In the United States, Pullman parlor cars were mundane. Every millionaire of any consequence felt entitled to his own special, the more luxurious the better, and Pullman was only too happy to oblige. There were hundreds of ‘business cars’, aptly described by their loving chronicler, Lucius Beebe, in The Big Spenders, as ‘mansions on rails’ symbolising the Golden Age from which naturally emerged the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’. The owners vied with each other with their marble bathtubs, Venetian glass, the luxuries of three continents. The wife of a Morgan partner averred that the only economical feature in her private car was the gold taps: ‘It saves polishing, you know.’ Gold dinner services were relatively commonplace. The financier Salamanca, the first commoner to own a private railway carriage in Spain, served his guests off gold plate. In the end Carlist revolutionaries burnt the coach as a symbol of corruption and privilege.
Even the richest millionaires had problems with their bathing arrangements. According to Beebe, the soprano Adelina Patti had a sunken marble bathtub aboard her appropriately named ‘Adelina Patti’ which, when the car was finally dismantled, turned out to be painted metal. Fritzi Scheff, another singer, had a bathtub neither sunken nor allegedly marble, but the water splashed so that she could only take a bath when her train paused for at least twenty minutes. Sometimes this was at three in the morning, an inconvenient hour.’ Sleeping arrangements were easier to manage. According to Beebe, Pullman built one car in which the division between two staterooms could be made to disappear, allowing the two separate beds to move together.
Private cars were highly visible instruments displaying not only wealth but also power of a very special kind, for it assumed that the owner was a member of America’s equivalent of royalty, and possessed the power to control the tracks on which the coach was to run. James J. Hill of the Great Northern deliberately used the modesty of his own specials as an advertisement for the general simplicity of his life-style: for him they were a combination of inspection vehicle and symbol of power. By contrast William D. Mann, an early Pullman rival, designed the coach in which Lillie Langtry toured the West to be a temple of luxury. In Cheyenne the awe-struck local paper noted that ‘the drawing room is a perfect bower, fitted up with sofas, antique chairs, an upright piano, little tables, elaborate desks and escritoires with a wealth of steel engravings and photographs scattered everywhere, which would do honour to an art gallery.’ She named it ‘Lalee’ which, she said, was the East Indian word for flirt. It was painted Jersey Blue to match her eyes.
In 1876 Henry C. Jarrett, the manager of Booth’s Theatre in New York, organised one of the most famous of the early transcontinental specials to carry his actors to San Francisco to appear in Shakespeare’s Henry V. The excursion was suitably theatrical – as the train passed Reno Mr Jarrett prepared a mass of Roman candles and set them off. Flames rolled out of the smokestack, an immense red fire blazed on the tender and hundreds of fire balls belched out of the Roman candles. The townsfolk responded with bonfires and the thunder of cannon.
Jarrett’s special crossed the continent at about 40 mph, the same speed as in the journey made by Harvey Cheyne, the tycoon in Kipling’s Captain Courageous, when he heard that the son he had thought drowned was in fact alive and well in Boston. Kipling instinctively grasped that the mere possession of a private railroad carriage was less significant than the power it symbolised, the fear created by its owner’s movements. From the Pacific to Chicago Cheyne’s special car, the Constance ‘ran special’.* The journey is a bravura hymn to the power of the railroads and the men who controlled them.
As messages rippled across half a continent so did the unease:
we want to know why-why-why? General uneasiness developed and spreading’ … Cheyne smiled grimly at the consternation of his enemies when the telegrams were laid before him. ‘They think we’re on the warpath. Tell ’em we don’t feel like fighting just now … tell ’em the truth – for once … let them have peace,’ and in boardrooms two ‘thousand miles away the representatives of sixty-three million dollars’ worth of variously manipulated railroad interests breathed more freely.
Kipling’s art was reflecting nature. Twenty years before Harvey Cheyne’s fictional journey Judge Roy Bean flagged down the ‘special’ carrying the great Jay Gould as it passed Langtry, the small town where he held sway. ‘As the train jarred to a halt several men on each side of the train poked out their heads and sawed-off shotguns’4. After an initial moment of tension the two got on famously. When Gould’s train finally left the telegraphist received an agitated message querying why it had been delayed. ‘Reported New York Gould killed in wreck. Stock Exchange wild. Trains piled up all over division. Answer quick.’ To which the telegraphist replied: ‘Jay Gould been visiting friend Judge Roy Bean and me. Been eating ladyfingers* and drinking champagne. Special just left.’ Not even Kipling’s imagination stretched that far.
Magnates often made more leisurely tours, like emperors touring their kingdoms to assert their authority. They did not hurry – typically Charles Eliot Perkins of the Burlington averaged a mere 216 miles a day on a tour he took with six companions in May 1892. We forget the continuing precariousness of life in the West.
‘The party – with frank fascination – skirted the edge of a murderous war between cattlemen and rustlers; visited Hot Springs when the water was 95 degrees and there was snow on the ground outside; inspected a coal mine; made an excursion to the Garden of the Gods (with a stop at the Broadmoor’s casino on the way back) and finally survived a long detour on the return trip to Burlington because of badly-flooded track.’ (An account of the journey appeared in Railroad History, 1978).
Pullman’s restaurant cars only served a minority of hungry travellers. Before their introduction passengers dined at stations and two contradictory traditions of railway catering had developed: in Britain, of unmitigated horrors, celebrated in innumerable jokes; by contrast in France and the United States the food at stations was often something to be celebrated.
British railway caterers have never recovered from the assaults of those two otherwise dissimilar geniuses, Charles Dickens and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, on the licensees of British refreshment rooms. The great engineer’s crushing remark to a certain Mr Griffiths, who leased the station buffet at Swindon (known to railwaymen as ‘Swindleum’), deserves its continuing fame: ‘I assure you, Mr Player was wrong in supposing that I thought you purchased inferior coffee. I thought I said to him that I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I did not believe you had such a thing as coffee in the place: I am certain that I never tasted any. I have long ceased to make complaints at Swindon – I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.’
Life aboard the Trans-Caspian railway, circa 1888.
At ‘Mugby Junction’* in Dickens’s story of the same name, ‘There is a refreshment room,’ the Lampsman tells the traveller, ‘but it’s a blessed circumstance for you that it’s not open.’ Later on the ‘Boy at Mugby’ describes with great glee the ‘stale pastry’, the ‘sawdust sandwiches’, the ‘ha, ha, ha, – the sherry’, the appalling offhandedness of the barmaids, and the magnificent, deliberate incompetence of Mrs Sniff who ‘did hold the public in check most beautiful! In all my time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milk to people as wanted it with.’ Then ‘the Missus’ returns from a short trip to France with the appalling news of ‘eatable things to eat, but also drinkable things to drink’ and life at Mugby was never the same again.
In ‘A Flight’ Dickens had already expressed his approval of the arrangements in a French refreshment room. ‘Large hall, long counter, long strips of dining-table, bottles of wine, plate of meat, roast chickens, little loaves of bread, basins of soup, little caraffes of brandy, cakes and fruit.’ In the United States the railways played a positive role in spreading civilised dining, most famously through the efforts of Fred Harvey (see here).
Elsewhere government-owned railways, in particular, were susceptible
to dishonest deals – in 1893 the Minister of Railways in the Cape Government had to resign because he awarded a contract to a friend without any form of tender. Not all government-run refreshment rooms were poor, however. In Australia Mark Twain found the breakfast good, ‘apart from the coffee’ and most of the girls … ‘would attract attention at any royal levée in Europe.’
Many otherwise obscure stops became famous or infamous for their dining facilities. At Voi in the middle of Kenya, weary travellers from Mombasa to Nairobi dined in a bungalow described by Charles Miller, in Lunatic Express, as ‘the Howard Johnson’s of East Africa and looked every bit the oasis with its wine stewards, white-jacketed waiters and barmen’. The main course, which ‘almost invariably consisted of iron boiled beef, rubber mashed potatoes and something that the menu called cabbage’, the whole ‘garnished with insects’, was consumed in a garlic-sodden atmosphere.
But primitive lines did not necessarily involve poor eating. On the Trans-Caspian line that most pernickety of travellers, George Curzon, thoroughly approved of ‘first-rate tea at id a glass’ and equally cheap fresh grapes and melons. Sometimes it was the restaurant stops’ associations, rather than the food, which mattered. Trains from Wellington to Auckland always stopped half way at Kaitape, so that travellers could eat,* and this one-horse junction is fondly remembered by many New Zealanders as an integral part of holiday weekends.
In Japan each station prided itself on its own special lunch-boxes. A lady living at the otherwise obscure station of Yokokawa invented ‘Kamameshi’, a combination of rice packed with boiled prawns, mushrooms and a local sauce, gingko doy, which tasted just as good hot, tepid or cold. It remains famous, people still make special trips to buy it, there’s a book about it – and even the pottery bowl in which it is packed is treasured as a souvenir.
*
‘One of the peculiarities of modern travel,’ wrote R. S. Surtees in Plain or Ringlets? ‘is the great demand there is for books, a book to prevent people seeing the country being quite as essential as a bun to prevent their being hungry.’ He was not joking. At a congress of French physicians held in 1880 the minutes stated that ‘practically everybody passes the time reading while travelling on the train. This is so common that one rarely sees members of a certain social class embark on a railway journey without first purchasing the means by which they can enjoy this pastime.’ (Quoted by Schievelbusch).
This ubiquitous ‘pastime’ provided numerous entrepreneurial opportunities. In the United States the American News Distribution Company, founded in 1863, employed ‘news butchers’, sprightly lads who travelled on the trains selling anything and everything. Generations of aspiring young Americans were supposedly uplifted by the story of the young Thomas Edison taking a chance on ordering a thousand papers with the latest news of the Battle of Shiloh – papers which he sold at steadily increasing prices in line with demand. He had instinctively understood the way railway speed encouraged the purchase of newspapers.
In Britain national newspapers were whisked to major provincial centres within a few hours* and special journeys were marked by the delivery of papers in record times. In 1844 George Hudson, the Railway King, celebrated the completion of the line from London to the Tyne with a special ‘Flying Train’ carrying a copy of the day’s papers 303 miles in nine hours. The Jarrett special enabled Fort Wayne, Indiana, to receive the same day’s New York Herald a mere eighteen hours after it had left the presses.
Special editions recording important news were also hustled across country – in February, 1848, news of a major speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer reached Glasgow (a distance of 472 miles) in less than 10½ hours, and a year later the Paris Bourse received its copy of The Times 6½ hours after it had left London.
The railways merely helped newspapers, but they created a totally new market for books, mostly sold at bookstalls on the stations themselves. Originally these were mere trays or stands, manned by crippled railwaymen or their widows, and purveyed slush and tosh. But soon a number of publishers tried to improve the public’s taste. As a result novels, usually by famous names like Dickens and Trollope, either in their entirety, or as part works, became staple fare and the demand from railway readers clearly had a considerable impact on the form and content of 19th century fiction. They increased the demand for novels and even more so for short stories, and not only in Britain: most of Kipling’s earliest stories appeared in a magazine devoted to railway reading in India.
Routledge launched a Railway Library with novels by well-known authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fenimore Cooper, while John Murray advertised his ‘Literature for the rail – works of sound information and innocent amusement.’ Most obeyed Paul Theroux’s injunction in The Old Patagonian Express: ‘For railway reading, the best book is the plottiest, a way of endowing the haphazardness of the journey with order.’ The biggest single influence on railway reading in Britain was W. H. Smith II. He did not become a publisher, though he encouraged the publication of the cheap reprints which came to be known as ‘yellowbacks’. He bought the reprint rights for novels by a number of popular authors and went into partnership with Chapman and Hall, the publishers, to produce the Select Library of Fiction.
But railway reading was not confined to fiction. The great Lord Macaulay encouraged Longman’s to introduce a cheap and popular series called the Travellers Library, which included a range of improving literature, while a lesser-known publisher, Wheales, did a good trade selling its practical scientific works to ‘the mechanics, engine-drivers and other employed upon the line.’5
W. H. Smith I had become a major newspaper wholesaler. His son negotiated special terms with the major lines as soon as they were built, but went further by acquiring the bookstall concessions at the majority of Britain’s main line stations. He had not held the first concession, a stall which opened at Fenchurch Street Station in London in 1841, but, in conjunction with a friend and neighbour, the redoubtable Captain Mark Huish of the London & North Western, he cleared the previous vendors and their trays of dubious reading from major stations. Smith’s efforts, and the respectability of the literature he sold, reflected and then became a symbol of the growing prudishness of the British middle classes.
On a visit to London to see the Great Exhibition the French publisher Louis Hachette observed Smith’s success and pointed out to the French railway companies that in Britain6 bad books are sold by their thousands in stations ‘to relieve the monotony … the boredom … the impatience’ of the journey. He proposed a partnership in which he would publish the books and run the bookstalls and the railway companies would find work for railway widows. Within two years Hachette had created his Bibliothèque des Chemins de Fer, an ambitious venture including travel guides, texts on agriculture and industry, illustrated children’s books (these became the celebrated Bibliothèque Rose) as well as ancient and modern literature from all over the world – Hachette was Dickens’s publisher, for instance.
By 1854 he had opened sixty bookstalls. At first sales were slow but by the mid-1860s newspapers were outselling books and bringing in a handsome profit. Unfortunately for Hachette the concessions were put out to tender in the 1890s and he lost most of them. But by then Hachette’s publishing house could take the strain, and he made up some of the losses by moving into Smith’s original business, newspaper wholesaling.
Publishers and newspaper proprietors soon found a lucrative sub-market in accounts of crimes committed on the railways. In late 1860 every paper in Paris provided its readers with a massive dose of the shivers following the murder of Chief Justice Poinsot. When a train from Mulhouse arrived in Paris he was found dead in a compartment he had shared with only one other person, his murderer. To increase passengers’ concerns, travellers in the next compartment had not heard a shot, although ‘they thought they had heard a shout, but only one’. Within a few weeks Le Figaro was proposing that, as well as carriages reserved for ladies or nonsmokers, there ought to be one ‘reserved for assassins�
��. (Quoted by Schievelbusch).
Four years later it was the turn of the English press to lick its collective chops following a gruesome compartment murder. An official report described a panic amongst first-class passengers afraid of each other. They were also scared stiff of travelling ‘singly with a stranger of the weaker sex, under the belief that it is only common prudence to avoid in this manner all risk of being accused, for purposes of extortion, or insult, or assault’.7
Most of the crimes were less bloodthirsty. One ingenious female fraudster was celebrated in a splendid music-hall song as the ‘charming Young Widow I met on the train’. She was naturally attired in deepest black, and suitably equipped with a baby:
‘When I think of my child I am well nigh distracted,
Its father, my Husband! Oh my heart breaks with pain!’
She, choking with sobs lean’d her head on my waistcoat,
Did the charming young widow I met on the train.’
Inevitably, she gets off, leaving the ‘baby’ with the dupe, who soon discovers that it is a dummy and that his watch, purse and valuables have all been removed. But the long-term best-sellers were accounts of Great Train Robberies. The first was in 1855, when a substantial quantity of gold bullion was stolen from a train between London and Folkestone in the normally tranquil county of Kent, though systematic train robbery was largely confined to the wide open spaces of the Wild West and Siberia.
Such was popular hatred of the railroads in the American West that thousands of otherwise law-abiding folk took to their heart a whole breed of railroad desperadoes, who were mostly murderous psychopaths. They were recalled as romantic heroes in many a story, many a ballad, and the myth was later perpetuated in hundreds of films. Even in the 1970s, film-goers were expected to side with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they were being pursued by a highly professional group hired by the great E. H. Harriman. The tone was set by the very first train robbers, the Reno brothers, defended by the inhabitants of Jackson County, Indiana against the detectives employed by Allan Pinkerton.
The World the Railways Made Page 29