Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad

by Walter R. Borneman

  The Mexican Central went on without Ray Morley and completed its line between El Paso and Mexico City early in 1884. By then, the Mexican National had a gap of about 385 miles yet to be built. And the gap would remain for a long four years. Palmer and his associates had simply taken on too much debt, flung a network far too wide, and failed to account for the lack of local revenues along those sections that were completed. Palmer learned firsthand what one of Jay Gould’s engineers had reported to Gould, “that so far as he could see, there was no business there for a railroad.”11

  Palmer suspended interest payments on the construction bonds and fought off receivership for three years until a foreclosure agreement in 1887 resulted in a new entity, the Mexican National Railroad Company. On September 29, 1888, the Mexican National Railroad was finally completed over the 840 miles between Laredo and Mexico City. Palmer remained on the board of directors until 1891, but by then the general had long refocused his main activities back in the mountains of Colorado.

  The Mexican Central had better luck. Once again, the seasoned management, solid revenue stream, and deep pockets of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe made the difference. With 1,224 miles of track between El Paso and Mexico City, the Santa Fe system could not compete with through passenger service between Chicago and the Mexican capital. (The Santa Fe–Mexican Central connections via El Paso took 128 hours versus a time of 88 hours from Chicago through St. Louis and Laredo on the Mexican National.) But even then, the real revenues were on the freight side, and as the growing Mexican economy slowly disproved the skepticism of Gould’s engineer, the standard gauge rails of the Mexican Central began to haul more traffic more efficiently than the narrow gauge Mexican National. Compounding the problem of capacity was the difficulty of transferring freight to and from the standard gauge lines on the Texas border.

  In the end, the Mexican National learned what Palmer was forced to come to grips with in the Colorado Rockies. On all but the most rugged of branch lines, narrow gauge for railroads in the United States and Mexico was an idea that came and went very quickly. The three-foot rails of the Mexican National lasted little more than twenty years. Between 1901 and 1903, its original track was torn up and relaid with standard gauge rails. About the same time, the Mexican government began to acquire substantial interests in both the Mexican National and the Mexican Central, and by 1908 the roads were among those merged into a new entity, the National Railways of Mexico.12

  For the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Mexican Central was never a big moneymaker, but it did extend the road’s continental reach. Even without the Mexican Central, the Santa Fe by the mid-1880s could boast of three routes to the Pacific: the first via the Atlantic and Pacific across northern Arizona and Needles; the second west from Deming across the Colorado River at Yuma (albeit subject to the whims of the Southern Pacific); and the third, over the Sonora Railway to Guaymas. What one might do there except wait for an occasional ship was another matter.

  The latter two routes made for good marketing copy in boasting of “three ways to the Pacific,” but the reality was that the destiny of the Santa Fe was increasingly tied to its Atlantic and Pacific line via Needles into California. There was more of California to be had, and soon much of the country would be clamoring for a stake in it.

  17

  California for a Dollar

  The next round in the continuing battle for California between the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific was to be fought east of Kansas City, not west of Needles. The Santa Fe decided that access to Chicago via its own independent tracks was essential to its long-term growth and sustainability. Chicago had long been one of the great railroad centers of the country. By the mid-1880s, it was arguably the greatest of them all.

  A complex web of lines spread out from Chicago’s hub. Chicago marked the western ends of the great New York Central and Pennsylvania railroad systems. A tangle of regional roads ran from it to the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs, the Northern Pacific at St. Paul, and what would soon be James J. Hill’s Great Northern system. South of Chicago, an array of lines led to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis.

  The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe built east from its roots and cut through the tangle of the Kansas City roads to secure a railhead on the Missouri River in 1874. Its uneasy partnership with the Frisco gained it access to St. Louis a few years later. As its attention was focused on the frenzied westward expansion of the early 1880s, the Santa Fe was content to rely on other roads for connections between Kansas City and Chicago. The Santa Fe carried the burgeoning cattle trade of the plains to these railroads at Kansas City, and they in turn provided the Santa Fe with freight flowing west. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

  These arrangements were disrupted, and William Barstow Strong and his Santa Fe investors made increasingly uneasy, when the Kansas City–Chicago roads began to construct their own lines west of Kansas City. The Santa Fe’s initial public response was that it had no desire to build east of Kansas City because other roads adequately served it there. But as those same roads invaded the Santa Fe’s territory, the farther west their railheads extended, the greater the threat became that they would capture the Santa Fe’s business and haul it straight through to Chicago.1

  Ostensibly, the Santa Fe and Jay Gould’s developing Missouri Pacific system had an agreement not to build into each other’s territory. But while the Missouri Pacific corporately adhered to the letter of the agreement, Gould’s far-ranging personal investments permitted him to sidestep its spirit. One example of this was when the tiny St. Louis, Fort Scott, and Wichita Railroad fell under Gould’s control. It threatened the Santa Fe’s long-held dominance over southern Kansas by simultaneously pushing construction westward and making connections eastward to Gould’s expanding system.

  By the end of 1887, Gould’s Missouri Pacific would complete its main line from Kansas City to Pueblo to tap the Colorado trade. This would be detrimental to the Santa Fe in the Colorado markets, but there was an even greater threat. Gould might well use his traffic alliance with the Denver and Rio Grande to forge a link for the Missouri Pacific through the Rockies to Huntington’s Central Pacific at Ogden.

  With Gould’s encouragement, the Rio Grande slowly began to extend a third rail west from Pueblo along its narrow gauge tracks in anticipation of such standard gauge traffic. In return, Strong and the Santa Fe had little choice but to abandon their trackage agreement along the Rio Grande line between Denver and Pueblo—to which Palmer had added a third rail in 1881—and build the Santa Fe’s long-threatened parallel line from Pueblo to Denver.

  Even the Santa Fe’s friendly rival, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, which had long been the Santa Fe’s most favored connection between Kansas City and Chicago, made plans to build westward. Its first step was into Nebraska to challenge the Union Pacific, but it also contemplated a line across Kansas.

  The Burlington’s Kansas extension was not intended as a direct challenge to the Santa Fe, but rather was proposed because the Burlington’s own vitality was threatened by the westward expansion of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. The Rock Island Railroad was building west across Kansas and would eventually reach Colorado Springs and Denver, the latter via a trackage agreement over the Union Pacific’s Kansas Pacific line.

  In the face of this developing competition across the plains, the Santa Fe’s long-term strategy looked obvious to President Strong. If the Santa Fe’s competitors were building west so aggressively, the Santa Fe had little choice but to build east with equal determination to counter them.

  As to the competition in the Chicago market, “the people along our whole system, above all other things,” Strong rationalized, “want direct, rapid, and unobstructed communication with Chicago, with only one carrier to deal with in the entire transaction; and they will patronize the road which furnishes it.”2

  Once the Santa Fe made the decision to build independently from Kansas City to Chicago, there were
three options. A. A. Robinson, now chief engineer of the Santa Fe, simply placed a ruler on the map and drew a straight line between the two cities. The object, after all, was a lifeline link between the western Santa Fe system and the hub of Chicago, not local traffic through an area already overdeveloped by competing roads.

  A second option was to buy the Chicago and Alton Railway. This would have lengthened the distance between Kansas City and Chicago but also given the Santa Fe independent access to St. Louis. But the Alton thought rather highly of itself, and the Santa Fe’s directors judged its reported $38 million asking price as highly inflated. That left a third option—essentially a variation on Robinson’s straight ruler route.

  From its name, the Chicago and St. Louis Railway sounded as if it were a main artery between those two cities. In fact, the railroad’s tracks had never extended farther south than Pekin, Illinois, about 150 miles from Chicago. The road was described as “two streaks of rust” and because it had only recently completed construction into Chicago, its terminal facilities were little more than a frame depot at Twenty-third Street, then well south of downtown. The road had been poorly built, with heavy grades and light rails, but it offered an established right-of-way over a portion of Robinson’s planned route. And the price was right: $1.5 million.

  The Santa Fe organized the requisite number of subsidiaries, including the Chicago, Santa Fe, and California Railway Company, which acquired the Chicago and St. Louis. Meanwhile, Robinson dispatched teams of surveyors to locate and acquire—as quietly as possible—the remainder of the proposed route.

  By February 1887, all was in place. President Strong gave Robinson the order to proceed and have the line complete by the end of the year. Robinson soon had crews working all along the planned 450-mile Kansas City–Chicago route. How crowded the countryside was with competing roads was evidenced by no fewer than thirteen crossings of other lines that the Santa Fe was obliged to construct, some at grade with frogs and others with over- or underpasses. But these existing regional lines proved of benefit because they obligingly hauled construction materiel to a dozen points along the Santa Fe’s route. This facilitated construction at multiple points rather than at only two railheads, and Robinson soon had seven thousand men engaged in the effort.

  Robinson reportedly admonished his locators not to plan any curves that were not absolutely necessary. In their early development, eastern railroads had been built to connect existing towns via whatever route necessary. Later, western railroads built largely to the dictates of terrain and planned their own towns along the routes. Now without those considerations, Robinson laid out an uncannily straight route much of the way between Kansas City and Chicago, with the result that the line would be both a raceway and the shortest distance between the two hubs.

  The two major exceptions to this course were at Fort Madison, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, and the town of Galesburg in upstate Illinois. Fort Madison outbid Keokuk, Iowa, as the crossing of the Mississippi, and this took the line northward into the sliver of southeastern Iowa between the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers. Galesburg was also north of Robinson’s ruler line, but it offered twenty acres for a depot site and $100,000 as inducements. Once across the Illinois River at Chillicothe, Illinois, the line joined the right-of-way of the Chicago and St. Louis at Ancona, Illinois, and then ran along its grade that was relaid with heavier rails.3

  Out west, the challenge had been steep mountain passes, narrow canyons, and deep arroyos, but across Missouri and Illinois, except for some stubborn glacial deposits, the main difficulty was bridging wide and unruly rivers. In addition to numerous side streams and creeks, five major river crossings presented themselves between Kansas City and Chicago. To overcome these obstacles, Robinson turned to Octave Chanute, a French-born engineer who was among the most-respected railway and bridge engineers of the day.4 (Later, Chanute would become better known in another dimension as a mentor of Orville and Wilbur Wright.)

  Despite bitter winter weather that delayed the completion of the Missouri River crossing for several months, Robinson closed the other gaps along the line with six hours to spare before Strong’s year-end deadline, spiking down the last rail near Medill, Missouri, at six o’clock on December 31, 1887. A full schedule of revenue operations began the following spring.

  By then, Strong had spared no expense in making certain that the passenger side of the Santa Fe’s business would be second to none. The road took delivery of cars with vestibules—no longer would passengers have to step outside into the elements to pass from car to car—and electric lights powered by batteries charged by a central dynamo in the baggage car. And the cars were warmed by steam heat from the locomotive rather than sooty coal stoves. What better way to promote the railroad’s freight business than to whisk bankers, businessmen, and stock growers between the two powerhouses of Kansas City and Chicago in thirteen hours and forty-five minutes of comfort?

  Clearly, the old depot of the Chicago and St. Louis in Chicago’s southern suburbs wouldn’t do, so Strong spent millions of dollars to gain access to downtown Chicago. The railroad’s passenger terminal was soon ensconced in Dearborn Station. Completed in 1885, Dearborn Station was operated by the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad, essentially a cooperative providing five railroads, including the Wabash Railway, with Chicago access. The Santa Fe built its own tracks almost to the station and became the sixth member of the consortium.

  But the Santa Fe would come to dominate the scene. Chicago’s Dearborn Station, with its landmark clock tower and stable of crack Santa Fe passenger trains gathered around it, would come to symbolize both the Santa Fe’s transcontinental reach and its reliable dominance.

  Within three years, the other major chapter of the Santa Fe’s eastern expansion would be written when the railroad finally acquired its struggling partner in the Atlantic and Pacific, the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway. The Frisco acquisition added 1,442 miles of track to the Santa Fe system, mostly in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, but more important, it gave the Santa Fe independent access to St. Louis. The road’s major presence in the three Midwest centers of America’s railroad might—Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis—would serve the Santa Fe well as it completed its drive to the Pacific.5

  • • •

  Even as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe secured its own line to Chicago, reaching the Pacific and knocking down the Southern Pacific’s iron fence around California remained paramount to the railroad’s long-term strategy. As a result, the town of Los Angeles would be quiet no more. For its part, San Diego would fuss and never completely forgive the Santa Fe for seeming to abandon it.

  The first shoe to drop for San Diegans was the news that William Barstow Strong and the Santa Fe had come to terms with Collis Huntington to operate over the Southern Pacific’s tracks between Colton and Los Angeles. Much as he had done with the sale of the Southern Pacific’s Mojave-to-Needles leg, Huntington hoped that by granting the Santa Fe access to Los Angeles, he might forestall its construction of parallel lines and further dissuade the road from building to the Southern Pacific’s jugular at San Francisco and Oakland.

  But Huntington had opened his door to California a crack at Needles, and Strong pushed it open farther and farther with every opportunity—the line to Mojave, the alliance with the California Southern over Cajon Pass, and the Southern Pacific trackage rights into Los Angeles. Now Strong wanted the California door flung wide open.

  It was soon reported that the Santa Fe was aggressively courting San Bernardino and promising to move the railroad’s maintenance shops there from San Diego. The Santa Fe offered $200,000 in capital improvements for a new depot, machine shops, and yard improvements if many of the same San Bernardino town fathers who had once hurried to San Diego to support the California Southern would donate an additional eighteen acres surrounding the existing depot site. When this form of persuasion was agreed to, the Santa Fe announced that San Bernardino would also become a division point.

&n
bsp; To most knowledgeable observers, “division point” bespoke the obvious. For San Diegans, it was the final evidence that their dreams of a transcontinental terminus were to be divided—and less than equitably at that—with their northern competitor. The best that San Diego got from the deal was a promise from the Santa Fe to continue wharf improvements on San Diego Bay and to reduce some of the heavy grades on the California Southern between the city and Del Mar to facilitate cheaper and faster operations northward.6

  Next came a battle over freight rates. Once again, Huntington—more because he was preoccupied with the eastern end of his transcontinental system and less because of any newfound generosity—appeared to extend an olive branch to the Santa Fe. Huntington had long been at the heart of various traffic pooling cartels. In 1885 he was instrumental in creating yet another, the Pacific Coast Association, which was to divide business between Chicago and St. Louis and the West Coast. While seven railroads, including the Santa Fe, were in the pool, the majority of transcontinental traffic went to the Southern Pacific.

  Smaller roads, such as the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande, tried unsuccessfully to collect balances due them from the Southern Pacific under the pool’s proportions and threatened withdrawal if they were not paid. But Strong and the Santa Fe—already sniffing about for an independent entry into Los Angeles—demanded past due balances and an increase in traffic share.

  After a cantankerous February 1886 meeting in New York City, Huntington’s representatives professed that they had done all they could “to keep peace, and even agreed to give the Atchison some of our earnings for the sake of peace, but it wanted more than it had earned or could earn.” As Huntington’s combative juices flowed, he huffed, “We have done all we propose to do, and I guess the Atchison will get tired of it before we are through.” Meanwhile, the Southern Pacific continued to handle 70 percent to 75 percent of the east-west traffic.7