The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  It was not only passengers who enjoyed privileges in special trains. Certain shipments of freight were treated with almost the same care, notably the most valuable in terms of dollars per ounce, silk. This cargo was so precious, valued at as much as $1.5 million per trainload—the equivalent of, say, $20 million today—that the trains were given priority, even over prestige passenger services. By ship and train, the fastest services reached New York just thirteen days after leaving Japan, the principal producer, and in January 1929 a train carrying solely silk covered the route between San Francisco and Chicago in just over two days, a good day and a half faster than the usual passenger services.

  There was one other famous example showing that, when motivated, the railroad companies could get their act together and provide rapid services. The occasion was, ironically, the return to the United States in June 1927 of aviator Charles Lindbergh following his inaugural transatlantic flight. He arrived in Washington, DC, and most of the newsreel companies, eager to show the footage in the New York news theaters, arranged to fly their film there. However, the International News Reel Company beat all its rivals by using a special train commissioned from the Pennsylvania Railroad equipped with a mobile film laboratory and pulled by a fast steam locomotive. Traveling at speeds of up to 110 mph, the 220-mile journey took only three hours, and the company beat its rivals by more than an hour, an all too brief triumph that entered into railroad folklore and was much boasted about by the Pennsy. The irony was that the film itself was fantastic propaganda for the nascent industry that would, within a generation, prove to be the nemesis of passenger rail in America.

  Freight traffic, not so time dependent, remained steam hauled for far longer than passenger services. There have been suggestions that the railroad companies would have been better off concentrating on investing in freight traffic rather than trying to save passenger services, but that misses the point. Until the Second World War, and even a bit beyond it, railroads were still the only viable way for large numbers of passengers to travel long distances. Moreover, the streamliners helped cheer up the mood of America after the Depression, which was no mean achievement.

  It was only in 1941 that the first freight train was powered by diesel, and this time it was the Santa Fe that was the pioneer, though others, such as the Southern, the Great Northern, and the Milwaukee, soon followed. Given the obvious long-term advantages of diesel, the reluctance to change demonstrated again the railroad companies’ hesitant attitude toward modernization. In fairness, it was not easy for them. At a time when they were beginning to be aware that their monopoly position was under threat, they had vast assets tied into steam technology and as a corollary required considerable investment to make the change to diesel. However, as we will see in the next chapter, once the conversion started, the steam locomotive disappeared remarkably quickly, becoming an endangered species within a decade and almost joining the dinosaurs within two.

  At the other end of the scale from the big companies and the main lines, a vast web of railroads, many of which were loss making and vulnerable to closure, covered America during the interwar period. Even the big companies were not immune from abandoning sections deemed hopeless. The Santa Fe closed twenty-five miles of branch lines in three states as early as 1921 and another thirteen miles five years later, while the Baltimore & Ohio abandoned mileage in the midwestern states of Ohio and Indiana also during the 1920s. Overall, though, most of the losses were in the South and West.

  The branch lines owned by what are sometimes called “mom-and-pop railroads” were the most vulnerable to closure. There were countless lines that ran just a few miles from a junction and survived by keeping costs down and services simple. Although the trains might be infrequent, they still provided a vital lifeline for the people on their route. Often there would be just one or two services per day in each direction, usually a mixed train carrying both passengers and freight. These lines’ best hope of salvation was to be merged into a bigger railroad that then might quietly forget their existence but might, conversely, run the risk of sudden closure. These lines, often with exotic and romantic-sounding names, were the most vulnerable to the advent of competition from the short-distance truck carriers, and several fell into disuse during this period, with around twenty thousand miles being lost in the interwar years. Many of the casualties of the 1920s were basket cases that had long been loss making or probably should never have been built, such as “the Madison Southern Railway, operating in Florida, [which] had only one passenger car, and its passenger revenues for 1919 totaled $438.” Amazingly, this railroad staggered on for three more years before closure. Even more amazingly, the fourteen-mile Kentwood & Eastern Railroad (showing unfulfilled Eastern rather than Western ambitions for a change) in Louisiana and Mississippi, which had no passenger car, “made a substantial amount of money each year from passenger revenues,” presumably from people sitting in boxcars or the conductor’s caboose, but this was not enough to prevent its closure in 1922.16

  There was, of course, one group that was happy to sit in boxcars. There had been hoboes on the railroads ever since the American Civil War, but with the Depression the phenomenon increased exponentially. Moreover, it was not just adults but a vast horde of teenagers who were on the move, estimated by Errol Lincoln Uys to number a quarter of a million in the 1930s: “Often as young as thirteen, each one came from a different background, each left home to ride the rails for different reasons, and each had unique experiences.”17 They were part of an army, estimated at 1.5 million during the peak years of the early 1930s, who used the railroads to get around the country to seek work. They suffered a terrible toll. According to the Interstate Commerce Commission, in the decade to 1939 nearly twenty-five thousand trespassers—seven a day—were killed and the same number injured, often losing a limb, on railroad property. Although not all of these would have been hoboes, a great proportion undoubtedly were, as jumping on and off moving trains was a hazardous business,18 belying the romantic notion of the life often presented in films and books. Hoboes, who have an annual convention every year in Britt, Iowa, distinguish themselves clearly from tramps and bums. Whereas hoboes travel and work, a tramp travels and begs, while a bum, who may or may not go on the road, simply drinks or takes drugs. The number was greatly reduced after the Second World War, partly by the greater affluence, but also by the con version to diesels, which unlike steam locomotives do not have to stop for water, giving hoboes fewer opportunities to jump on and off trains. Hitchhiking for a while became their preferred mode of travel, and today greater security and containerization make jumping the rails far less common.

  For the most part, the railroads prospered in the 1920s, and after the terrible downturn in the Depression began to recover as the war approached. The closures were, in fact, a minority, less than 10 percent of a very extensive network in the interwar years. The Interstate Commerce Commission was required to give permission for shutting a line and withheld it on numerous occasions. Moreover, with the war leading to a resurgence in railroad use, which enabled even the most moribund lines to suddenly get back in the black, most of these lines survived into the 1950s, when the branches started to be hacked off in great numbers.

  Despite the growing competition, the regulatory difficulties, and their own failings, the railroad companies could point to a proud record of improvements in the interwar period. Although the railroads were undoubtedly slow to adapt to the changing environment, it would be wrong to suggest they remained impassive in the interwar period while the opposition were sharpening their knives. There were numerous technical improvements, such as centralized train control that allowed one dispatcher to set signals and switches across a large stretch of railroad, perhaps as much as 100 or 150 miles of track, a significant increase in efficiency. Safety, too, improved considerably. The number of accidents, both minor and major, fell dramatically in the 1930s as the result of the adoption of new technology. Whereas in the 1920s, there were several years in which there were
more than a hundred rail passengers killed in accidents, during the 1930s the number of fatalities only once exceeded forty in a year. As George Douglas notes, “Railroad travel had once carried with it the threat of hazard and risk; now the typical American came to believe that train travel was by far the safest form of transportation.” And it was, given that the death toll on the roads was mounting rapidly in this age before seat belts and strict drunk-driving legislation and that early aviation was uninsurable.

  One calculation suggests that in the 1920s alone, the railroad companies spent as much on improving their lines as they had in the whole of their previous history. Indeed, the figures are impressive. Thanks to investment and better operating practices, the average daily mileage of a freight car went up by 50 percent between 1921 and 1940 (though only to 39 miles, which doesn’t seem that impressive), but, more significantly, the annual ton mileage per employee almost doubled in that period. Writing in 1960, railroad historian John Stover, who produced these figures, concluded, “Critics of the railroads in recent years have often viewed the industry’s management as being composed of old fogies, averse to change and still living in the nineteenth century. Actually, the twentieth century has been one continuous period of increased productivity.”19 It would not, however, be enough to save many from disaster in the aftermath of the war, a period in which the decline was rapid, painful, and, for passenger services, almost terminal.

  11

  A NARROW ESCAPE

  The Second World War demonstrated that the railroads were still the backbone of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Aviation was still a minority activity, and the roads, despite the creation of the US highway system, were not only inadequate but also just too slow for the carriage of large quantities of men and matériel. Quite simply, trains ran faster than cars and trucks, with less manpower and more reliability. The internal combustion engine still had some way to go before it could be seen as the mainstay of national communication.

  It was not just the military that used the railroads extensively during the war. The rationing of gasoline and the shortage of rubber for tires meant that long-distance journeys by car were no longer possible for the general public. Aviation was restricted to those helping the war effort. The middle class left their Fords and Chryslers in their front yards and went back, all too briefly, to the trains. The railroads not only satisfied the military’s almost unlimited demand for transportation, but also became, once again, the lifeline of the entire national economy.

  Hence, the railroads carried all but a handful of the troops heading for the ports, and virtually all the war matériel, becoming rather unlikely beneficiaries of the strictures of war. This time, though, the railroads were determined not to be humiliated by a government takeover. Realizing that they could not prevaricate as they had done in the First World War, the railroads cooperated far more effectively than previously and, benefiting from the considerable investment in equipment made in the interwar years, carried a much greater volume of both goods and passengers than in the earlier conflict. No longer were thousands of freight cars allowed to molder at railheads: the railroads worked together, rather than against each other, to ensure better coordination.

  The logistics were made easier by the fact that ports on both the East and West Coasts were used, since the war was being fought both in Europe and in the Pacific, unlike in the First World War, when traffic was all eastbound. There was one similarity between the two conflicts, however. In both wars the railroads were dogged by severe industrial-relations troubles, as the labor unions found themselves in a strong position, given the huge demands placed on the railroads and the shortage of staff. Experienced railroad workers were in great demand—the number of people employed in the industry increased during the war from 1.1 million to 1.4 million—and with the railroad companies becoming profitable once again because of the increase in war traffic, the unions repeatedly put in wage demands. Skilled labor was in short supply, as not only were more people needed, but a quarter of existing railroad employees were called up to fight, including around 43,000 earmarked for the Military Railway Service, which built and repaired rail lines in areas of the conflict stretching from Sicily to the Philippines. President Roosevelt intervened twice on their behalf, forcing the railroads to agree to wage raises. On the second occasion, at the end of 1943, he took the management of the railroads into government control to avoid a strike for a three-week period during which he conceded to many of the unions’ demands. However, even with these increased costs, the railroads remained highly profitable during this period. Neither freight rates nor fares were raised substantially during the war; it was the massive increase in volume carried that brought the railroads back into the black.

  The conflict gave a remarkable boost to an industry that, at the outset of the war, had only partially recovered from the Depression. The raw figures are instructive. At the pit of the Depression in 1932, passengers traveled 16 billion miles on the trains. By 1940, that figure had risen only to 24 billion, but in 1943, the second full year of US participation in the war, the figure had quadrupled to 96 billion passenger miles. Freight showed a similar though not quite so marked growth, with the 1944 total of 737 billion ton miles being just about double the 1940 figure. There was new traffic, too. The railroads had never carried much oil, but as shipping was endangered by German U-boats, it became a highly profitable new business and the industry showed great flexibility by hastily cobbling together enough tanker cars. The economics of the railroads, many of which were still bankrupt at the start of the war, were transformed by this influx of business, showing yet again that railroads, with their high fixed costs, are invariably at the mercy of external factors. All significant railroads were profitable in 1942: “Railroads that only a few years before were being operated by trustees appointed by bankruptcy courts were paying handsome dividends.”1 Even the perennially ailing Erie, which had not produced a dividend since the 1870s, finally paid out to its long-suffering shareholders in 1943.

  The railroads might have been profitable for the first time in more than a decade, but their safety standards, which, as we have seen, had improved greatly in the interwar period, slipped badly. The heavy use of the railroads for both military and civilian purposes, combined with the lack of investment, inevitably meant that they were being run down, and both punctuality and safety standards were compromised. On a mundane level, the trains were often delayed. This was noticed by the acerbic writer and critic H. L. Mencken, who traveled a couple of times a week between his home in Baltimore and New York and noticed that, for the first time, the trains were not always on time. Nor was the journey as comfortable. The Southern Pacific’s timetable warned, “In our dining cars, we are rationed much as you are at home and we can’t always get the supplies in our allotment.” That meant just two meals a day were served, breakfast and then dinner, which could be taken anytime after 3:00 p.m., but diners were restricted to just one cup of coffee with their meal. And, of course, they were told “not to discuss what you see on passing trains,” since, as the wartime propaganda posters stressed, careless talk might be overheard by enemy spies.2

  Safety, though, was a more serious matter. The most tragic illustration of lax standards was an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad at Frankford Junction, near Philadelphia, on September 6, 1943, when a train bound for New York’s Penn Station derailed and hit a signaling gantry, killing seventy-nine passengers. Rumors that the wreck was the result of German sabotage were quickly proved to be groundless as the more believable but embarrassing truth emerged: the accident had been caused by poor maintenance, resulting in an axle-bearing failure. The list of survivors, who included a newspaper magnate and Lin Yutang, a famous Chinese writer, showed that the railroads were once again the transportation method of preference, indeed necessity, for all classes, since car use was so restricted.

  Such disasters notwithstanding, it was, as Richard Saunders Jr. suggests, “the railroads’ finest hour.” The railroads
regained their place at the heart of the nation’s psyche. The most emotional memories of the war for many Americans involved the departure or arrival of trains filled with waving men and long waits in station cafés and on windswept platforms during which they experienced moments of hope and sometimes despair as, all too often, a loved one returned home maimed or, worse, in a wooden box. It was at railroad stations that “people said goodbyes to husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters, trying to be brave but hugging them harder than they ever hugged them before.” The Second World War marked the last time that the railroads could truly be said to be at the heart of American life. As George Douglas puts it, “World War Two was a last hurrah for the railways.”3