The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  There was a mixed reaction in the railroad industry to the danger posed by the automobile. The complacency of some executives was well summed up by a promoter of interurban railroads who was quoted as saying in 1916 that “the fad of automobile riding will gradually wear off and the time will soon be here when a very large part of the people will cease to think of automobile rides.”4 Others, though, seeing that their monopoly position was being challenged, sought to improve the service they offered passengers. This was particularly true on many longer-distance services, where there were marked improvements during the interwar period, but several companies with big commuting markets were also alert to the potential threat from the automobile. Although no major intercity lines were electrified in the 1920s, apart from some sections of the Pennsylvania, numerous sub-urban services were converted, but despite the obvious advantages, at times the catalyst of external pressure was needed for the change to be made. In Chicago, it was complaints from the city authorities over the nuisance caused by smoke from steam locomotives that made the Illinois Central electrify its services. In the East, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was forced to do so in order to speed up turnaround times in its Philadelphia station, which had limited capacity, while the Lackawanna followed suit partly for the same reason. Interestingly, although electrification greatly improved the passenger experience, since electric trains were cleaner and faster than their steam equivalents, this was rarely uppermost in the minds of the railroad managers making the decision. Rather, it was reducing costs and improving efficiency that motivated them to make the change. There was still, among many railroad managers, the notion that passengers were more trouble than they were worth. James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern, characterized passenger services in bizarre terms, as “the equivalent of the male teat, neither useful nor ornamental.”5 Overall, while passengers at the time contributed around a quarter of total railroad revenue, the proportion varied widely from company to company, with the big railroads in the East being most dependent on fare income, while some midwestern railroads made little provision for troublesome humans. Hill’s remark confirms the fact that, as mentioned before, generally for most railroads income from freight was higher than passenger revenue. This was true even in the 1920s, when passenger revenue was so high, and it goes a long way to explaining why the passenger business was allowed to wither away so quickly after the Second World War.

  The hostility to passenger services, though by no means universal, was sufficiently prevalent to account for the general mood of complacency of the railroad companies about the rise of automobile travel. The year 1920 had seen the highest-ever number of passengers—1.2 billion, not including commuters—but by the end of the decade, total passenger mileage across all railroads had fallen by more than 40 percent, despite the population growing by one-eighth. At the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929, Americans were already traveling five times farther in their cars than by train. Although the railroads still had by far the biggest chunk of the business market and the prestige services continued to flourish, there was little attempt to speed up services overall: “The blue-ribbon extra-fare trains between the East Coast and Chicago revealed what passenger officials thought was most important: comfort, luxury and safety. Speed is the enemy of all of these, and it is the enemy of track maintenance as well [making it far more expensive].” Instead, the companies tended to focus on passenger care, trying to outdo each other in offering the most molly-coddling. Redcap porters would ensure that no passenger carried his or her baggage, and indeed on most major routes railroad travelers could avail themselves of a door-to-door service, neatly described by Martin: “The affluent Midwestern family whose son was leaving shortly for Yale College phoned the railroad depot the day before and had the expressman call in his van for the lad’s trunks and suitcases. Father handed the man the railroad ticket and he duly punched the square indicating that the traveler’s baggage—150 pounds were allowed [on a full-price ticket]—had been checked to destination.”6 In fact, it was even better than this implies. The luggage was not simply taken to the station in New Haven, but rather driven to the student’s room at the college, where it would await his arrival. This door-to-door service was routinely provided for business travelers, too, who would inform the clerk at the hotel to arrange for the baggage to be taken to their next destination.

  For the affluent customers, the prestige trains continued to vie with each other to provide the best service. The interwar period was the heyday of these services. The huge distances required to travel across the United States and the lack of any realistic alternative mode of travel for most journeys meant that the rich flocked onto trains, and the railroads made sure to cater to their every need. Even before 1914, the example of the Pennsylvania and New York Central in creating luxury trains was being followed elsewhere. In 1911, the Santa Fe launched the De Luxe, running once a week between Chicago and Los Angeles, a trip that took sixty-one hours. It was limited to just sixty passengers, who paid a supplement of twenty-five dollars (the equivalent of around eight hundred dollars today). The Santa Fe clearly tried to outdo anything the New York Central provided on the Twentieth Century Limited. Not only was nearly all the train’s accommodation in individual rooms, and the passengers’ every requirement attended to by a vast array of staff, ranging from a manicurist and barber to a librarian, but every “male passenger was presented with a pigskin wallet embossed with the train’s title in gilt; and at the California border uniformed pages would swarm aboard with corsages for each lady.”7 Many luxury trains sought to develop distinctive aspects of their service to attract publicity and passengers. On its long trip between Chicago and Seattle, the Great Northern’s Oriental Limited featured a 5:00 p.m. ritual when a steward, bearing a silver tea service and followed by a retinue of uniformed maids carrying sandwiches and patisseries, would walk down the length of the train, handing out these treats. Gyms, string quartets, swimsuit modeling, and Sunday services all featured on these trains. When it was relaunched in 1930, the North Coast Limited, which also ran between Chicago and Seattle but on the Northern Pacific’s tracks, boasted an electrician solely required to look after the innovative art deco lightbulbs.

  The major passenger flows were not, of course, just on the east-west axis. There were well-used long-distance passenger routes on both coasts. In the East, they stretched from the Northeast down to Florida, which was booming as a vacation destination, thanks partly to the railroad created by Henry Flagler. On the West Coast, the rapid expansion in the population of California, opened up by the transcontinentals, led to the creation of a range of successful services, especially in the key corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles but also stretching right up to Washington State. One key route, used not so much by the rich but crucial to the internal settlement pattern of the United States, was Chicago–New Orleans. The efficiency of the service meant that Chicago was often the first place that African Americans, fleeing the Jim Crow laws of the South, ended up, seeking jobs in the burgeoning industries of the Midwest such as the stockyards of Chicago or the automobile plants of Detroit. And they brought with them their music, creating the renowned Chicago jazz and blues culture.

  In their heyday, the prestige trains were major moneymakers, and after the crash and the Depression, the rail companies realized that modernization was essential for survival. Aviation, though still in its infancy, had begun to tempt a few courageous, affluent, and, given the early safety record, foolhardy travelers to venture into the skies. Just as the government had helped the nascent railroads with contracts to transport mail, they supported early commercial airlines with similar arrangements. The first post office airmail service started operating between New York City and Washington, DC, as early as 1918, and soon transcontinental flights were creaming off the lucrative mail business from the railroads. In 1925, private contractors were allowed to carry mail, just as the early railroad companies had done, and these flights started taking a few passengers as a sideline.
There was at least one attempt by the railroads to merge the two modes with the launch of a joint venture by Transcontinental Air Transport, with two railroads, the Santa Fe and the Pennsylvania. They offered passengers a trip across America from coast to coast in forty-eight hours—cutting a day off the normal train service—traveling by rail at night, as nighttime flying was deemed too difficult, and by air during the day. By 1930, it became possible for the first time to fly all the way from coast to coast, but it was not until the advent of the DC-3—the Dakota—in 1936 that aircraft had sufficient capacity to allow the airlines to make a profit solely through carrying passengers rather than being covertly subsidized with a mail contract. Even with the introduction of the DC-3, aviation barely impinged on the railroads’ long-distance market before the war, as in 1940 it still had barely 3 percent of the market.

  Buses had begun to attract some passengers at the lower end of the market by the outbreak of the Second World War. The railroads, realizing the danger, began to operate numerous bus services themselves and acquired many of the small operators who proliferated in the 1920s. Greyhound buses started making transcontinental trips by 1927, and the national Grey hound network was created two years later. However, the road network was still poor, with large sections still unpaved, and the railroads remained competitive on key routes. For example, a journey between New York and Chicago by bus in the late 1920s took twice as long as the ride by rail and in far less comfortable conditions. Nevertheless, despite a downturn during the Depression, by the outbreak of the Second World War Greyhound Lines had become well established as a national carrier, serving nearly five thousand towns throughout the nation.

  Trucks were already posing a more potent threat to freight traffic. The first trucks had appeared in 1904 but could not even begin to compete with the railroads until the technology was improved to make them more reliable and increase their payload. Moreover, cars and trucks initially posed no threat to the railroads simply because “there really was nowhere to drive them.”8 When a reckless doctor from Vermont, Nelson Jackson, accepted a bet to drive across the United States in 1903, it took him sixty-three days, as he spent much of the time repairing punctures and getting pulled out of potholes by helpful local farmers. The poor state of the roads was a direct result of the success of the railroads. Once it was clear, soon after the in-augural run of the Baltimore & Ohio, that the railroads were going to spread rapidly around the country, the turnpikes declined and there was no appetite to build any new roads. Throughout the nineteenth century, the more that the railroads established their dominance—in some places such as Colorado, they even bought up the old turnpikes to use as lines of route—the less appetite there was for spending any money on road building or even maintenance. In particular, any notion of establishing a national road system, an aspiration of numerous early- nineteenth-century luminaries, was quietly shelved.

  In the twentieth century, however, the roads were about to get their revenge, although at first progress was slow. The first paved road outside cities was not built until the early 1900s, and, although urban streets improved, there was little progress during that decade on building intercity highways, despite the growing number of cars and their greater range. It was, initially, the states that took the initiative by creating well-funded highway departments to upgrade roads and construct new paved highways. At the federal level, little progress was made until 1912, when at last the federal government, under pressure from campaigners within the automotive industry, began to consider building a transcontinental road. In 1919, a military convoy traveled from coast to coast using the partly completed road known as the Lincoln Highway and took sixty days to make the journey. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was so appalled at the poor condition of the roads that, when he was president in the 1950s, he launched the program to build the interstate network that would have such a devastating effect on the railroads (see next chapter). The thirty-three-hundred-mile Lincoln Highway, mostly called US Route 30, was not actually completed until 1923, but support for the project showed that the federal government was at last taking an interest in the issue, despite the fact that the Constitution, as mentioned in Chapter 1, notionally prevented federal funds from being spent on national infrastructure. Somehow in the rush to roads, this was forgotten, and in 1916 President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Aid Road Act, popularly known as the “Good Roads Bill,” backed by a generous initial appropriation of $85 million in its first year, ostensibly to help farmers bring their produce to market.

  A series of technological improvements further tilted the balance in favor of trucks. As well as the greater reliability of engines and added power allowing bigger payloads, the key development was the introduction of the heavy-duty pneumatic tire by both Goodyear and Dunlop in 1919 that reduced fuel consumption as well as the number of breakdowns caused by punctures. Trucking had the built-in advantage of flexibility, since trucks could go right to the door of farms and factories. Moreover, the industry was entirely unregulated until 1935, whereas the railroads were constrained by the rules imposed on them by the Interstate Commerce Commission, most important the requirement of a minimum charge per mile. This prevented the railroads from offering the same door-to-door price as the truckers, who cannily charged for the whole journey the amount the railroads required for the railroad leg. The railroads complained that the truckers were effectively subsidized, as the roads they drove on were state funded and the lack of regulation—and initially unionization—allowed them to operate without restraint. According to Martin, trucking was “a classic form of self- employment of men ill-suited for closely supervised work, who must work illegally long hours and drive at illegal speeds to pay for their or their employers’ increasingly expensive rigs.”9 Although in numerical terms the trucks at first made only minimal inroads into the railroads’ business, they targeted the high-value freight that was the most profitable part of the trade, leaving the railroads with the mineral and aggregate traffic that was least lucrative. The other section of the business that was quickly lost to the roads was the transportation of what was known as “less than carload” freight, small loads that were uneconomic on rail but easily carried by truck. House moves, too, soon transferred, helped by the fact that trucking the contents did not require everything to be crated, as required on the railroads. Overall, the truckers had the great advantage of being able to pick and choose which loads they wanted to carry, charging what they wanted, whereas the railroads were under a legal obligation to take whatever was offered at regulated prices.

  The railroads thought, with some justification, that they were unfairly treated. As the author of a history of the Burlington suggests, “U.S. railroads are the only transportation mode that owns, maintains and operates its own infrastructure—and pays ad valorem taxes for the privilege.”10 This puts them at a great disadvantage when the going gets tough, as in the 1930s. Whereas trucking companies could quite easily simply take their excess vehicles off the road and therefore no longer contribute anything to the infrastructure, the railroads had far less flexibility. They had far greater fixed costs than their rivals, as they were responsible for the stations, tracks, and terminals, on which they had the added burden of having to pay taxes, whereas truckers had only the cost of their trucks and relatively small depots. As roads got better, the truckers’ costs reduced, as they could travel faster, further increasing their competitive advantage.

  The truckers had already profited from the Depression, reducing their prices to meet their impoverished customers’ needs, something the railroads could not do. The railroads compounded their bad situation by pushing for a rate increase in the early 1930s that, surprisingly, the commission, once so obdurate, now granted. This was poor timing on the part of the railroads, another indication that they could not see the bigger picture. Even the regulation finally imposed on the truckers in 1935 ended up helping the industry by preventing cutthroat price competition between them and consequently allowi
ng the industry as a whole to be more profitable. The highway network, too, was ever expanding, with 3 million miles— fifteen times the length of the railroad system—by the outbreak of the war, connecting every little village and hamlet that had been ignored by the iron road. As a result, when America entered the war following Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the trucks had 10 percent of the intercity freight business, a good toehold from which to expand, but a figure that shows the railroads were still dominant, even if they had lost much of their profitable trade. Despite all their difficulties and handicaps, the railroads retained a natural advantage for heavy loads and for long-distance transportation.

  It was the automobile that would be the ultimate railroad killer, particularly of passenger services. The bald figures are instructive. From a total of 3.3 million cars—for a population of around 100 million during the First World War—by the end of the 1920s, that total had increased to 23 million, albeit for a larger population. Henry Ford was the main instigator, or culprit, depending on how one looks at it. His Model T, the first car specifically aimed at the middle class rather than the rich and cheaper since it was the first built using assembly-line methods, had cornered the market, with 15 million being produced by 1927, when it was superseded by later designs. Cars, of course, created much extra travel, so although their use expanded almost exponentially during the 1920s, the number of passengers traveling by rail largely held up, thanks to growing prosperity and the rising population.