The Great Railroad Revolution
Page 47
Can America join in this rail renaissance? In a way, it has already done so. Its freight railroads are very successful and profitable and have ridden out the recent recession in a remarkably healthy state. American railroads carry more freight than any other system in the world apart from Russia. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and stock market player, who bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in 2009 for $26 billion, does not back losers. He is a philanthropist, too, and stated clearly that the environmental advantages of rail were one of the reasons that prompted his investment. The railroads’ construction of new tracks to carry coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming is another major success story, as production has expanded dramatically because of the relatively “clean” nature of the coal mandated by the Clean Air Act of 1970. The area now provides 40 percent of America’s total needs, serving more than forty power stations from Texas to Ontario, Canada. Starting with a single-track line built in the 1970s, the railroads have invested more than $2 billion to build or refurbish hundreds of miles of track to serve the mines. Although there have been problems in meeting the demand, consolidation of the railroads involved— it is now a joint operation between Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe—has resulted in a smooth-running operation that runs up to eighty trains per day on the track heading east out of the area. Each train consists of between 125 and 150 cars, making it the line with the heaviest annual load in the world. Again, it is a success story that has attracted little attention in the wider public. The huge double-stack container trains that run from the Pacific Coast to Chicago and beyond, and which necessitated many parts of the old transcontinental lines being double-tracked, and the coal traffic from the Appalachians to the East Coast are other success stories of the freight railroads.
In terms of suburban and commuter rail, numerous cities have recognized their importance as a way of reducing congestion. There is, too, a hidden benefit, one that is rarely discussed. It is noticeable that New Yorkers, who have by far the best public transportation system in America, are fitter and healthier than Americans elsewhere, thanks to their high use of railroads and their consequent readiness to walk. New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is struggling to keep up with rising demand and is spending $3 billion on extending the Long Island Rail Road from its present cramped terminal in Penn Station to Grand Central and on to Queens.
Every American who travels to Europe and sees the way that the railroads have survived and flourished in the twenty-first century is a potential convert to rail. Amtrak’s recent surge in passenger numbers at a time of great economic difficulty suggests there is much latent demand. Where there is a reasonable service, such as in the Northeast or on some lines out of Chicago, young people, perhaps less hooked on cars than their parents, are being attracted onto trains because traveling on them means they can still use their cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices. The railroads have a 40 percent share of the New York–Boston rail-air market, and it could be much more if the trains were faster. Or indeed, if gas prices rise even further.
The harsh truth, however, is that America will not get a national railroad network, high-speed or otherwise, without a more radical and comprehensive strategy than was contained in the stimulus package, which was an attempt to please everyone and ended up being ineffective. Nevertheless, much can and should be done. The less newsworthy or dramatic development of suburban rail systems and light-rail networks may be a better way of initially getting more people quickly onto the railroads than the big-ticket, high-speed rail schemes promoted by a government eager to attract the headlines. The fact that the stimulus package is concentrating on a few key corridors is the right way to go, but it would be better to do a few cheaper ones rather than throw vast amounts of money at schemes like California’s high-speed rail project that are unlikely to see the light of day for a generation or more, if ever. America could enjoy a new age of the train. Environmental conditions may again make flying difficult or expensive. Cars are losing their allure and are unsuitable for many long journeys. America needs to relearn the joys of railroads that have served them so well in the past and, indeed, continue to do so today, albeit invisibly.
Notes
CHAPTER 1. THE RAILROADS WIN OUT
1. The British sections of this chapter are based partly on my earlier book Fire & Steam.
2. Often spelled “waggonways.”
3. Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 567.
4. As with most of these early developments, their precise origin is subject to debate.
5. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (1951; reprint, Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 56.
6. Ibid., 57.
7. Ibid., 63; Thomas Crump, A Brief History of the Age of Steam (Robinson, 2007), 83.
8. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, 55.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. Ibid., 21.
11. Technically, West Virginia did not exist at that time, as it was still part of Virginia.
12. It eventually became part of Highway 40.
13. Ibid., 26, 29.
14. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 8; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, 28.
15. Francis T. Evans, “Roads, Railways, and Canals: Technical Choices in 19th-Century Britain,” Technology and Culture 22 (1981).
16. It can still be seen in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
17. They were not yet chartered as cities.
18. Rocket was then merely a description of a firework rather than a spaceship, though some had been used for military purposes, too.
19. Now, rather oddly, called Jim Thorpe, after the celebrated Native American–European American athlete.
20. Quoted in Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 22. There are other claimants for this feat, notably John Stevens, the early railroad enthusiast who laid out a circular track in his garden and built a small steam engine, the sixteen-foot-long Steam Waggon, to run on it, but in reality it was little more than a toy.
21. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 27.
22. Officially known as the South Carolina Railroad.
23. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 15; Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 23.
24. Most accounts suggest he was black, but this may well be motivated by racism.
25. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 26.
26. Hamburg is now a completely moribund place.
27. John Latrobe, quoted on the website www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/tom thumb.htm. There is a full-scale model of the locomotive in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.
28. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 23.
29. This figure comes from the very comprehensive website www.oldrailhistory.com, which includes some very basic railroads not counted by official sources but whose inclusion it justifies with a definition available on the site. The variation is small, however, and the figure of 987 miles given for the end of 1835 can be taken as the best estimate.
CHAPTER 2. A PASSIONATE AFFAIR
1. Bloodgood v. Mohawk & H.R.R., 18 Wend. 9, 48 (N.Y. Ct. Err. 1837).
2. Quoted in George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 37, 75.
3. Ibid., 75, 76.
4. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 19.
5. Douglas, All Aboard, 77.
6. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, say enough to support 150 miles of line, or say a subsidy of 2.5 percent, given there were around 4,000 miles by then.
7. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroa
ds (Bonanza Books, 1947), 40–41.
8. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 28.
9. Charles Caldwell, “Thoughts on the Moral and Other Indirect Influences of the Rail-Roads,” New England Magazine 2 (January–June 1832): 299.
10. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 75, 80, 57 (emphasis in the original).
11. Ibid., 57, 93.
12. The term booster spirit was first mentioned by Daniel Boorstin.
13. Even modern trains struggle up anything greater than 1–2 percent.
14. Navvies is an abbreviation of navigators, for these men were the direct descendants of the workers who had built the canals. They are described in a wonderfully thorough and evocative book, The Railway Navvies by Terry Coleman (Hutchinson, 1965).
15. Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 11.
16. Ibid., 18.
17. Ibid., 15; William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2007), 454.
18. Even today there are still nearly two hundred thousand such crossings that result in accidents that cause a couple of hundred deaths annually.
19. Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 24; Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 31.
20. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 31.
21. Quoted in Charlton Ogburn, Railroads: The Great American Adventure (National Geographic Society, 1977), 16.
22. Jim Harter, World Railways of the Nineteenth Century: A Pictorial History in Victorian Engravings (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 248.
23. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 35.
24. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (1951; reprint, Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 53–54.
25. Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 13, 14.
26. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 18.
27. According to US Census figures, though some historians question the accuracy of this statistic.
28. We even find a particularly incongruous & Eastern in Chapter 10.
29. George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu, The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 (1956; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2003), xi.
30. Douglas, All Aboard, 28.
CHAPTER 3. THE RAILROADS TAKE HOLD
1. Andrew Dow, Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 6.
2. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 31.
3. Ibid., 72, 35.
4. In American literature it is sometimes referred to as the world’s first trunk railroad, which is very far from accurate, since several European countries already boasted substantial main lines.
5. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Bonanza Books, 1947), 60.
6. There was, however, a 1946 book by Edward Hungerford, Men of Erie, published by Random House.
7. See my earlier book Blood, Iron, and Gold (PublicAffairs, 2010) for a description of the struggle to create a railroad through the Western Ghats.
8. The origin of the name is unclear. It is also uncertain whether the animosity between the two groups, which flared up in various parts of the United States on canal and railroad projects, was based on religion—the Corkonians as Catholic, the Fardowners as Protestant.
9. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 61.
10. Ibid., 62, 63.
11. H. Roger Grant, Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad (Stanford University Press, 1994), 1.
12. Ironically, in recent times China has built many hundreds of miles of its high-speed rail network using a similar system of a raised railroad on piles.
13. Initially, it was four feet and eight inches, but the half inch was soon added.
14. Mark Reutter, introduction to The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890, by George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu (1956; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2003), xii.
15. Ibid.
16. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.
17. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 61.
18. Now Harriman, New York.
19. The word order refers, here, to a signaling instruction.
20. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 68.
21. A railroad term for drivers and other crew who ride in the coaches as passengers.
22. Martin, Railroads Triumphant, 260; Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 82.
23. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 84.
24. Originally called the Chicago and Aurora Railroad.
25. There is, however, a through line running alongside Union Station.
26. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 139.
27. The lack of direct rail links between Chicago’s various stations was fine for the first century or so while the railroads were effectively a transportation monopoly, but eventually it was to cost them dearly. (The legacy of this competition remains. In 2010, when I traveled around America by rail, I arrived from Pittsburgh in a train that terminated at Chicago’s Union Station, and when the next day I headed off west for Seattle, the service left from the other side of the same building on entirely separate tracks, as even today there is no through-passenger service.)
28. John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 20.
29. Charles Dickens, American Notes (Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842). All these quotes taken from pages 69–74. Available online at Google Books.
30. Quoted in Stover, American Railroads, 33.
31. Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1879; reprint, Bibliobazaar, 2006), 10.
32. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 37.
33. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 68.
34. Douglas, All Aboard, 57; Gordon, Passage to Union, 69.
35. Douglas, All Aboard, 58.
36. Tyrone Power, Impressions of America, www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=514357&pageno=53.
37. Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 77.
38. Douglas, All Aboard, 67.
39. Anthony Burton, On the Rails (Aurum, 2004), 89; New York Tribune quoted in Holbrook, Story of American Railroads, 35.
40. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 66.
41. Charlton Ogburn, Railroads: The Great American Adventure (National Geo graphic Society, 1977), 17.
42. In a bizarre coincidence, one of the worst railroad disasters in postwar US railroad history occurred in September 1993 when a barge hit a bridge at Big Bayou Canot, near Mobile, Alabama, pushing the rails out of alignment and subsequently derailing an Amtrak train, which plunged into the creek, killing forty-seven people.
CHAPTER 4. THE BATTLE LINES
1. Quoted in James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 45.
2. Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 75.
3. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 55.
4. See my earlier book Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways (Atlantic, 2010) for a detailed analysis.
5. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (Oxford University Press, 1992), 15.
6. Gordon, Passage to Union, 138.
7. Martin, Railroads Triumphant, 52; John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 55.
8. Gordon, Passage to Union, 136.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 137.
11. John Westwood, Railways at War (Osprey, 1980), 24, 21.
12. They would not, in fact, escape direct nationalization in the next major conflict, the First World War, as we will see in Chapter 9.
13. Joseph Hankey, “The Railroad War,” Trains (March 2011): 32.
14. This was the first of two major battles at this location. To add to the confusion, they are known as the Battles of Manassas by the Confederates, who tended to name battles after towns or villages, in contrast to the Unionists, who used creeks or rivers.
15. Ibid., 27.
16. Ibid., 24.
17. Stover, American Railroads, 55.
18. Martinsburg later became part of West Virginia, which separated from secessionist Virginia in 1863.
19. George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (Paragon House, 1992), 107.
20. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War (Penguin Books, 1990), 527.
21. Quoted in Charlton Ogburn, Railroads: The Great American Adventure (National Geographic Society, 1977), 24.
22. Quoted in Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1952; reprint, Indiana University Press, 1999), 144.
23. George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 201.
24. Stover, American Railroads, 61.
25. John Buchan, A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1925), and available online (http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/escapemn.htm). This account is based on the one in my previous book Engines of War.