The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  If there was a minority sentimental about the loss of local time, there were many more who mourned the loss of a whole way of life, interrupted both literally and metaphorically by the arrival of the fierce and steaming iron horse. Radical change on this scale inevitably engendered downsides. The railroads were creating a different America, and, inevitably, there was a sense of lost community, as “towns where all the members of the community knew one another” were transformed into places with “any number of strangers and crowds, whose numbers became one important measure of the economic vitality of the town.”7 In other words, the railroad created the very notion of a bustling town thronging with people going about their business. Scenes of crowds that perhaps, at most, had been seen on one market day a week or month now became a daily occurrence. The railroads contributed to the creation of ever-bigger towns, which attracted ever-larger crowds and ultimately, the mass society that can be seen as the product of the railroad’s ability to allow ever more efficient and rapid travel.

  If having a station was a bit of a gamble, since it might stimulate an outflow rather than an influx of facilities, not having one was generally far worse. Towns left out of the rail network were in danger of contracting or even withering and dying. To counter this effect, some states passed laws requiring railroad companies to provide stations for all communities through which they passed. In 1872, Massachusetts enacted a law requiring the railroad to provide a service of cheap trains, morning and evening, if more than two hundred people signed a petition. Rather like American airports today, vying with each other to facilitate flights from discount carriers such as JetBlue or Allegiant Air, town councils would negotiate with railroads to obtain a station, offering inducements such as tax relief or cheap bonds. As trains speeded up, however, services made fewer stops, and more and more communities faced an uphill struggle to establish or merely maintain their train stations. On occasion, people power was used to improve facilities. In Tennessee, the railroads were required to provide every town of three hundred or more inhabitants with a waiting room for the use of passengers. For their part, the railroads were not always amenable to serving small communities. They wanted to serve the profitable mass market as much as possible, siting their stations in the biggest towns or where there was the greatest movement of freight. Small towns with few inhabitants, mostly poor, were not their priority, because the maintenance of such stations would be a financial burden, as would the need to stop trains there. Most radically, sometimes whole towns simply picked up and moved to be on the railroad. Cleora in Colorado, for example, was bypassed by the Denver & Rio Grande, which laid out a nearby town, called South Arkansas (later Salida). The inhabitants of Cleora realized that this newcomer would wreck their town and consequently simply resettled to be nearer the railroad.

  Sometimes, though, there was an obvious synergy between railroads and the local communities. Big events such as state agricultural fairs, or even the “World’s Fairs” held in the second half of the nineteenth century in New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago, inevitably attracted large numbers of railroad travelers. Indeed, for most people it was almost impossible to attend these events without taking the train. Town authorities soon realized that creating fairground sites near a railroad station would make them much more likely to attract large numbers of visitors: in Ohio, for example, just before the war, “the state board of agriculture arranged to have the railroad tracks into Cincinnati stop quite close to the Ohio state fairgrounds.” Soon the railroad companies were providing special rates, or even additional trains, for people attending these events. This newfound potential for association created by the railroad was felt first at the state or regional, rather than at the national, level. The limitations of the railroads before the Civil War meant that it was relatively easy to travel across a state, but rather difficult to go beyond its boundaries. This helped cement the unity of individual states, a notion that reached its apogee at the outbreak of the Civil War. After that, the railroads were able to claim, with some justification, that they were a unifying force on a national level: “The middle class traveled to the early political conventions held before the Civil War; to schools that drew students from all parts of the country; to professional gatherings in law, medicine, teaching and library work.”8 The emergent middle class, created in part by the railroad’s ability to generate wealth, were inveterate travelers, able to pursue both business and leisure interests ever farther from home.

  The railroads encouraged collective travel. Any group, whether it was a local Sunday school or an association of retailers, would negotiate a cheap rate with the railroad company, perhaps even chartering a whole train. Thanks to the railroads, national organizations, representing all kinds of interests such as particular trades, professions, campaigns, or even hobbies, could emerge. The range of groups seeking discounted tickets was remarkable and provides an insight into the new America in which organizations could now function at a regional or national level as a result of the availability of relatively cheap rail travel. The records of the American Association of Passenger Traffic Officers reveal applications for cheap fares from those attending an array of diverse organizations that give the flavor of life in nineteenth-century America, such as the Millers’ International Convention held in Cincinnati, a national meeting of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, the Colored People’s World Exposition, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.9 Civil War veterans had numerous reunions for which they requested reductions on the normal ticket price, and although all these requests were accepted, for some unaccountable reason—perhaps racism against the predominantly Chinese owners—the application from the National Laundry Association was turned down. The effect on American society of this ability to travel the country cannot be overestimated: “Organizing nationally was the work of the age, and ticketing records show that railroads made possible the growth of organizations with a national membership of people with middling means.”10 Even groups of shoppers, coming up to town for the day, had access to group discounts.

  One major section of society was largely excluded from the sense of national cohesion created by the railroads: the poor could not join in the fun, as they could not afford the fares. However, although long-distance travel was beyond their means and the unemployed could never afford train fares, low-paid workers could occasionally indulge in the odd day trip when the railroads started to stimulate what eventually became the world’s biggest industry: tourism. Even the poorly remunerated factory worker could afford to spend a day at the beach, a practice that started to become commonplace in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Every major city established a nearby center for these day trips. For New Yorkers it was Coney Island for the beach and the fairground, reached by the Prospect & Coney Island Railroad, or in the other direction Brighton Beach, which was served by the Brighton Beach & Brooklyn Railroad. Either way, the fare was just thirty-five cents round-trip. For Philadelphians, there was a ride to Atlantic City in New Jersey for a dollar, while Bostonians, via a trip on the Boston & Maine and then a tramcar ride, could reach Revere Beach, described rather snootily in the 1893 Baedeker’s guide as “a popular holiday resort for Boston’s lower classes.” A little farther away from Boston was Nantasket Beach, which on a sunny weekend day could attract fifty thousand visitors or more. In the Midwest, Chicagoans were spoiled with choices. They could either just saunter to the beaches of Lake Michigan, literally a few hundred meters from downtown, or hop on the local train service, which in a few minutes would take them to the larger beaches on the lakeshores of Indiana to the east. The richer residents might go farther north along the Illinois and Wisconsin shores of the lake or “inland to resorts such as Fox Lake, where private homes and hotels afforded accommodation for vacationers.”11 This was typical. Whereas those who toiled by hand usually had to be content with day trips, the middle classes could enjoy longer breaks, allowing them to travel farther. The more affluent professionals or businesspeople might even have a summer house, bu
t it had to be easily accessible by the railroad. Towns that were pretty or pleasant enough to attract tourists began to compete for this custom, turning themselves into resorts that would advertise their amenities at stations.

  For the seriously rich, as ever, it was a different ball game, although even they were dependent on having a nearby railroad connection. The real mark of distinction, however, was to have one’s own station, or, better still, one’s own railroad. After the Civil War, escaping the summer heat of the bustling cities of the East became imperative, and the Adirondacks, in the northeastern corner of New York State, developed into the favored destination of the rich. This was an unspoiled area of mountains, lakes, and forests that was first reached by railroad tracks soon after the end of the Civil War. The line was gradually extended, and soon the hunting parties, who had had to “rough it” in tents and shacks, had large country houses at their disposal. These “cabins,” as their owners modestly called them, were actually enormous log houses, usually sited next to a lake, with a boathouse and outhouses for guests. Thomas Durant, of the Union Pacific, was instrumental in pushing railroads farther into the mountains, as was, later, William Seward Webb, who married Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter Eliza. To ensure that his elite customers were not disturbed by hoi polloi on the various railroads like the Fulton Chain and the Raquette Lake, which he controlled, Webb provided a “private service to the owners of homes along the route and barred the public from riding the trains.”12 A list of passengers on the railroad reads like a roll call of the new American aristocracy of the time, including J. P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, and various banking families, such as the Guggenheims. Amazingly, Oliver Jensen, in a book published as recently as 1975, recalled traveling on just such a branch line in the Adirondacks, the romantic-sounding Grasse River Railroad. It was a haphazard experience. According to Jensen, “It posted no signs and listed no telephone number.” Instead, he simply turned up, “hoping to ride behind their steam engine in an ancient coach with black leather seats and beautiful, if cracked, woodwork.” The “astonishingly large crew” of three men in lumber jackets took him the fifteen miles from Childwold to Cranberry Lake, where it left off a mail pouch and a few express packages, which, as Jensen points out, provided what was effectively a government subsidy to the tiny line. Then, after a short pause, the train “heaved and bumped home, passengers being permitted to throw a few switches, look at the beaver dam, and inspect a long and decaying Wagner palace parlor car” in a siding.13

  Similar areas of countryside were opened up by the railroads in this period. In Florida, a line that was designed principally to serve the tourist market must rank as the most ambitious American railroad ever built. This was the Florida East Coast Railroad built by Henry Flagler, not so much a railroad entrepreneur as an obsessive who was ready to throw his fortune at his dream of making the farthest point on Florida’s coast into an opulent and exclusive resort. Flagler, who had seen how the French Riviera had quickly been transformed from a series of sleepy fishing villages into a tourist honeypot thanks to a railroad running along the coast, decided to do the same for Florida. The state had been something of a railroad desert, having seen only a few short, unconnected lines built since the Civil War. Worse, various gauges had been used, and the tracks, therefore, could not be connected. Flagler, who had made his fortune as John D. Rockefeller’s partner in creating Standard Oil, first came to the state in the late 1880s and saw its potential as a tourist haven because of its climate. He ignored the fact that this very climate was, in fact, a source of disease and poverty and was one reason the state was so sparsely populated. Flagler bought up one of the largest railroads, the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax, and began to create a continuous line along the eastern side of the state to serve a series of resorts that he developed on the coast. First he built the massive 540-room Ponce de León Hotel in St. Augustine, followed by the Royal Poinciana at Palm Beach, which was twice as big. The railroad was gradually extended down to Miami to serve two more vast hotels,14 with the help of convict labor leased from the state at a monthly rate of $2.50 per man, plus food and lodging, a fraction of the cost of the $2.00 a day that was the going rate for free labor. Flagler’s line reached Miami in April 1896, and he then began to scope out the crazy ambition of reaching Key West, a dot 128 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean connected to the mainland by a string of rocky islands broken by stretches of sea. Virtually none of the route was on land where tracklaying was easy. The line, which became known as “the railroad that goes to sea,” involved crossing no less than forty-two miles of ocean, including one seven-mile section, and the construction of seventeen miles of viaducts and bridges and twenty miles of embankments on filled causeway. Flagler’s pockets, though, were almost bottomless, thanks to his oil money. He needed a great deal of it. On three occasions, severe hurricanes, each worse than the previous one, wrecked completed sections of track. In the third, a particularly violent storm, 134 men, many of them in a boat, were killed. In the aftermath of the disaster, many others, fearing for their lives, walked off the job, but still Flagler plowed on, offering better wages and providing the workers with storm-proof dormitories. Even so, the conditions for the railroad workers were appalling. Mosquitoes were a constant menace, accompanied, for part of the year, by even harder-biting sand flies. And there were still numerous fatal accidents, given the dangerous working conditions.

  The completion of the line in January 1912 was marked by a special train, with the eighty-two-year-old Henry Flagler aboard, from New York to Key West, where it was met by a crowd of more than 10,000 people, many of whom had never seen a train before. Key West, later Ernest Hemingway’s hangout, was actually nearer to Havana than Miami, and the main service, which was supposed to take four hours from Miami but often took six or seven because of the difficult conditions, was called, fittingly, the Havana Special. Flagler, who enjoyed nothing more than a ride in the cab between Miami and Key West playing folk tunes like “Long Caleb McGee” or “Old Dan Tucker” on the locomotive’s whistle, died the following year, too soon to realize that the enterprise was a failure. Few tourists ventured all the way down the line, and the hopes that Key West would become a major freight port since it was the nearest in the United States to Central and South America never materialized, with the result that few freight trains used the railroad. The rail service lasted less than a quarter of a century, as yet another hurricane, on Labor Day 1935, destroyed the railroad. Flagler’s work was not wasted, however. The railroad company gave up trying to run any trains on the line, which in any case had been reduced to just one service a day. Cars had begun to use the tracks, and now the arrangement was formalized. The rails were ripped out, and the line of the route remains today as the base for US Highway 1, running to a series of exotic resorts as well as the port and naval base of Key West.

  If tourism was largely stimulated by the advent of railroads, so was the creation of professional sports. The railroads not only enabled matches between teams in major cities to take place by providing transportation, often overnight, for the big-league teams, but also allowed supporters of the away team to travel, greatly enhancing the atmosphere in the stadiums. Baseball was the pioneer. The game itself had started becoming popular during the Civil War, when troops on both sides played during lulls in the fighting, and it expanded rapidly after the war. Boston and Chicago were the big hitters in the first professional league established in the early 1870s, and clearly such rivalry would not have been possible without the two teams being able to travel to each other’s city by rail. In fact, “city size and railroad travel feasibility defined the major baseball leagues,” and generations of baseball players spent much of their time on the railroads.15 A whole culture of life on the rails developed, enlivened by practical jokes, such as the one played on Babe Ruth, the greatest ever baseball player, who was told to rest his arm on the little netting shelf that was next to the bed for personal effects. Ruth, a pitcher at the time, did so and found that in the mornin
g he could barely move his arm.

  It was, in fact, the limitations of travel by rail that prevented teams from the West from joining the Major Leagues before teams took to the air in the 1950s. Until then, St. Louis, the most westerly town reachable by overnight train from the East Coast, was as far west as the so-called national leagues could stretch. Other professional sports developed later than baseball, but also made heavy use of the railroads, for both players and spectators. Indeed, match and tournament schedules were arranged around railroad timetables. Circuses, too, traveled by rail in whole trains specially provided for them. In one much-recounted episode, an elephant managed to remove the pin between carriages, splitting the train without the driver realizing what had happened. Tragically, one of the country’s worst rail disasters occurred on a circus train when 86 people died, along with numerous circus animals, and another 127 people were injured, after a locomotive engineer fell asleep and ran his empty troop train into the rear of the Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train in June 1918 near Hammond, Indiana. Many of the victims were burned beyond recognition and are buried anonymously in a special circus cemetery nearby. Another similar disaster, also in the Midwest, involving two trains of the Wallace Bros. circus, a predecessor of the Hagenbeck-Wallace, had occurred in 1903, with a death toll of 23 and numerous animals.16 Despite these tragedies, circuses have proved one of the most durable users of the railroad. Even today the Ringling Bros. circus travels around the United States in a pair of special mile-long trains of sixty cars each—carrying everything from acrobats and trainers to elephants and pythons. It has been using the tracks since 1872, except for a short break during a failed experiment with road travel in the 1950s.