J. P. Morgan, whose recommendations guided many foreign investors, was not pleased to witness this degree of competition within the industry, which was certain to depress profits for both railroads and kill the market for their securities. In hopes of reaching an agreement between the Pennsy and the New York Central, Morgan initiated what has come to be known as the Corsair Compact, a meeting of executives from both railroads in July 1885 aboard his yacht, the Corsair. The unusual meeting place may have been chosen because New York City was then enduring a heat wave, but it has also been suggested that Morgan chose his yacht so that no one could storm out in anger.
The gentlemen agreed that the PRR would sell its West Shore stock to buyers who would lease this railroad to the NYC and purchase the South Penn at a price that would cover construction work already completed. This deal would give each railroad control over the line that had threatened competition. In addition, the Pennsy would acquire the Beech Creek Railroad, a coal hauler financed by Vanderbilt interests that ran roughly from Williamsport to Clearfield over tracks that were more or less parallel to the Pennsy’s Philadelphia & Erie Railroad.
The Corsair Compact made J. P. Morgan America’s most powerful financier, the man who could bring order and stability to the railroad industry. In his article, Martin comments, “The settlement of 1885 was the first great achievement of American finance capitalism. It would be neatly dramatic to say that finance capitalism in the United States was actually born on the afterdeck of the Corsair that hot July afternoon.”
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court stepped in to prevent the PRR from taking possession of the Beech Creek or South Penn. The PRR-affiliated Cumberland Valley Railroad and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad acquired pieces of the South Penn project after it was sold at foreclosure in 1890. However, neither ever did anything significant with the property. The big loser in the Corsair Compact was the Philadelphia & Reading, which had already spent significant cash improving its facilities in Philadelphia and Harrisburg in anticipation of the increased traffic the South Penn promised to bring. The deal negotiated by Morgan also resulted in preventing the Reading from ever becoming a real trunk line.
The abandoned South Penn project left Pennsylvania with nine unfinished tunnels, several bridge piers in the Susquehanna River, and miles of graded roadbed. Schemes to revive the project came and went, but it was the unlikely setting of the Great Depression that finally brought action. A state representative from Washington County, a state planner, and a lobbyist for the trucking industry were out for a late-night snack in Harrisburg in January 1935. In the climate of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Commonwealth was looking for large public works projects to help stem unemployment. Gazing at the South Penn bridge piers, one of the three men asked, Why not run a toll highway over the old roadbed?
The inspiring bridge piers remain abandoned in the river, but six of the South Penn’s tunnels became part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which also incorporated portions of the abandoned South Penn railroad bed. Thus, as George H. Burgess and Miles C. Kennedy write in their history of the PRR, the Pennsy finally did see considerable competition from the South Penn route, but in the form of cars and trucks traveling the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Railroads and the Johnstown Flood
The growth and success of Johnstown began in 1831, when the first barge successfully made a voyage from Johnstown to Pittsburgh through the canal that had been constructed as part of the western division of the Commonwealth’s State Works transportation system. The backwoods trading center founded in 1794 had a population of more than three thousand by 1840. After the Pennsylvania Railroad laid its tracks through the town during the 1850s, Johnstown acquired its major growth industry, the Cambria Iron Company, and later additional rail service from the B&O via its Somerset & Cambria branch. By the fateful year of 1889, nearly thirty thousand people were living in and around Johnstown.
Back in the days when Johnstown depended on the State Works canal, the Pennsylvania legislature had approved funding for a mountaintop reservoir miles above the town to keep the canal in business during the summer, when it was in danger of running dry. Construction began in 1838, but not long after the South Fork Dam was finished, trains were able to run all the way from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, making both the dam and canal obsolete.
Busy, industrial Johnstown as it looked prior to the flood in an illustration for a book on the Pennsylvania Railroad by William B. Sipes.
The dam remained neglected until 1879, when it was purchased by Benjamin F. Ruff, who planned to use it as the main attraction for his South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, a resort intended to draw the wealthy of Pittsburgh away from their mountain retreats in Cresson. The club’s members soon included such notables as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Philander Chase Knox, Robert Pitcairn, and Andrew Mellon.
The South Fork Dam had been constructed to harness the area’s spring rains, but it proved unequal to the storm that hit the Laurel Highlands late in May 1889. In his book about the Johnstown Flood, David G. McCullough notes that several warnings came from persons at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club that the dam was in imminent danger of giving way—warnings that reached Johnstown despite storm damage to the telegraph lines. After 4:07 p.m. on May 31, twenty million tons of water came crashing down the Conemaugh Valley with what some survivors described as a “roar like thunder.”
McCullough also tells of the heroic ride of railroad engineer John Hess, who was seated inside engine number 1124 about half a mile from the East Conemaugh railroad yards. Upon hearing what sounded like a hurricane, Hess immediately put on steam and headed for East Conemaugh with the flood right behind him, his whistle tied down and shrieking. “A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad, and to everyone who lived near the railroad,” writes McCullough. “It meant there was something very wrong.” Most folks correctly interpreted the whistle as an urgent message to get out of the way. Passengers on a train delayed in East Conemaugh heard it and may have witnessed Hess leap from his locomotive. A conductor ran along the halted cars shouting for everyone to head for the hills.
Survivors and historians have produced many accounts of the sixty-foot wall of water traveling as fast as forty miles per hour toward Johnstown, sweeping everything in its path into a deadly torrent of debris. More than twenty-two hundred people lost their lives, and many of the survivors were rendered homeless and even temporarily destitute in the wake of the destruction of the factories where they had been employed.
The Pennsylvania Railroad lost 24 passenger cars, 561 freight cars, 34 locomotives, miles of track, and a number of bridges. One of the flood’s earlier casualties was the Conemaugh Viaduct, which had spanned the Little Conemaugh with a single arch since its completion in 1833 and was a local landmark. The brick roundhouse at East Conemaugh was crushed, and the cars in adjacent yards were scattered about like toys. The most horrific scene of the tragedy took place at the railroad bridge over the Conemaugh River in Johnstown, where a fire started, consuming the debris trapped by the bridge’s stone arches together with corpses and survivors of the surging waters who had become stranded at the bridge.
This photo, picturing the aftermath of the Johnstown Flood, is part of an exhibit at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.
Robert Pitcairn, superintendent of the Pennsy’s western division, had been notified of danger via telegram when the initial warning reached Johnstown. He had ordered that his private railroad car be attached to an eastbound train, but the train was halted several miles west of Johnstown. He and its other passengers watched in horror as debris and bodies began floating down the Conemaugh River below the train tracks and did what they could to rescue survivors.
Back in Pittsburgh, Pitcairn called for contributions to help the victims. The PRR contributed cash, and its Pittsburgh depot and yards became the collection headquarters for food, supplies, and volunteers bound for Johnstown by railroad. McCullough comments on the actions of Pitcairn and the
PRR: “For all its highhanded ways, for all the evils people attributed to it, in a crisis the railroad had been worth more than any other organization, including the state.”
Charles Dickens Travels
Inefficient and inconvenient as it may have been, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Portage Railroad did guarantee its passengers an interesting trip. The British author Charles Dickens describes his experience on the railroad in American Notes, a work originally published sometime during the 1860s:
Occasionally the rails are laid on the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking down from the carriage window, the traveler gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountains depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages traveling together; and, while proper precautions are taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty, traveling thus at a rapid pace along the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homeward; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirtsleeves, looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow’s work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind.
Local Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society
Altoona might have lost the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania to Strasburg, but its rail fans were not going to give up on having their own railroad museum to preserve and interpret Altoona’s heritage as a railroad town. The organization originally known as the Altoona Railway Museum Club when it was organized in 1965 became the Horseshoe Curve Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society in 1968. After the Railroaders Memorial Museum Inc. was established as a nonprofit corporation in the early 1970s, members continued to contribute to the museum’s development, and they still support its projects today.
The Horseshoe Curve Chapter, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2008, restores and operates its own rolling stock. Its activities also include excursions on the Everett Railroad, in conjunction with the Roaring Spring Historical Society. Its monthly newsletter is called the Coal Bucket.
The Region’s Railroad Giants
J. Edgar Thomson (1808–74)
J. Edgar Thomson learned the basics of surveying from his father, who got him a job making surveys for the original Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. He moved on to work for railroads in New Jersey and Georgia before the Pennsylvania Railroad hired him as chief engineer. Thomson began locating the Pennsy route between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in 1847. Horseshoe Curve, a two-mile engineering feature that allowed locomotives to pull heavy loads up the Allegheny Ridge, was probably his crowning achievement. The curve remains in use today and is also one of the world’s best-known railroading tourist attractions.
Thomson was elected president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1852, and under his leadership, the Pennsy expanded, becoming the largest transportation company in the world. Early in the twentieth century, the empire whose blueprint he had drawn adopted the slogan “Standard Railroad of the World.” Thomson leased the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railway and purchased a system called the Panhandle lines, ensuring that Pennsy trains could run west from Pittsburgh to Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. He also leased the New Jersey railroads that took Pennsy trains to the Hudson River.
The terms of Thomson’s will established a trust fund for the orphaned daughters of railroad men who had lost their lives while working for any railroad company, but particularly the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1871, he purchased the lot adjoining his mansion in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, planning to use it for a boarding school for these orphans. Thomson died before the structure was built, but his trustees saw to it that the institution, originally called St. John’s Orphanage and later the J. Edgar Thomson School, opened in 1882 in several adjoining residences on Rittenhouse Street. Thomson’s orphans were moved to Kingsessing Avenue, and later the trustees decided that they would be better cared for not in an institution, but in the home of some surviving relation. The J. Edgar Thomson Foundation still exists, providing limited financial assistance to the female orphans of deceased fathers who had been in the employ of a U.S. railroad.
Herman Haupt (1817–1905)
Following his graduation from West Point in 1835, Herman Haupt spent very little time in the army, leading historians to speculate that he had ended up in a military academy at the urging of his widowed mother, not because he was interested in a military career. However, the engineering skills he acquired there launched his railroad career by gaining him employment with several smaller Pennsylvania railroads.
Haupt joined the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1847 as assistant to J. Edgar Thomson. He was promoted to general superintendent and then chief engineer, in which capacity he managed the completion of the Pennsy route over the Allegheny Mountains. His 1852 book, The General Theory of Bridge Construction, became a popular text for engineering schools. He left the Pennsy in 1856 and went to work on the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts.
In 1862, he was invited to Washington, D.C., where he assumed the rank of colonel and designed and built the railways and bridges that the Union needed to win the Civil War. He was also responsible for moving troops and equipment efficiently by rail during the conflict. After this service, Haupt continued his career in executive positions for a number of other American railroads.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1806–78)
Benjamin Henry Latrobe joined the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1830 as a surveyor’s rodman, a rather humble position for a man who had previously practiced law, most recently with his brother, who had been counsel for this railroad. The career change into engineering worked well for Latrobe, who rose through the B&O ranks. By 1839, he had located the B&O’s main route between Harpers Ferry and Cumberland.
He also managed the survey for the B&O route between Baltimore and Washington, which included the Thomas Viaduct over the Patapsco River, named for Philip Thomas, first president of the railroad. This granite bridge, more than six hundred feet long, was completed in 1835 and was later hailed as one of the finest examples of railroad architecture in America.
Latrobe was appointed chief engineer for the B&O in 1842, when its main line was completed to Cumberland. He retained this position while taking on a number of other responsibilities, including the position of president and later chief engineer for the Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad. In 1871, Latrobe had the honor of driving in the golden spike that connected the Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad with the B&O.
John Work Garrett (1820–44)
John Work Garrett went to work for his father, a Baltimore merchant, after attending two years at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. During the late 1840s, the Garrett family expanded its business operations by starting a bank and purchasing real estate, making the family quite wealthy by the time the Civil War started.
The Garrett family became early investors in Baltimore & Ohio stock, and by 1855, John Work Garrett was elected to the railroad’s board of directors. A report he prepared on the railroad’s finances made such a positive impression that not only were his suggestions adopted as guiding principles for the railroad, but Garrett was elected the company’s president in 1858.
During the Civil War, Garrett kept his railroad loyal to the Union, to the dismay of Maryland’s Southern sympathizers. Business was excellent for the B&O in spite of the war, and by 1865, Garrett could report great increases in both passenger and freight traffic.
Although Garrett continued expanding the B&O westward after the war, he relinquished plans to expand the railroad into a southern rail system because of competition from other railroads, including the Pennsy. B&O never rivaled the New York Central or the PRR in assets or revenue, but Garrett did succeed in tripling its mileage by the time of his death in
1884.
John Work Garrett. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Robert Garrett (1847–1896)
John Work Garrett’s son Robert tried to run away from home to join Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s army, but his father persuaded him to enter Princeton instead. He graduated in 1867 and took his place in the bank started by his grandfather, where he learned about finance. In 1871, he was finally able to follow General Lee—as president of the Valley Railroad of Virginia. After the Valley Railroad became part of the B&O system, Garrett became a vice president of the B&O.
He became acting president of the B&O in 1884, after John Work Garrett fell ill following his wife’s fatal injury in a carriage accident. He presided over the extension of the B&O from Baltimore to Philadelphia, a project that his father had started. However, as John F. Stover notes in his history of the B&O, “Robert Garrett was not the dominant, forceful, and aggressive figure that his father had been. John Work Garrett had served a long and useful apprenticeship under the stern eyes of the first Robert Garrett in the 1830s and 1840s. The younger Robert had had too much given to him and really earned very few of the several advancements presented to him in the 1870s and 1880s.”
While traveling in England, Garrett heard that J. P. Morgan, the powerful financier and railroad czar with whom the B&O was negotiating for capital, might insist on some say in the selection of the railroad’s officers. Possibly fearing that he would lose his presidency anyway, Garrett resigned in 1887, claiming that he was acting on the advice of his physician.
Robert Garrett is remembered in Baltimore not for his brief stint as B&O president, but as the man who brought Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out its Mount Vernon and Washington Squares. Garrett also gave this upscale neighborhood copies of some fountains on the Champs-Elysees and a statue of George Peabody for its Peabody Institute.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 27