The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  The iron road had initially stimulated the rapid development of towns and cities, and now, as much by accident as design, it allowed urban areas to sprawl: “Suburban railroad traffic changed the American landscape in the 1880s and 1890s [forging] a new kind of link between the city’s core and pastoral environs that had once been thought of as far away.”14 The railroads’ role in creating suburbia was key. A common pattern was for developers to identify a greenfield site in the environs of a town or city and buy up land cheaply on which to build houses without revealing their intent. The developer had to ensure that there was either an existing railroad connection or one that could be easily extended to the site and then persuade the railroad company to provide a station. Failing that, the developers themselves would have to spend their own money on building the station, because without it, the housing would have little value.

  The railroads not only created the early suburbs but also established the rhythm of life that went with them. Daily travel by train meant a regimen determined by the clock, as people generally traveled on the same service every day: “Office routines in the city were in fact adjusted to fit the times when railroads actually ran the largest number of trains on the most rapid schedules.” Office hours were determined by the arrival of trains, and the nine-to-five routine was born. Railroad commuting bred a lifestyle of habits and fashion and created countless Groundhog Days. People would use the same car, the same seat even, every day, often sitting with the same fellow commuters, and read the same paper or play the same card game. They might even be on first-name terms with the train conductor. They wore the same clothes, bought their coffees at the same kiosks, and even followed the same trends: “Briefcases, attaché cases or other accoutrements went in and out of fashion over the years; they were highly stylized but uniformly accepted.”15 The most affluent commuters would often club together to pay for a special coach to be attached to their regular service, solely for their use—hence the expression club car. Schedules tended to remain pretty much the same, too, over the years, often serving generations of users. The Lackawanna could boast the longest-running US commuter train service, which left the railroad’s Hoboken terminal in New Jersey at 4:15 p.m. every afternoon to travel nonstop to the leafy towns of Madison and Morristown. It was introduced in 1883 and retained the same spot in the Lackawanna’s timetable until the demise of the company in the 1970s. The popularity of the train among the wealthy elite earned it the unofficial moniker the “Millionaire’s Express,” which suggests that the elite of the white-collar workforce did not have to endure long hours in the office. The Lackawanna could also lay claim to having carried America’s longest-serving commuter, W. Parsons Todd, onetime mayor of Morristown and founder of the town’s museum, who reportedly regularly traveled between his New York office and his home between 1899 and 1970.

  The early commuting lines, described in Chapter 7, had by the first few years of the twentieth century proliferated in many eastern and midwestern states. Towns with suburban rail services included not just New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where the rail-commuting habit survives and which had developed very extensive suburban networks in the three decades before the First World War, but also Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New Orleans, where the local rail networks have all but disappeared.

  For the railroad companies, this burgeoning commuter market was a mixed blessing. If there were sufficient concentrations of commuters and available train paths—that is, sufficient space in the timetable without disrupting longer-distance services—suburban rail could be profitable. However, the trains themselves were expensive to provide and might be used just twice daily, sitting idle in sidings the rest of the time, unlike stock used for longer journeys that could earn revenue all day long. The commuters themselves could be a demanding bunch, dissatisfied with the service provided in return for their expensive season ticket—though they received a considerable discount as regular travelers—and therefore ever pressuring the railroad to improve its facilities. The tribulations of the longest commuter line in the United States, the Long Island Rail Road, demonstrate the difficulties of achieving consistent profits over a long period out of commuter traffic. Despite also being America’s busiest commuter service by some measure, the Long Island has had a turbulent existence with periods of prosperity interwoven with leaner times. The company went broke in the 1870s, then prospered under the inspired leadership of Austin Corbin, until the 1903 panic again plunged it into difficulties. In 1900, the Long Island was taken over by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which saw the benefits of combining long-distance services with suburban traffic in a single new, massive New York terminal. With passenger numbers growing rapidly, the Long Island prospered, thanks to New York’s population explosion, electrifying large sections of its routes, and taking over several connecting lines and streetcar services, only to start closing lines in the 1930s. Then, after the Second World War, the Long Island Rail Road fell into difficulties again (see Chapter 11), not least because it was prevented by the authorities from raising fares between 1918 and 1947, despite a doubling in operating costs.

  Commuters also needed to get around towns, and one solution was the elevated railroad. Subway systems were initially rejected as being too difficult technically, despite the example of the London Underground; instead, the idea of putting railroads on raised platforms down the middle of the invariably straight city streets (US cities were required by planning statutes to be built on a grid pattern) was taken up in several places. New York’s extensive network of elevated railroads started with the opening in 1870 of the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway, a four-mile line operated by cable. The company collapsed almost immediately, but its assets were picked up by the Manhattan Railway, which built a series of lines. Soon, four of New York’s avenues—which are essentially on a north-south axis—were overshadowed by heavily engineered metal structures stretching up to sixty feet in the air and carrying steam locomotive–hauled trains. By the end of the decade, there were more than fifty miles of track in New York, but, not surprisingly, given their ugly infrastructure and the smoke and cinders they rained down on the public below, the New York elevated railroads, or Els, were never particularly loved. The fact that they were owned by the reviled Jay Gould, who eventually gained control of the whole network, did not make them any more popular. They were also slow, never averaging more than around 12 mph, and difficult to reach. Nevertheless, with no alternative yet available—the subway system would not open until the early years of the twentieth century—they were heavily used. In their heyday, the mid-1880s, they carried well over 100 million passengers annually and were so profitable that they were able to reduce their fares to the five cents universally charged by streetcars of the age. Inevitably, though, their days were numbered. The Els were an intermediate technology that was never quite satisfactory, even when, soon after the turn of the century, the network was electrified. After Manhattan’s first underground railroad was completed in 1904, the Els started to be gradually replaced by the subway. Most of the Manhattan Els survived into the 1950s, whereas in the other New York boroughs many of the overhead structures were incorporated into the subway system. The other city that favored elevated railroads was, of course, Chicago, where much of the system survives and where the “L” (oddly, the system was known as the “El” in New York but the “L” in Chicago) has become a proud part of its transportation heritage. Its first line, which was steam operated, opened in 1892, and the system, which was soon converted to electricity, expanded rapidly in the years before the First World War. Elevated railroads, though, were expensive and cumbersome, and conventional railroads could not be built profitably to serve the local needs of smaller towns. The railroads had gotten in there first, taking advantage of the easier sites, but the streetcars’ greater flexibility and lower costs enabled them to reach places that the railroads could not have served profitably. Once the streetcars were electrified, their flexibility and cheaper infrastructure allowed them
to become the key driver of the expansion of the suburbs. There was almost no place too small to sustain a viable trolley network. While large towns soon had tracks on every major thoroughfare, almost every town with a main street was getting in on the act: “Streetcar lines were designed with the express purpose of opening new residential tracts whose appeal would be to people of some means who were repelled by conditions in the central city. They were called streetcar suburbs.” Until the First World War, streetcars were highly profitable: “The expectation— actually, the faith—was that ridership and profits, even with the 5 cent fares seemingly inviolate, would continue to grow far into the future.” Most lines started out as local concerns but were soon consolidated, first into urban networks, and later into major streetcar corporations that owned systems in several cities and were regarded by the public with increasing suspicion since they were effectively monopolists. That perception was not entirely fair because the streetcar companies did invest heavily in new equipment and cars after they consolidated into bigger concerns. Apart from a few affluent suburbs whose residents were worried that streetcars would attract the local riffraff, “the expansion of street railroads was regarded as a municipal boon even as the men who controlled them grew richer and lost favor in the eyes of the public.”16

  Every small-town mayor and councilor saw street railroads as the harbinger of growth and prosperity. Initially, their main purpose was to carry commuters to work and back, but soon streetcars were built to connect the city with a host of other destinations: “There were lines running out beyond the suburbs to the countryside, to cemeteries (there were special funeral cars), or to scenic sites for picnics and outings.” The weekend was indeed big business, and the streetcar companies expanded into providing leisure activities. A census in 1907 found that there were no fewer than “467 ‘parks and pleasure resorts’ owned or operated by street railway companies,” all, of course, connected to the streetcar network.17 The ride in the trolley was part of the day’s fun, especially when the windows were taken out in the summer, affording the passengers a welcome cool breeze.

  The streetcar companies also began to venture into rural pastures, stimulated by demand from people living a few miles out of the cities who had no adequate means of getting there since horse-drawn transportation was expensive and slow. However, it was the interurban railroad, run by separate companies, that most effectively catered to the needs of people living out of town. Largely ignored by railroad historians because of its short life span and rather crude construction, the interurban was nonetheless remarkable for the speed of its expansion and the rapidity of its demise. Mostly separate from both the streetcar and railroad networks, interurbans were electric trains that connected outlying areas of cities with the center or connected neighboring towns. They were essentially long-distance streetcar lines, ranging in length from a few miles to fifty or sixty, built rapidly—six months to a year was typical—and on the cheap, usually by the side of existing highways or on agricultural land offered at little cost by farmers eager to have a rail line adjoining their property. The interurbans filled a gap in the market: catering to relatively sparsely populated areas, which it was widely expected would make its owners a profit.

  It was an expectation that would be rarely met. A few interurban schemes were built in the 1890s, and a small number in the decade after the First World War, but the vast majority were built in two short bursts during the first decade of the 1900s in the expectation they would be huge money-makers. The owners’ hopes were, sadly, far too optimistic. Some of the early lines were indeed profitable, but that served only to stimulate the construction of a large number of schemes that could never hope to earn a decent rate of return. This rush to create interurban lines constitutes one of those periodic bouts of commercial madness that litter the history of economics, from the Dutch tulip boom of the 1630s to the rush to invest in dot-com companies in the 1990s: “Even though the interurbans built to connect major cities or to tap rural areas of considerable population density were not, in light of the expectations of the time, irrationally conceived, their construction was accompanied by an outpouring of optimism and a rash of ill-considered projects that, in retrospect, can only be called one of the classic manias.” They were part of a wider movement toward electric traction during the early 1900s, when “electric railway track of all types was being built at about ten times the rate of [conventional] railroad track.”18

  Interurbans have no precise definition, since the cruder systems were like streetcars and the more sophisticated versions morphed into suburban electric railroads, but they appeared in one form or another in thirty states. The industry enjoyed a meteoric growth, which in a way mirrored the expansion of the railroads in their early years and, similarly, was stimulated by local entrepreneurs, although larger concerns began to consolidate systems in the years running up to the First World War. By 1900, there were already twenty-one hundred miles of interurban railroads, and this figure leaped to nine thousand by the end of 1906 and fifteen thousand by 1913. It was in the midwestern states where they were most prominent. Ohio had far more mileage than any other state, with just under twenty-eight hundred miles of interurban track, and only three towns of more than five thousand inhabitants in the whole state did not have a system. With its well-populated farming areas, largely flat terrain, and numerous mediumsize towns spaced twenty or thirty miles apart, Ohio was perfect territory for interurbans. So was neighboring Michigan, which had the next biggest system with nearly two thousand miles. Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, and New York also all developed extensive networks remarkably quickly. By 1910, many areas of the United States were covered with these slightly ramshackle railroads, the only regional exceptions being the Deep South, the northern plains, and much of the West. Even so, Los Angeles was the hub of the extensive Pacific Electric, “a 1,100 mile interurban system whose ‘big red cars’ skirted mile after mile of sandy shoreline, swept past endless acres of orange groves and climbed into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.” Interestingly, it was this network of streetcar systems, rather than the car, that created the sprawling nature of Los Angeles and its suburbs. All its main highways had a streetcar line running down them, and therefore it was the distance to the streetcar stop that was the limiting factor in local development. The Pacific Electric interurban system was the brainchild of a developer, Henry E. Huntington, who built it as a loss leader financed by profits from his housing projects. He saw that good transportation was as essential as ensuring the houses had water and electricity and therefore was not concerned that he lost money on providing it: “The result was the characteristic low-rise form of the region, with mile upon mile of ‘California bungalows’ spreading along the tentacles of the Pacific Electric Network. This extensive urban spread gave Los Angeles a reputation, which has lasted to this day, as the very model of urban sprawl.”19 Lots that were a half-dozen blocks away from the streetcar were simply left undeveloped, but once the car became commonplace, they were built upon and their residents’ automobiles soon displaced the streetcars on the highway.

  Development of these interurban streetcars was so intensive in parts of the Midwest that it was possible in 1910 to travel continuously by interurban from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to Oneonta, New York, a distance of nearly eleven hundred miles. Since their average speed was under twenty miles per hour, because of the frequency of stops, the low power of the electric motors, and the tight curves, it is doubtful that anyone in those pretrainspotter days would have undertaken such a trip. However, in that year a group of businessmen did travel a similar distance entirely on interurbans, from upstate New York to Louisville, Kentucky, using an electric car borrowed from the New York Central, in order to promote the interurban network.

  Profitability, though, proved a mirage. Passenger railroads, with their expensive infrastructure and high costs, need dense populations and intensive use, and the interurbans had neither. One or two companies even carried freight in a bid to be viable, but
few remained in the black for very long. Consequently, “the interurbans were a rare example of an industry that never enjoyed a period of prolonged prosperity.”20 The United States was littered with redundant interurban projects whose promoters had failed to raise the capital. Other lines collapsed as soon as they were built: in the case of the Indianapolis, Crawfordsville & Western (even the interurbans had western ambitions!), for instance, the railroad’s opening ceremony and its filing for bankruptcy were simultaneous events.

  The maddest of these schemes—and there are a lot to choose from— was the plan set out in 1906 by the Chicago–New York Electric Air Line Railroad for a double-track electric railroad in a straight line between the two cities. It was to be the equivalent of a rail superhighway: no crossings with roads or other rail tracks and only the gentlest of curves to ensure they could be negotiated at ninety miles an hour. Whereas previous crazy schemes for express railroads in the Northeast had never gotten off the drawing board, remarkably some construction on the Air Line Railroad was actually carried out, thanks to its promoter, Alexander Miller, selling enough stock for work to begin in Gary, Indiana. Some fifteen miles of track were built to a very high standard, the cost of which was one of the reasons for the scheme’s failure. Inevitably, though, despite the support of its shareholders and the optimism expressed in its own promotional magazine, Air Line News, the company stopped building and went bust in 1915.

  There was a lot stacked against the interurbans: the hostility of the railroad companies, the limited market they served, the cheapness of the construction (which increased operating costs), and ultimately, after the war, the advent of the Ford Model T and other cheap cars. Yet for a while, the big railroads felt threatened by this crude competitor, not least because many interurbans were backed by powerful electricity companies. Despite the fact that interurbans seemed to cater to a rather limited market and ran, at best, hourly trains with single cars, some railroads were so fearful that they ran concerted campaigns against them and were quick to challenge them in the courts at every available opportunity. The railroads most hostile to the interurbans were the largest, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, both of which regularly sought injunctions against the interurbans. The trigger for disputes was often the need for the interurban to cross the line of a railroad. On several occasions, injunctions were obtained to prevent the crossing. In one case, in California, the Petaluma & Santa Rosa was banned from crossing the line of the California Northwestern and had to provide a horse-drawn shuttle service to carry its passengers into the town of Santa Rosa. When the Petaluma again attempted to install a crossing over the Northwestern’s line in January 1905, its men were confronted with two locomotives on the tracks that were used to douse them with boiling water, an incident known as the Battle of Sebastopol Avenue. In fact, at the local level, “outright violence between interurban employees and railroad men was not uncommon.” When the Ohio Central Traction Company completed its tracks to the village of Crestline, Ohio, a fistfight broke out between its construction gang and men employed by the Pennsylvania and New York Central. A more common—and civilized—response from the railroad companies was to try to improve their competing service by cutting rates and running more trains. However, their costs were always higher, partly because they were unionized, and they were unable to compete effectively. That did not stop the railroads from continuing their hostility even once the local interurbans were built: “The typical railroad executive was convinced that the interurbans had no ethical right to exist, and was eager to do what he could to eradicate them.”21