The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  In settled countries as much as new regions, there was intense competition for a town’s access to a railway. In many countries it became the first duty of politicians to ensure that their constituencies possessed the vital lifeline to the outside world – in 1861 they rang the bells in the little town of Saint-Girons in the Ariège in the foothills of the Pyrenees when they heard that a railway serving the town had been approved. And there were few, in Saint-Girons or anywhere else, who dared lament (in public anyway) the passing of older ways of life and the destruction involved. The problem continues: Amiens town council warned that if the town were left off the route of the new TGV Nord from Paris to Brussels it would mean the gradual erosion of the town in years to come.

  In Britain the argument as to whether the railway was an essential component of a town’s growth or survival soon became academic. By 1852 the largest towns without a railway were relatively unimportant – Weymouth, Hereford and Yeovil – none of which seem to have suffered from their belated arrival. For the railways were not omnipotent, they tended to sharpen existing identities, confirm existing social and economic trends. In Britain many railways were financed locally, so Norwich, a declining city which could not afford to finance its own link with London, lost further ground compared with Bristol, another historic regional centre, which could. In Simmons’s words the decline of many small towns ‘was part of a general trend, the movement from rural England and Wales … the towns that shrank were not only those that were unfortunate in their railway communication. They include a fair number that were well placed on the system quite early.’

  If the town were important or dynamic enough then it could afford initial neglect. Being by-passed by the original line from London to Birmingham did not hurt Northampton, a growing centre which soon acquired its own link with London. In the United States neither Denver nor Salt Lake City declined in importance although they were over a hundred miles from the original Trans-continental railroad. The railroads were forced to provide a proper service to major centres, but smaller settlements were in no position to dictate to the promoters, and the history of the American West is littered with the sad stories of small communities which had to pay considerable sums in ransom money to the railroad builders to ensure that they were not left out of its magic circle.

  In autocratic countries without any tradition of civic initiative, individual communities were helpless. With a simple wave of a ruler the Tsar had dictated the straight route the railway would take from his capital at Saint Petersburg to Moscow. He thus orphaned three historic towns: Novgorod, Valdai, and Torzhok. Even Novgorod, once the centre of an independent city-state, was condemned to everlasting stagnation.

  The concentration process was not confined to Britain: there are examples as far afield as Mexico and South Africa, although, as so often, Surtees’ description in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds is incomparably the best description of the trend:

  Before the introduction of steam, Pickering Nook was one of the quietest little places in the kingdom: one doctor, no lawyer, two milliners, and an occasional pedlar with the latest London fashions. The inhabitants were chiefly elderly ladies who loved retirement and the musical note of the nightingale. Now it is hiss, screech, whistle – hiss screech whistle – morning noon and night. Five railways run right into the very heart of the little town, severing it like a starfish. It has become a perfect anthill of industrious locomotion. People seem to go to Pickering Nook in order to pass to every other place.

  But, he continued, ‘Railways, which make some places, ruin others, and Dirlingfold has suffered the latter fate. The railway seemed to have sucked all the life out of it – taken it all up to Pickering Nook.’

  In France, a far larger and more thinly-populated country than Britain, it took several generations for the railways to reach into the heart of the countryside. Much of rural France remained deprived of contact with the outside world because at first the railways connected only the major towns and cities. Moreover, the railways’ enormous hunger for capital deprived rural roads of the investment they required. So, until the largely politically-inspired ‘Freycinet lines’ of the 1880s and 1890s French railways ‘crossed rather than irrigated’ many rural departments. ‘Between 1866 and 1936 rural communes without a railway station in a zone fifteen kilometres on either side of the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée line lost almost one-quarter of their population, while those with a station (excluding Paris) gained 1,645,373 inhabitants’.2

  Snobbery of one sort or another led a select group of towns to reject the railways, or at least ensure that they were kept at a proper distance. Oxford refused the chance to be a major railway centre, while genteel seaside resorts were naturally afraid of social dilution. At Harrogate, smartest of Yorkshire spas, the railway created its own new centre away from the historic heart. Bournemouth, then more a town for retired gentlefolk than a mere seaside resort, felt that its heart was threatened by a railway projected by some highly disreputable contractors. The local MP expressed his constituents’ concern at ‘the suicidal policy of allowing one of the most beautiful portions of Bournemouth to be cut up by a railway’.3 So the railway was kept at a discreet distance, a blessing achievable, it was said, ‘only where there is money and influence’. Subsequent growth has ensured that the old station is now at the heart of a greatly expanded resort, and ironically, a new by-pass was built along the route which the townsfolk had rejected a hundred years earlier as too destructive of their peace.

  The railways’ biggest single effect was to change the historic balance in favour of towns and cities on navigable waters. Marcel Blanchard pointed out in Geographie des chemins de fer that before the railway age four ports were among the ten French towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. By 1870, thanks largely to the railway, there were thirty such towns and cities, of which only seven were ports, and two of those, Toulon and Brest, were military encampments.

  Nevertheless, in France, as elsewhere, towns where the railway met a major navigable stretch of water had a head start when the railways arrived. In the generation before the railways Orleans had largely lost its role as an entrepot, because of the increasing importance of the River Seine between Paris and Le Havre, but recaptured some of its historic commercial importance when the railway companies sited their depots on the waterfront – though even Orleans lost out to the great Parisian octopus which monopolised the profitable wine trade, itself a result of the railways.

  But railways could also be powerful weapons against navigable waterways, weapons perceived as heaven-sent by a number of American cities threatened by major canals. The great Erie Canal, which linked the upper Hudson River with Lake Erie, had been half a century in the making when it was opened in 1825. Its immediate success confirmed New York’s pre-eminent status as the country’s biggest port. No turnpike could compete with the Erie. On a mountain road six draft horses could pull only perhaps a four ton load, whereas on a canal a single horse could pull the equivalent of several wagonloads.

  Inevitably New York’s major rivals, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia, seized on the new-fangled railroad to provide a technological leap ahead of the canals. But railroads could not achieve miracles. The Grand Trunk railroad south from Canada to Portland in Maine attracted considerable English capital but its promoters were ‘trying to make water run uphill’.4 The railroad shortened the transatlantic journey by two hundred miles, but this saving was hopelessly inadequate to challenge New York’s commanding lead.

  Within the United States the biggest battleground between rail and water was the huge basin of the Mississippi. The river lost its monopoly as the railroads steadily diverted the ever-growing traffic, particularly of grain, away from the long, meandering route down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, and towards the ports on the Great Lakes, which provided direct access to the Atlantic. The first city to be threatened was St Louis on the Mississippi. Railways were not destined to remain mere feeders to even the mightiest river systems for long, and by
the time the city had woken up to the fact that railroads could act as independent forces, it had lost its primacy to Chicago.

  By the middle of the century half a dozen towns along the Missouri River were fighting for pre-eminence. Before the Civil War the favourite was Saint Joseph, ‘the outfitting point for much of the emigration westward’, while, said one booster, Leavenworth ‘can’t help what seems to be its destiny, becoming the metropolis of Kansas and the West’. At the time both towns were bigger than the eventual winner, Kansas City. But this was an economically-unified community, a new town without the vested interests relying on the wagon trade which sabotaged St Jo’s efforts. In the words of Charles Glaab,5 ‘political negotiation, corporate intrigue and local manoeuvring – not the logic of geography or location … ensured that Kansas City was the eastern terminus of one of the branches of the Transcontinental railroad. Once the river had been bridged in 1869, Kansas City was firmly on its way to superiority over former rivals as the centre for shipping cattle and beef eastwards.’

  The fighting was general. Louisville had become the great entrepôt on the Mississippi, but was threatened when Cincinnati provided access for produce from the upper Ohio Valley. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad enabled Louisville to open up an alternative hinterland, the Middle South. Louisville emphasised its southern affinities by dispatching ex-Confederate salesmen into the South and sending relief to victims of Sherman’s march through Georgia.

  A similar change of direction greatly boosted the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Established as fur trading posts on the upper Mississippi, they had been relatively slow-growing: although the first steamboat reached them in 1823 a regular service was not established until 1847, and as late as 1865 there were only 210 miles of railway in the whole state of Minnesota. Yet ten years later, thanks largely to the demands of the grain trade, the figure had risen nine-fold, providing mid-Western farmers with access to Chicago, the inescapable metropolis of late nineteenth-century America, the perfect example of the all-powerful combination of rail and water, and one, moreover, with access to the Atlantic and thus to Europe, and not, like the Mississippi, merely to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Chicago remains incomparable as a case of explosive expansion where railroads met an important navigable stretch of water. Ironically the town’s burghers had not originally welcomed them, preferring to rely on the combination of plank roads and the shipping on the Great Lakes. It took the genius of one man, William Butler Ogden, to enable the town to fulfil its manifest destiny. In the early 1840s he persuaded farmers to invest in a small railroad west into the wheatlands. The idea caught on, not only among the locals, but among the financiers of New England. One of them, John Murray Forbes – the only railroad magnate of whom no-one spoke ill – made the vital connection by linking Chicago (and thus the Great Lakes) with the Mississippi at two points, Quincy, Illinois and Burlington, Iowa and thus establishing the foundation of the famous Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

  Chicago Station: the cross-roads of American life.

  By 1856 Chicago was the focus of ten trunk railroads with almost 3,000 miles of track between them, running nearly a hundred trains a day into the world’s fastest growing metropolis, and, by no coincidence, its fastest-growing railroad centre. Not surprisingly:

  each new railroad that came into the city helped fashion its future … within a decade the Illinois Central altered the face of the lake front and stimulated suburban development along its tracks … Wherever the tracks ran, the use of the land was affected. The yards and depots dominated surrounding neighbourhoods, and rail facilities became the nuclei of industrial and commercial growth. This crucial development was unplanned and only remotely governed by public policy … the early railroad decisions were written on the map in lines of iron and for more than a century have constituted fixed features of the Chicago scene.6

  There were so many railroads – no fewer than twenty-three eventually included the city’s name in their title – and the city was so large that they did not exercise the same political dominance as did the Central Pacific through its monopoly of rail access to Northern California, or the Pennsylvania in its home state. Yet their presence transformed Chicago into the wonder city of the last half of the century.

  Chicago typified the importance towns attached to not allowing through traffic, thus ensuring that their lucrative entrepôt trade was not disturbed. In China, Canton managed to ensure a break so that Kowloon, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong Island, did not link directly with the main line to Hankow, while in France the Lyonnais fought to prevent a through railway to ensure that all freight would have to be unloaded and then reloaded in their city. But in the end the only French city able to maintain its role as an entrepôt was Paris, not only because of its size, but because its stations were not linked.

  Nevertheless early railway development had inescapably been linked to access to navigable waters. Even Atlanta, with Denver and Indianapolis the only major nineteenth-century American city not on a major waterway, owes its origin to a region’s need to be connected to a navigable one. In the 1830s Georgia created three separate railway companies, each designed to placate some of the state’s quarrelling communities. The three were threatened by a number of lines from out of state, so they cooperated in promoting a single route to provide access to the Tennessee River at Ross’s Landing, subsequently better known as Chatanooga.

  Originally the lines were to meet on a less important river, the Chattahoochee, but the river banks proved unsuitable and a junction originally called simply ‘Terminus’ was built eight miles away. Terminus soon blossomed into Atlanta, but proved remarkably ungrateful to the railroads which had called it into being. As the inhabitants well knew, their town was ‘the incidental result of the building of [rail] roads intended exclusively for the benefit of other towns’, and the railroad managers showed no inclination to invest in their accidental offspring.7

  Before the Civil War the Atlantans had felt, in the words of the city’s historian, that they were living in a ‘besieged city, assailed by economic agencies subservient to older cities in the “unprogressive” plantation districts’. It was only after the Civil War that its unique position at the hub of the region’s railroad network enabled Atlanta – a mass of ruins after Sherman’s visit – to develop into the greatest entrepôt city in the South.

  Railways could also link twin towns, one an historically important inland centre, the other (often originally less important) on the nearest coast. The twinning was particularly noticeable in Latin America: in Chile Santiago and Valparaiso; in Colombia Bogota and Cartagena; in Venezuela Caracas and La Guayra; in Brazil Sao Paolo and Santos; in Ecuador Quito and Gayaquil, happily prospered as Siamese twins.

  For all the importance of a watery link, many towns without such connections flourished as never before thanks purely to their position on the railway network. In Switzerland Olten became the turntable of the whole Swiss railway system. In Italy Bologna assumed a new importance because of its position on the railway map. In France Dijon, in Burgundy, the meeting point for main lines from north, south and east, flourished for the same reason, depriving such riverside towns as Gray and Chalons-sur-Marne of their former importance. But the changes were relative: Bologna had been famous for a thousand years before the railways; Olten is still not a major city; and Dijon always was, and remains, noted not so much as a railway town but as the centre of the trade in the region’s fine wines.

  The true ‘railway towns’ were those created by the great trans-continental railways. Few were as important as their archetype, Cheyenne (see here) and many are now forgotten, relics of long-lost speculations. More remain as inconspicuous today as they were when the railway brought them into being.

  The Canadian Pacific did more than any other single railway to create new settlements. In Pierre Berton’s words in The Impossible Railway, it ‘dictated both the shape and the location of the cities of the new Canada’ as it swept past Regina, C
algary, Chapeau and Cartier, Stephen and Donald (two of the railroad’s organisers); as well as towns named after milords Dunmore (who had tried and failed to win the original contract) and Revelstoke (the member of the Baring family who had come to the company’s rescue by underwriting a bond issue). ‘With a scratch of the pen the company could, and did, decide which communities would grow and which would stagnate; the placing of divisional points made all the difference.’

  In all the CPR fostered some eight hundred towns and cities in the three prairie provinces. The later, and more northerly, Canadian National route spawned 132 settlements, with a mere 60,000 inhabitants, yet their relative smallness did not discourage speculators, despite the CPR’s best efforts. Typically, at Mirror, Alberta* 577 lots were sold for nearly a quarter of a million dollars in just eleven hours after the town sites were put on the market, a rate of almost one a minute. ‘Before the town was a month old, it had two banks, five stores, three lumberyards, a hotel, three restaurants, two pool rooms, a sash and door factory, and a newspaper.’8

  Inevitably a link with navigable water provided the greatest opportunity of all. The CPR rejected the existing town of Port Moody as its western terminus, because there wasn’t enough flat land for expansion. William Van Home, the CPR’s general manager, preferred a site closer to the Pacific near the mouth of Burard Inlet. Not surprisingly Van Home was not happy with the existing name, Coal Harbour, and preferred to name the terminus after Captain Vancouver, who had explored the coast nearly a century earlier.