The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  The interurbans might have survived the hostility of the railroads, but it was the basic lack of a market—and the impossibility of making money from a schedule that ran just one single car per hour over the tracks—that would prove their undoing. The demise of the interurbans came almost as fast as their construction. Most interurbans had a life span of around twenty to thirty years, and they were killed off by a combination of competition from the car and the deterioration of their equipment. Many of the promoters were given twenty-five-year franchises that ran out around the time of the Great Depression, and since that coincided with the need to buy new equipment, the municipal authorities simply shut the systems down rather than issue new franchises. A few interurbans stuttered on until after the Second World War, but soon succumbed to the automobile, which not only destroyed their remaining customer base but eyed jealously all that extra space next to the highways.

  Interestingly, the authors of the key history of the interurbans suggest that they could have been as damaging to the conventional railroads as the Ford Model T, whose very invention stymied their development and killed them off: “Both [interurbans and the Model T] threatened the position of the railroad train as the principal means of passenger transportation; by 1960 [when the book was published] the automobile was providing 90 per cent of intercity passenger miles.” By then, “no trace of the [interurban] industry remained in its original form,” although a handful of routes had been converted to suburban rail use or to freight service.22 It was particularly unlucky for the interurbans that cars became a viable alternative to rail just a decade or so after their introduction, which made them, like the fax machine, the punch card, or even the Els, a short-term technology that was rapidly superseded.

  The main railroad companies were now adopting modern technology that allowed them to explore new solutions to old problems. America may have been slow to develop subway systems, but it can nevertheless lay claim to the greatest railroad engineering achievement of the early twentieth century. This was the construction by the Pennsylvania Railroad of the tunnels under the East and Hudson Rivers that separate Manhattan from the mainland, a feat that was all the greater since it required the electrification of a large section of the tracks. The Pennsylvania had long been frustrated by its lack of access to Manhattan, as its New York passengers had to traverse the Hudson on ferries. It was Alexander Cassatt, the company’s president, who pushed the idea through, though unfortunately he was to die in 1906, before the completion of the project. Of the options available at the time to the Pennsylvania, a bridge was deemed technically too difficult and would have required the cooperation of the New Jersey port authorities, which was not forthcoming. However, the building of a tunnel raised a number of concerns, most notably fears that the use of steam locomotives underground on such a busy commuter route was too much of a safety risk (although by the 1900s, the London Underground had been operating with steam engines in almost continuous tunnels for more than thirty-five years), and therefore the state authorities mandated the use of electric propulsion. The twin-bore tunnels under the Hudson took seven years to build—no mean achievement given the challenges of working under the river, which included using compressed air to keep the water from seeping in. With access from the tunnels, the Pennsylvania Railroad could, at last, have a station on Manhattan, and the decision to cross both rivers meant it had to be a through station rather than a terminus. And, of course, it had to be bigger and grander than the Vanderbilts’ nearby Grand Central, which was being rebuilt simultaneously with many beaux arts features. Pennsylvania Station was, indeed, majestic and massive, extending over seven acres, the largest covered indoor space in New York, and was shared with its subsidiary, the local Long Island Rail Road. It, too, was built in the beaux arts style that was the fashion of the day, although the exterior was dominated by a seemingly endless colonnade of pink granite Doric columns. The interior was eclectic in style, with carriageways inspired by the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a vast waiting room in the style of the Roman Baths of Caracalla. It was, regrettably, to survive barely a half century. In a piece of architectural vandalism akin to the destruction of the Great Hall and the arch of Euston Station, Penn Station was, to outrage both in America and abroad, demolished in the early 1960s. That was the result of a desperate bid by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was already in its death throes before its fateful merger with the New York Central, to save itself through the construction of Madison Square Garden above today’s entirely subterranean and dismal but bustling station.

  Following an accident in a tunnel in 1902 that cost fifteen lives, the New York State legislature prohibited the use of steam on Manhattan, and consequently the Pennsylvania spent the years of construction of the tunnel considering how to implement electrification. Apart from the now universal use of electricity for streetcar operation, several railroads had begun to experiment with this new and highly efficient form of motive power. Indeed, even before the need to electrify the New York services, America was in the fore-front of railroad electrification, rivaled only by Switzerland, prompted by the eagerness of two rival companies, General Electric and Westinghouse, who saw the railroads as an almost unlimited market for their different systems of electric power. General Electric favored the third-rail system used extensively on underground systems, while Westinghouse developed the overhead-wire system.

  As early as 1887, there was an electric-powered coal train operating on the short Lykens Valley Colliery line in Pennsylvania, and a few other mining lines followed suit. The Baltimore & Ohio, pioneering as ever, was the first railroad company to use electric power for passenger trains when it introduced a General Electric system in a 3-mile tunnel section of a new line around Baltimore in 1895. The experiment proved successful, but the technology was still too unreliable for large-scale mainline operation. A small railroad in California, the narrow-gauge North Shore Railroad, was the first to electrify a suburban service, but it was New York, with the densest rail traffic in America, that was most in need of the new technology. For the New York Central and the New York, New Haven & Hartford that shared its tracks, the change was essential. The number of suburban services operated by the two companies was beginning to outgrow the capacity of the Grand Central terminal. Given the high cost of land on Manhattan, the obvious solution was to create new tracks under the existing station. The effects of steam locomotives were increasingly giving rise to complaints from the affluent Manhattan residents and to concerns about their safety: “The smoke, steam and cinders of some 700 daily trains were a nuisance to the neighborhoods along the line, and low visibility in the 2-mile Park Avenue Tunnel created a severe safety problem.”23 The ordinance by the New York State legislature banning steam, which was due to come into effect in 1908, gave the railroads no choice, but the Central embarked on a far more ambitious scheme than required, electrifying the nearly 60 miles of track on the Hudson River and Harlem routes with a third-rail system similar to that used on the El. For its part, the New Haven used the overhead system for 33 miles of track up to Stamford, Connecticut, whereas the Pennsylvania, after much deliberation, decided on the third-rail system—even though it was recognized as posing a hazard to track workers and trespassers—for both its Long Island Rail Road and the services using the Hudson Tunnel.

  The success of the Baltimore & Ohio experiment, and the electrification of so many railroads in New York, encouraged other companies to follow suit, especially in long tunnels, which were a particular hazard because of the risk of asphyxiation when steam locomotives stalled. In 1908, Canada’s Grand Trunk Railroad became the first, electrifying a mile-long tunnel linking Ontario with Michigan that had seen some dangerous incidents. Others soon followed, notably the Boston & Maine, which had particularly serious ventilation problems in its nearly 5-mile—and very busy—Hoosac Tunnel (see Chapter 6), where waiting for smoke to clear had become a limiting factor on its capacity, and the Great Northern, whose Cascade Tunnel through the mountain range of that name in Wa
shington State was especially hazardous, as it had a steep gradient that locomotives struggled to climb. Electric locomotives not only had the advantage of being smokeless, but were also more powerful—when used in twos or threes—and therefore were introduced in several other such locations, even though that necessitated changing locomotives from steam to electric and back again. The longest and most ambitious scheme, initiated in 1915 by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad (the Milwaukee Road), electrified 440 miles of its route through Idaho and Montana, and later through to Tacoma in Washington State, a total of more than 650 miles. This was to be the only long-distance electrification west of Chicago, and it was not, ultimately, a success, as it went bust in 1925. Despite many suburban networks’ turning to electricity before the First World War and New York’s becoming the first city anywhere in the world to have an all-electric train service, which meant that America was at the forefront of railroad electrification technology, the failure to introduce electric power more widely was to be another lost opportunity for the US railroads.

  As well as electrification, there were several other significant improvements in this period. The building of the Lucin Cutoff over the Great Salt Lake in Utah completed in 1904 cut 43 miles from the transcontinental journey, bypassing the line’s original route through Promontory Summit. In the state of Michigan, a tunnel under the Detroit River connected the city of Detroit directly with the East for the first time. There were, too, numerous small enhancements to the network that in parts included relaying the entire track with heavier rail. Martin suggests that the scale of investment in the early years of the twentieth century was such that, in effect, “America’s railroads were, indeed built twice; once in the nineteenth century, and again in the exhilarating era we call, with so much justification, Progressive.”24 Nevertheless, thanks to the failure of the Interstate Commerce Commission to recognize the investment needs of the railroads, it was not enough, and they would enter the First World War unprepared for its demands.

  The railroads had continued to expand in the first decade of the 1900s. Inevitably, the growth rate had slowed down, as networks were virtually complete; at least in the East and much of the Midwest, every little town was now served by a railroad or an interurban, but there were still a few additions made to the system. Most of the new lines were built in the still sparsely populated West and were principally branches tacked on to the transcontinentals. (In Canada, two of the three transcontinentals were not completed until after the start of the war in Europe.) The Great Northern, the Union Pacific, the Western Pacific, and the Milwaukee Road all built substantial sections of track in the first decade of the 1900s, and old Henry Flagler’s madcap line to Key West was not completed until 1912. By and large, however, this was the end of nearly a century of railroad building. In the 1910s, Flagler’s scheme aside, very few new lines were being built. Overall, route mileage increased from 193,000 at the turn of the century to its peak of 254,00025 miles in 1916, about a quarter of the route miles ever built in the world. Already sections were being abandoned, as they proved unprofitable or an unnecessary duplication. In New England, for example, closures began in 1907 after consolidation by the New Haven resulted in several branch lines becoming redundant. For the most part, though, it would not be until after the Depression of the 1930s that track mileage began to be reduced more quickly.

  The First World War put an end to further expansion, but the railroads would experience an unprecedented period of traffic growth during the conflict. Although from the start of the war in 1914 there had been a debate about America’s involvement, the railroads were unprepared for the demands that the conflict placed on them. Many railroads were already in deep trouble. The continued obduracy of the Interstate Commerce Commission to allow rate increases had pushed numerous major companies, such as the Rock Island, the New Haven, and the Wabash into receivership, and although they kept running, they were not in a position to invest. Just as America was about to enter the war, the railroads found themselves embroiled in a bitter labor dispute that turned into a battle with the government. The labor unions had been arguing for an eight-hour day, rather than the ten they worked normally, but the railroad companies were adamantly opposed, despite being pressed on the matter by President Woodrow Wilson. Instead, he managed to persuade Congress to pass legislation to that effect, but the new law, when introduced in January 1917, was ignored by the rail companies, who argued it was unconstitutional. The matter came to a head just as America was about to enter the war. The unions threatened to go on strike on March 19, 1917, but that morning the companies finally yielded to the eight-hour day and that very afternoon the Supreme Court ruled that it was not unconstitutional.

  Even without these industrial-relations problems, the railroads were already in a state of chaos as a result of increased demand, the lack of investment, and terrible winter weather. The difficulties had been mounting since the beginning of the previous winter, which had come early, with considerable snowfall in the autumn of 1915. The bad weather, which had broken previous temperature records, could not have come at a worse time. Overall demand went up by 10 percent, but traffic to the eastern ports— Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York—soared by a third, boosted by demand from war-torn Europe. The railroads could not cope. By February 1917, the ports were clogged, and, to make matters worse, many merchant navy captains were refusing to allow their ships to leave the protection of the port, as Germany had announced that any boat carrying supplies for the Allies was a legitimate war target for its submarines. Moreover, the railroad companies failed to understand the imperatives of war-time, even if America was not directly involved until April 1917. Albro Martin suggests it was the legacy of the previous decades that caused the crisis: “Americans paid dearly in 1916 and 1917 for the neglect of their railroads. Not only were the lines short of virtually every kind of physical facility, notably locomotives, but the timid structure of the railroad business itself, based as it was on the old-fashioned philosophy of competition, turned out to be an intolerable incubus.” Indeed, as another historian, Richard Saunders Jr., points out, there were some absurd practices on the railroads: “Trains of war materials rolled into congested eastern ports, while southern ports remained idle. . . . Pennsylvania coal might go to customers in the West while Illinois or Kentucky coal moved east.” The railroad companies tried to muddle through, and there were occasional acts of cooperation, but they were prevented from working closely together by antitrust legislation passed in 1890 at the height of public antagonism toward the railroad barons. Even when the presidents of nearly seven hundred railroad companies signed an agreement to coordinate their services, they found they could not do so legally. The efficiency of the rail network, measured in terms of daily mileage of freight cars, reduced by 20 percent, and the effect was compounded by the extra demands being placed on the system. In short, the railroads were simply not in a state to deal with the task facing them. Samuel Rea, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, told the Interstate Commerce Commission, “The condition of the railroads today presents a menace to the country.”26

  By the autumn of 1917, matters came to a head. There was a national shortage of freight cars estimated at 158,000, and more than that number were piled up around the eastern ports waiting to be unloaded. The basic lesson of railroad operation that had been learned in the American Civil War by Herman Haupt, the great railroad strategist, had been forgotten: cars must be unloaded and returned before new trains can be accepted, as otherwise bottlenecks form and the cars are not available for further trips. The railroads responded by creating a series of committees to try to sort matters out, but each collapsed in the face of the antitrust legislation that specifically prevented railroads from pooling resources and the mutual antipathy between the different companies. Another early and severe winter was taking its toll. Coal and food prices were soaring, and the people, many of whom had been opposed to America’s entry into the war, were becoming restless and taking to
the streets.