympathy for the railroad and saw train robbers as democratic heroes rather than villains.”24 Countless songs and poems were composed in honor of the thieves, often recounting highly sanitized versions of their actions in which they stopped a train, restricting themselves to robbing the rich and raiding the safe, and then rode off on horseback into the desert. It was part of a folklore that was both born of the growing antipathy toward the railroads and also further stimulated it, a phenomenon that will be analyzed in the next chapter.
It was the same suspicion and dislike of the railroad companies that led to the romanticization of the hoboes who jumped freight trains and traveled free. Like train robbers, they enjoyed a measure of public support because they were perceived as getting one over on rapacious corporations who saw fit to hand out huge numbers of free passes to VIPs, especially politicians, who might be useful to them and were contemptuously known as “deadheads” or “fare beaters.” The phenomenon of hoboes jumping trains had its roots in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, when large numbers of rootless men traveled the country with little clear purpose. Some were tramps, living life permanently on the road and never seeking work, but most men jumped trains in order to seek work or a new life, most commonly out west. It was a precarious way to travel. If possible, they boarded the trains at stations or freight sidings, but sometimes they hopped on trains trundling slowly through towns, running the obvious risk of being dragged underneath. There was a constant game of cat and mouse between the train conductors and the hoboes, who rode anywhere on the train where they could keep out of view of the crew. The most perilous hiding place was on top of the cars, where falling asleep could prove fatal, but it could be equally dangerous to ride between or underneath the cars. The lucky ones found an empty wagon or broke into one, which they raided for any food or portable valuables. They risked the wrath of the conductors, who, however, sometimes turned a blind eye to these free-loaders, not least because many of them were former railroad workers or, indeed, were seeking a job on the railroads. Many of the hoboes, of course, had a drinking problem, as did many railroad workers, especially the drivers. According to Dee Brown, “Pioneer engineers on the Western railroads had a reputation for heavy drinking” as an antidote to the stresses of operating trains in such dangerous conditions, with the risk of attacks by robbers, derailments caused by the poor track, or collisions with other locomotives or livestock.25 Passengers occasionally attributed particularly bumpy rides to the lack of sobriety of the train crew, and, although drinking was a fireable offense, the railroad companies often took a lenient attitude, recognizing the pressures of the job. Use of alcohol was so prevalent that after his successful campaign, Coffin, the great safety campaigner, turned his attention to the issue and established a Railroad Temperance Society in an effort to try to reduce drinking among railroad workers.
Drunk engineers were only one cause of discomfort for ordinary passengers. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the railroad well established as the only means of traveling long distances, rail travel was still rarely a happy experience. Indeed, the conditions that passengers were obliged to tolerate would be one of the reasons the railroad companies gradually became pariahs. The Pullman cars were one end of the spectrum of services offered by the railroads. At the other end, even during the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s, when the railroads were expanding at a ferocious rate, train travel for the masses remained pretty grim.
The conditions that immigrants had to face were undoubtedly the worst. Despite improvements in services and connections, there were no coast-to-coast services, and it was only toward the end of the century that there were regular through trains between New York and Chicago. The completion of the bridge over the Missouri in 1872 theoretically allowed for an easier transfer, but the eastern railroads refused to cooperate with the Union Pacific, forcing passengers laden with their baggage to use the wagons of a special transfer company to reach the other side. Given the need for all these changes, and the slowness of the trains, an immigrant might take seven days to reach the West Coast, whereas passengers enjoying the faster and better-appointed trains might complete the journey in four or five. Even after the Missouri bridge was built, the journey necessitated several changes. People arriving at Chicago heading west would already have been “forced to change trains once or several times, probably at Buffalo, Pittsburgh or Detroit.” And Chicago itself inevitably brought a change of train: “During the heyday of American railroad passenger travel, one of the common sayings was that a hog could travel across country through Chicago without changing cars at Chicago, but a human being could not.”26
Immigrants were designated special cars—and sometimes entire trains— consisting of the oldest and least-comfortable equipment. Thus, they traveled in wooden coaches with flat roofs, fitted out with hard wooden benches, and still heated with the potbellied stove in the middle that fried those near it and was of no use to those farther away. There was a “convenience” at each end of the coach, a mere hole giving out onto the rails. There was no running water of any kind. The news butcher (see Chapter 3) provided bottled water and other basics, but the trains still stopped for meals that had to be bolted down with great haste, as the railroad staff were intent on avoiding delays. According to George H. Douglas, “Crews on immigrant trains were apparently especially sadistic, and would sometimes start up after only five or ten minutes, without the slightest warning to passengers, perhaps delighting in being able to leave part of their troubling horde for the next day’s immigrant train.”27 Pullman service it was not.
In 1879, before he achieved fame as the author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson traveled on an immigrant train nearly ten years after the completion of the first transcontinental. On these trains, conditions were not much better than those described by Dickens nearly forty years earlier, as cited in Chapter 3. The discomfort began the moment he boarded the train at Castle Garden Station in New York: “There was no waiting room, no refreshment room, the cars were locked; and for at least another hour or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit platform.”28
After several changes of trains, Stevenson was put on an immigrant train at Council Bluffs, Iowa, consisting of just three passenger coaches— known for some unaccountable reason as “Zulu trains” in th
e West—to which were added a baggage car, various freight wagons, and a caboose and which, at times, carried entire families along with their chickens and even a goat or cow for milk. One of the passenger cars was reserved for Chinese, at least fifty of whom were crammed into the car with their baggage. Indeed, in this period in America, the Chinese suffered much racism and were generally provided with separate cars, just like the separate “Jim Crow” cars that were becoming standard for black people on the segregated trains of the South. Stevenson was shocked to find his fellow travelers discussing the Chinese in terms of such stereotypes as uncleanliness—in fact, the Chinese were likely to have been cleaner than most of the Caucasians on the train— deviousness, and clannishness, the last being an all too understandable and sensible response to their pariah status. Stevenson also found the train staff almost brutally rude. He asked a conductor three times when a dinner stop would be made, and the man merely “looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away.”29
Stevenson installed himself in the men’s car, where for $2.50 he managed to buy three straw cushions and a board on which he could sleep when placed across the backs of seats. Except he found sleep almost an impossibility, as Dee Brown reports, “with his fellow travelers sprawled on boards, seats, and flooring, all being continually shaken by the rough motion of the train groaning and muttering in their half slumber.”30 Stevenson thought it strange that women, with their children, had no compunction about wandering into the men’s car, despite the spitting, swearing, and card playing. The car was spartan in the extreme, with no upholstery, no springs to soften the journey, and poor ventilation. And the journey was slow, all too slow. Stevenson moaned that the train was constantly driven onto sidetracks to wait for other services, all of which were given priority over the immigrant trains, with the result that their final arrival time could not be predicted even within a day or so. On the tracks, the trains managed as little as nine miles per hour in sections where the track had been hastily laid and perhaps thirty-five at best. In the early 1870s, the average speed was around twenty miles per hour, but this improved quickly and would double in the following decade.
Stevenson also complained that at the dinner stops, “the train stole from the station without note of warning,” whereas on all other trains a warning cry of “all aboard” was issued.31 He just missed out on the big improvement in meal services brought about by the innovative Fred Harvey, who realized that there was good money to be made from providing better-quality eating houses for the great majority of train passengers who could not afford Pullman. Harvey, who had worked for the railroads as a caterer for several years, decided in 1878 to set out on his own and opened the first of a series of restaurants at the stations of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, which became renowned for service and quality and in particular for the “Harvey Girls,” the waitresses chosen for their attractiveness and attentiveness. These young women were subject to a strict regime, being made to wear prim uniforms and required to live in hostels where they were barred from consorting with passengers—or any other men, for that matter. They acted as a civilizing influence on the customers, who previously had a reputation for being so unruly that the girls’ predecessors, mostly black men, had to carry firearms. The Harvey Girls achieved such widespread popularity that they featured in a raucous eponymous 1946 musical. These restaurants were to become a feature of rail travel in the West, providing a vital service, until dining cars became universal,32 and even then Harvey, credited with creating the first American restaurant chain, responded by opening several eateries in the big union stations springing up in places such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles that survived until the decline of the railroads after the Second World War.
Whereas immigrants were at the bottom of the scale in terms of the service they received, many poorer travelers on branch and local lines fared little better than before. There was a fantastic proliferation of such railroads, most still serving local interests and businesses, and the service on these lines usually consisted of just a few mixed-traffic trains, combining a few freight wagons with a couple of passenger cars per day. The trains would stop at all stations, often taking a long time to unload freight, but they would still represent a lifeline for local people. Traveling conditions remained primitive. Whereas the large railroad companies were, by the 1880s, introducing improvements such as electric lighting and steam heating on the trains, most passengers on these smaller lines did not see such progress until well into the twentieth century—if ever, given these lines were among the first to close.
These short lines, as they are known, tended to live off hand-me-downs from the larger companies, both locomotives and rolling stock. Sometimes these were ill-suited for purpose, such as on the West River Railroad in Vermont, where longer trains had to be split in two to be hauled up the sharper inclines. On the Walla Walla & Columbia River Railroad in Washington State, the engineers reportedly had to fill up the water tank with bucketfuls hauled up by rope from the local creek. It was not unknown, either, for the passengers to have to help out when the train was held up: “Obstacles such as rainstorms, which revealed leaky roofs in the cars, or blizzards . . . stopped trains for days while the passengers and crew dug [them] out.”33 Nevertheless, most of these lines survived because they were a lifeline for the local economy, and many, too, benefited from mail contracts that were an effective hidden subsidy.
Since roads and road transportation were still primitive, branch lines were built to the remotest places, often at the whim of the local landowner. Their very names evoke a world that seems rather more than just over a century away. Take the eight-mile Narragansett Pier Railroad, which opened in 1876 to serve the fashionable Rhode Island resort of that name on a branch from the New Haven Railroad. It was family owned and “employed only the ricketiest of engines and rolling stock once the summer people were gone.” At one point, for obscure reasons, the Pennsylvania sought to buy it and sent a telegram to its president asking for the price. The response is part of railroad legend: “Mine not for sale, how much for yours?” Journeys on such lines might be delayed by the conductor’s deciding it was a good time to shoot a rabbit or, more seriously, because beavers had decided to make a meal of a bridge, a common hazard on the two-foot-gauge lines in western Maine. These lines were run informally, and rarely for profit: “The engineer might well be the president of the company, the brakeman his brother.”34
One kind of local line did prosper, however. This was the period when the number of commuting services began to spread, notably in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, stimulating the growth of the urban sprawl that would later be served so much better by the automobile. In fact, as early as the 1840s, a few railroads had begun offering “commuted” tickets—reduced fares for regular use—to stimulate travel, but demand was limited, as there were few businesses needing such workers or, indeed, suburbs from which they could commute. Boston was an exception, as it boasted eighty-five commuter stations within fifteen miles of the city center by 1848 when a fifth of its managerial class lived in surrounding suburbs and came to work by train.
However, for the most part, it was not until after the Civil War, when industrialization began to attract vast numbers of workers to the cities, that the need for commuter services became pressing. The relationship between the railroad companies and developers was instrumental in stimulating the demand. Typically, suburbs were built around a main square housing a railroad station, to which the commuters were expected to walk, which meant that stations were spaced about a mile apart. The lines would often extend out farther to “exurban” areas, past the suburban fringe to where the really wealthy lived on “larger estates, horse farms and country retreats whose occupants would be driven to the nearest station by carriage, or, later, ‘station wagon.’”35 By the 1880s, commuting was becoming commonplace in numerous eastern towns and even as far west as San Francisco, where the first commuting line opened in 1864. Soon, on the busiest
lines, there was a differentiation between the types of worker, with manual and blue-collar employees taking earlier trains, as they worked longer hours, whereas white-collar and managerial staff traveled later. The more affluent groups organized their own club cars, supplied by the railroad and paid for by subscription. These coaches were for the exclusive use of members, who joined by invitation, and were furnished with comfortable chairs, card tables, and, principally for the return journey home, a bar. The suburban sprawl was, of course, to be the urban railroad’s undoing, as it spread beyond easy reach of the railroads and therefore was better served by the automobile, which would supplant these suburban rail services within a couple of generations. The effect on the towns was to relieve pressure on housing. People crammed into tenements could, at last, breathe more easily as they moved into suburban houses cheap enough for even modestly paid workers to afford the rent.
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