The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  Railways revolutionised distribution as well as production habits. In Hungary a whole network of local rural lines was hurriedly built in the late 1860s to carry away the contents of barns groaning with bumper grain harvests. But railways did not merely salvage local surpluses, which included oranges in Mexico as well as grain in Hungary: they greatly increased its value. Alfred Chandler showed that the price of corn and hogs, which Ohio produced in abundance, increased by fifty per cent or more once the Erie canal improved communication to the East. Between 1835–1860, years which saw the completion of the railway network ‘the price of corn advanced 50 per cent and that of hogs 100 per cent’.31

  The animals previously required to transport produce to market ate their way across country; a hunger which meant that up to a third of all the arable land in Spain could be turned over to growing wheat once railways had replaced horses and oxen. Among the hungriest animals were those being driven hundreds of miles across country before being slaughtered: with the coming of the railways they could enjoy a last restful ride. In Spain, for instance, the merino sheep no longer had to eat their way across the country but could be transported to market by train, thus ensuring that the Southern pastures were grazed the year round.

  In Britain railways revolutionised the cattle trade: all the major markets gravitated to the railheads, the trade of the drover declined, the cattle reached market – and thus the consumer – in far better condition (according to contemporary figures every day’s droving reduced the weight of the cattle by some 8 lbs). Whole areas could be devoted to fattening cattle rather than less specialised grazing, and the trade in dead meat flourished, because different parts of the carcase could be sold in markets with different tastes – tripe in the North of England for instance. Sheep could be bred on the hills before being sold for fattening to graziers in the lowlands.

  Because there was no return traffic for wagons carrying live cattle railways encouraged another major change, the slaughter of meat before it was shipped. By the 1860s London was fed by two daily meat trains from Scotland, trains taking a mere thirty hours for a journey of over 500 miles, trains which sparked off an agrarian revolution in the Scottish Highlands, But the Scots had no monopoly. Until new animal disease legislation was passed in 1892 London welcomed meat from much further afield, from Austria, Hungary and Poland, via Rotterdam and Hamburg. The legislation was aimed at the minority of dishonest butchers who shipped diseased meat by rail, confident that the railway provided them with a shield of anonymity. ‘In some cases,’ wrote Richard Perren, ‘the worst carcases were salted down to avoid inspection but some were so bad that they rotted in the salt tubs.’32

  For railways had a double effect. They could provide urban populations with undreamt-of quantities of such luxuries as fresh fish: during the mackerel season London consumed 90 tons a day, much of it from Fenit, a small village in Kerry, on the West Coast of Ireland; while two loaded trains carrying herrings arrived every day from Yarmouth during the season. But at the same time they encouraged the spread of the mass-produced, inferior ‘industrial’ foods which stunted the growth of the British urban proletariat for a hundred years. (In his standard work on British food Sir Jack Drummond mentions only the second role.)

  Other countries exploited the railways to produce vastly increased quantities of standardised, yet wholesome, foods. The Danish bacon and Dutch butter which graced British breakfast tables depended on railway-based specialisation, while British farmers found that they could supply housewives with milk the year round if they built better barns to house the cattle in winter. Specialised agricultural railways were to be found wherever there was profit to be made. The French built lines to transport alfalfa in Algeria, palm oil and peanut oil in west Africa. The British built lines to transport cotton in Egypt, the Sudan and Uganda and lines to exploit the beef and grain in Southern Africa.

  The railways could also set up pressure to find new regions to exploit. When the land in the Upper Pariba Valley in Brazil was exhausted by over-production of coffee, the growers kept having to look for new land. For with the railways, and with them industrial-scale agricultural exploitation, came the whole paraphernalia of modern capitalist production: the replacement of increasingly costly and restless labour by machines and, in many cases, some form of processing near the point of production. By 1883 Brazilian coffee arrived at the processing machinery ‘hulled, sorted, polished, bagged, and weighed mechanically’.33

  Only a few products did not require railways. Although a railway was built to Kimberley in the decades after diamonds were discovered there, the fields did not depend on them. The diamonds were light, and the needs of the 6,000 or so settlers could be met by horse transport. But diamonds were the exception to the rule that the exploitation of any major new mineral discovery relied on a railway.

  Railways exploiting a known body of ore were commonplace: phosphates in Morocco, tin in Nigeria, copper in French Equatorial Africa and in the Rhodesian and Congolese Copper Belt. The railways could also uncover undreamt-of riches. The Canadians were rewarded for their patriotic ardour in insisting that their transcontinental railway should traverse the barren tundra north of Lake Superior instead of taking an easier, southern route through the United States. Shrewd eyes examining the rocks in the hills round the construction camp half way along the line where the mining town of Sudbury stands today spotted the traces of what subsequently proved to be one of the biggest deposits of nickel in the world.

  Ice: The Disappearing Traffic

  For a generation or more American railroads carried loads which, quite literally, melted en route: ice. The quantities involved were astonishing. Richard Cummings has calculated that every inhabitant of a major city consumed two thirds of a ton annually, and even the benighted denizens of smaller towns used a quarter of a ton apiece.*

  The trade was pioneered in New England, where a prime source was Walden Pond, the beloved home of Henry Thoreau. For decades its shores echoed every winter with the scraping of the ice-saws developed by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, a Massachusetts man who saw the value of ‘ice rights’. Not surprisingly the ice promoters compared the north’s frozen riches with its coal mines and granite quarries – although the ice could be harvested only during the winter months.

  A special railroad was built to tap the pond’s riches and specially insulated cars were developed to transport the ice. The users were equally ingenious. A Cincinnati pork packer even ‘modeled his entire packing room on the principle of a household refrigerator’ and a fruitgrower in central Illinois built ‘a cold-storage warehouse in the shape of a large natural ice refrigerator in which considerable quantities of fruit could be carried over from season to season’. The ever-increasing demand for the cool lager beer especially popular with German immigrants ensured that the brewers were consuming over a million dollars worth of ice annually by the 1860s. At the receiving end, New York’s food distributors equipped themselves with hundreds of ice chests holding meat, fruit and vegetables, fish and perishable dairy produce, its quality greatly improved by refrigeration facilities available from cow to customer.

  Cutting ice for use in the summer: a long-forgotten industry.

  The railroads themselves patented a dozen different types of refrigerated wagons. The industry even supported its own paper, the Ice Trade Journal, and its horizons were widened by the completion of the Transcontinental railroad in 1869. The Californians hacked their own ice from a number of locations, including the ‘Summit’ of the Sierras, where the ice was floated over the edge of a dam to end up in two icehouses holding thirty thousand tons, though the local product had to compete with ice brought by sea from Alaska. The refrigerated cars carried apples, pears, oranges and salmon eastwards and returned with cargoes of peaches, grapes and oysters – some of which were planted in San Francisco Bay.

  Ice was one of the few instances in which railways actually delayed technical advances. Because so much capital had been invested in the less efficient natural technology
it proved difficult to finance the development of ice machines using compressed air or ether. In the event the steamship companies, denied the same access to natural ice as the railmen, encouraged the development of mechanical refrigeration. But the natural icemen did not give up without a struggle. Even at the end of the 1880s three million tons of ice were stored on the Hudson River ice fields in normal years.

  The Grapes of Rail

  As railways spread so did the culture of the vine, for the wine trade, like so many others, was liberated from its dependence on access to waterways. In the pre-railway millenia no wine – or spirit for that matter – without access to a navigable waterway stood much chance in international markets.

  Not that railways could always tilt the balance. The Cognaçais, with their easy access to Northern Europe via the River Charente, retained their lead over the Armagnaçais, historically handicapped by reliance on slow and expensive road transport.

  The most spectacular success story was Mendoza, the great Argentine wine-growing region, where an upsurge in wine production in the late nineteenth century was intimately associated with the arrival of a whole generation of mostly Italian immigrants. The indenture system ensured that a hard-working immigrant could hope to set up on his own after only a few years and make a comfortable living from a relatively small vineyard, each hectare of vines producing 60,000 lb of grapes. They were a close-knit community who ‘tenaciously defended the local economy, particularly the wine industry, against perceived threats to their individual and collective success. They formed voluntary associations, for example, to encourage and modernize wine production. These groups also served to organise opposition to taxes, wine falsification’34 – and the railways’ allegedly excessive freight rates.

  But most of the development was in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain and Southern France. In Italy the railways created the international fame of the land-locked vineyards of Chianti in Tuscany, performing a similar function in helping the vineyards of central Spain against their coastal competitors. Even though domestic demand remained concentrated on locally-produced wines, export demand ensured that the vineyards in Navarre grew by a third in the thirty years after the railways arrived, while those of Albacete increased four-fold. They also improved the quality. In pre-railway days many wines tasted decidedly resinous because they had been carried on mule-back in hog-skins painted with pitch – a treatment, and a taste, which survive today only in that appalling beverage, retsina.

  The quality of the wines of Rioja in Northern Spain were improved because they were near Bordeaux, a source of capital and technical expertise, and it was the rail network which allowed Spanish wines to take the opportunity offered when the dreaded phylloxera louse attacked French vineyards before their neighbours in Northern Spain.

  It was the railways which covered the plains of Languedoc with even more vines – previously the growers had been forced to distil their surplus produce. At harvest-time the railway stations were a chaotic mess, besieged by cart-loads of wine night and day. Casks lay everywhere, right on the crowded platforms, in warehouses throughout the region, scattered in the fields round the stations. The surge in production of strong wines from Provence killed many vineyards, most notably those near Paris, whose only asset had been their proximity to a major market. Even the Burgundians found it difficult to sell their wines, while the Champenois had to concentrate on sparkling rather than still wines, and the Orléanais turned to the production of vinegar.*

  At least one fine wine area flourished because of the railways. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Saint Emilionais had lived rather in the shadow of their grander brethren in the Graves and Medoc round Bordeaux. The railway, snaking round their little town and marking the bottom of the slopes on which the best grapes were grown, served to transport their wines to Paris and thence to Belgium and Northern France, regions still faithful today to the wines of Saint Emilion and its neighbour, Pomerol. By no coincidence the region’s wines first attracted notice at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867, a decade or so after the railway’s arrival.

  But Saint Emilion was an exception. Most ‘railway wines’ were inevitably mass-produced, and because the makers were relatively uninterested in their quality they helped conceal the potential for making fine wines in such sites as the hills of Provence.

  * By limiting his calculations to low-value, high weight agricultural commodities Professor Fogel tilted the argument against the railways.

  * When Thomas Brassey built the line from Paris to Le Havre he relied for his locomotives on a works at Rouen built and owned by W. B. Buddicom, the chief engineer at Crewe.

  † As John Francis pointed out in 1851, 25,000 rail bridges had been built in the first fifteen years of the railway era, or ‘more than all that previously existed in the country.’

  * There were a few exceptions. In The Railway Age Michael Robbins describes how ‘In the early days of railways we are told that a certain company carefully sheeted their coal trucks because they were ashamed of such a low class of traffic’. They soon learnt better.

  * The American Ice Harvests, the source of this note.

  * The railways encouraged the long-haul traffic from the South by charging lower rates compared with the shorter haul from Burgundy to Paris. The growers in Beaujolais allegedly shipped their wines down the Rhône to Arles then back to Paris by rail.

  VI

  IMPERIAL RAILWAYS

  1

  Colonies:

  Direct and Indirect

  Railways were a major instrument of national, political and economic assertiveness and influence, their intrusions abroad increasingly resented as the ability to construct and operate them became a test of national development. The colonising powers built and often operated railways all over the world – and not only in their own direct possessions – bringing their own habits, their own languages, with them. The influence could be simply financial – in 1914 Bradshaw’s Railway Manual estimated that British investors owned 113 railways in 29 countries. But it could also be much more direct. The first American the Andean peasant or the Nicaraguan labourer ever met would be connected with the railway, which thus became the single most potent symbol of the control of an alien power over their lives.

  The railways are popularly envisaged as an imperial force because of their role in conquering and then controlling the empires built up during the nineteenth century. Railways enabled imperial conquerors, like the British Raj in India to police, and exploit, their conquests. In Africa, particularly, they became the supreme symbol of the way the dark continent was carved up by the European powers in a grid composed of competing railroad lines. Only railways provided putative colonialists with the technical means to exploit the conquests they had made through other symbols of technical superiority like the Gatling gun.

  Railways helped protect old empires as well as developing new ones, and they enabled the Tsars of Russia, the Habsburg emperors and the Sultans who presided over the decline of the Ottoman Empire to retain power over their far-flung dominions till the advent of World War I. However, in empires old and new the role of the railway was largely technical, supportive, secondary.

  By contrast they, and the train of financial and technological obligations they brought with them, played the leading role in the ‘indirect imperialism’ that became so prevalent in developing countries not directly subject to the colonial powers. In those countries we find far more support for Lenin’s thesis that imperialism was a search for outlets for finance capitalism than we do in directly-controlled colonies. Informal, indirect, accidental imperialism, much of it engendered by the railways, paid far more handsomely, and ran far fewer risks, than the more formal imperialism which involved responsibilities as well as power. Any form of indirect colonisation, whether the investment was for mines or plantations, required railways and inevitably they became of enormous emotional and psychological significance as the outstanding symbol of the men and powers which were controlli
ng – and, too often, cheating – developing countries.

  The conquistadores of steam needed support from local politicians who were usually crooked and generally incompetent. So, permanently and irretrievably, railways, their foreign promoters and their local supporters became associated with foreign interference of the most undesirable description, power asserted, and fortunes gained, without any corresponding degree of responsibility. The inevitable popular disillusionment was the greater because of the initial fund of goodwill felt for the promoters.

  The consequences, in terms of permanent and only too-justified suspicion of western finance, has bedevilled what we would now call North-South relations to this day. The railways, the first capital-intensive industry any of these countries had ever seen – one, moreover, which they needed and which only foreign capital could construct – was the first, crucial battleground which gave capitalism in general a bad name, associated as it was with foreign extortion, as any attempt to get back the money that had been invested was seen by the locals. The pattern, and the results, were global. The whole process meant that many underdeveloped countries still suffer today from the paranoia inevitable in those who have been persecuted in the past.

  Naturally such schemes produced a new breed of men. Eric Hobsbawm captured their major characteristic, their overriding, global ambitions. ‘Such men thought in continents and oceans, for them the world was a single unit, bound together with rails of iron and steam engines, because the horizons of business were like their dreams, world-wide. The such men human destiny, history and profit were one and the same thing.’1

  The process they engendered time and again was graphically described in the Rio News in 1887:2