The Story of American Railroads: From the Iron Horse to the Diesel Locomotive

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CHAPTER I

Panorama

FOR a time in my boyhood I lived on a farm within sound of the Grand Trunk Railway, and went to school in the town of North Stratford, a junction with the Maine Central. The Grand Trunk was not the first railroad I can remember, but it was the one that appealed most powerfully to me, that stirred my imagination beyond compare. Not before and surely never since have I heard the like of the whistle of a Grand Trunk mogul as it moaned up from deep in the forest we called the ’Hegan Woods and came wafting on frosty waves through the brittle air of a December in northern Vermont.

To me those moguls were gigantic locomotives. I firmly believed them to be the largest locomotives on earth, and so did all other boys of the town. They hauled the long freights between Portland and Montreal, and commonly stopped at North Stratford for water. There, on a grade crossing in the very center of the village, one of them stood at dusk every winter night, holding up what town traffic there was while we boys stood to watch the great black monster with its trimmings of ice that told of bitter weather, and listen fascinated to its breathing.

We knew, of course, that this breathing of the locomotive was really some sort of pump that had to do with the airbrakes, but we never thought of it that way, for an engine to a boy of my time was not a machine at all but a living animal, perhaps some species of mastodon, in any case an animal that had lungs and breathed. To us that nervous panting—that pampah, pam-pah—now slow and even, now hurried, was coming direct from the body and soul of the locomotive, as sentient as any human and twice as wonderful. The engine, you understand, was panting, resting, as a dog rests and pants, gathering strength for the heavy pull ahead, which it knew very well would begin as soon as it had crossed the Connecticut River and started the rugged haul up the valley of the Nulhegan to Island Pond.

Up the ’Hegan valley I’ve sat in a sleigh and watched, completely spellbound, while one of those vast trains of freight cars came thundering by on its way to Canada. The locomotives must have had exceptionally good headlamps for the era, for I recall that a shaft of light lit up the tracks at Hobson’s Mills for what seemed to me a mile or more in advance of the engine. Along with the first glimmer of brilliance came the first rumblings of the heavy train; and soon the very woods, all dark and mysterious and rather sinister outside of that shaft of yellow light—soon the very woods began to tremble and were filled with the rolling thunder of the railroad in action. Then, for a moment that was never quite long enough, the mogul pounded up and past in clouds of steam and smoke, a glow of hellish fire lighting the interior of the cab, where the shadow of the fireman moved against the glow, a silhouetted imp of the Pit, with the endless cars coming along behind bringing the hypnotic rhythm of their clatter.

There was a grade crossing ahead, at the Mills, and the warning that welled up from the dome of the mogul was a warning to all human beings in the ’Hegan Woods, alive or dead, to all animals wild and domestic, to the fishes in the frozen muttering streams, to the birds in the balsams and the owls awing, and to the frightened souls of all Indians who had used this route for a highway before ties and rails had been laid upon it.

The Grand Trunk engines possessed whistles built by a master who was a combination of Thor himself and some brilliant esthete, for he perfected an art form fitted wonderfully to that northern clime and splintery air where an obbligato was supplied by the crackling of Aurora Borealis. The steam shot quickly up from the big round dome on the mogul’s heaving back, then a blast of mighty noise shattered the woods and the night, a trump to shame all horn players since Gabriel, to tell the loggers all over Brighton township that the Fast Freight was going through. Yes, sir, that was her. . . . It was a blast to roll on and on over the timbered hills, over the blueberry swamps, over the stark white fields, to inform farmers in Bloomfield and Brunswick, even in Lemington and Canaan, before the echo had worn itself out, that the Grand Trunk was making the ’Hegan Woods with a full head of steam and would soon be over the hump, to drift easily downgrade along St. Lawrence waters. . . .

It was said of these locomotives and trains, and even the timetables cited the fact, that they went either to Montreal on the north, or south to Portland. But we boys knew better than that. They went, we were certain, to a magic and wholly wondrous land for which we had no name, and once there they never stopped rolling. True, they might pause now and again, in the manner of locomotives, for fuel and water, when they would rest briefly and pant. But they never would come to the end of the track. There was no end. The rails, we knew, led on into Canada, reputed to be a big enough country, then on through Canada and to God knew where, the engines whistling at intervals, ringing the bell at intervals, smoking, steaming, pounding, rolling, rolling on to the end of time and the edge of the world. . . .

As I say, we boys did not have a name for that magic country to which all passing trains went. But some of my boyhood friends resolved to see that land and learn its name. So, a bit later they went to work for the railroad, some on the Grand Trunk, some on other lines. Forty years later, which was just the other day, I talked to one who had set out in youth to find the land to which all passing trains went—or, rather, used to go. Gold stripes and stars marched up his blue serge from cuff to elbow. Yes, he said, I found out where the place is, though I never got there.

You know, continued this veteran of forty years on the rails, you know, when you and I were kids, boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were the sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I’ve heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad—or there used to be in our day. It was the echo of a mogul whistle in these same old ’Hegan Woods that made me a railroadman for life.

We talked some more, this veteran and I, and although he never quite put it into so many words, I understood him well enough; he was telling me that the country where passing trains go is just beyond Oz, where the Round River flows through a notch in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

If railroads created a dreamworld for boys of my generation, and they most certainly did, it was merely incidental. The main achievement of the railroads was to help enormously to build the United States into a world power and do it well within the span of one man’s lifetime. Historians know it, too, though because of the stiff if genteel conventions of their craft most of them have continued for a hundred years to write about our armies and navies and sonorous statesmen, with here and there guarded references to mysterious Economic Factors and forces which, stemming as they do straight from either Heaven or Hell, are amenable to no control by man, be he Democrat, Socialist, or Republican.

I realize as well as any man, and glory in it too, that the smoke that clouded the pretty green at Lexington was important. So were the clouds of burning powder that hung above Gettysburg. Both were freighted with destiny. But neither is more a true symbol of the United States than the plume of white smoke that streamed out behind the first doubleheader to plow up and over the Rockies carrying the first rail-borne goods and passengers from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific shore. The whole great empire of the American West was riding that train of cars.

By turns the railroad was to bedevil and bewilder America. In one of his essays Herbert Spencer, an Englishman who meant more to the United States than to his native land and who thoroughly believed in Steam, said that a volume would be required simply to trace through all of its ramifications the effects contingent upon the act of lighting a fire. These effects, he vowed, were infinite though imperceptible. The effects upon the United States of steam, which comes from water heated over a fire, are also infinite, but most of them are easily perceptible.

For one thing, steam locomotion in the United States harmed one region to build up another. The forces of nature meant little to it. It overcame wind and tide. It abolished the Mississippi River, until then a gigantic fact. It abolished those fearful reaches of the interior that cartographers labeled Great American Desert. All that even the Rockies meant to steam locomotion was merely a little more fire under the boiler.

Steam turned out to be capricious. It proved to be as much a master of what Americans called their Destiny as it was its slave. It carried the individual wherever he would go; and it carried away whole communities who did not want to go anywhere at all. Either that, or it buried them where they were. The railroad made bright green grass to grow in the once busy streets of Nantucket, Salem, and Charleston. It stole, openly and arrogantly, from New Orleans that monopoly of wealth which the Mississippi once promised to pour into her lap. Up in the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire, pine and spruce started to creep across the fields and pastures of deserted farms, to surround even the barns and houses and to strangle them—all because of steam locomotion. By 1880, at the latest, the home of one of my forebears, cleared and built by enormous effort before 1800, was marked by a lonely chimney, slowly crumbling into bright red ruins amid green forest, beside a melancholy hole in the ground, while an apple tree and a bush of lavender struggled for life in what had been the yard. It was only one of hundreds like it.

Steam locomotion was filled with wayward fancies. For some mysterious reason that only professors of economics pretend to understand, it carried wealth and importance past one place to lay them down at another. It passed Oswego, Dunkirk, Sandusky, and Fort Wayne to build a gigantic city at the foot of Lake Michigan. It picked the most impossible building site in California and conjured up San Francisco on the spot. It whistled past old and important places like Fort Vancouver, Tumwater, and Nisqually and made secondary hamlets like Portland and Seattle into cities.

There was no telling what steam would do, and many a fortune was made or lost because of its perversity. Before men realized what was going on, steam had moved the center of population from near the Atlantic seaboard to a point that existed in the school books of the same generation only as deep wilderness. More than one pioneer related, in no more than his middle years, how the last Indian whoop and the last sad cadence of the owl had died in the echo of the first locomotive. Wilderness one year, metropolis the next. It constantly astonished those who had been through it, to their last day, as well it might.

Wherever and whenever the railroad came, the change was often swift to dizziness. As a young fur trader, Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard climbed an oak tree in a dismal swamp to get his first look at Fort Dearborn, a miserable collection of hovels. A little more than two decades later, he liked to be shaved in the elegant barber shop of the great and gaudy Palmer House, on almost the same spot.

Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle grew up so rapidly they left the map makers a full ten years, perhaps twenty years, in the rear; while all along the two thousand miles separating those places there grew up one, then two, then three lines of continuous civilization, bolstered on each side by rectangular townships devoted to growing wheat, mining copper, cutting timber—now that wheat, copper, and lumber could be taken to market. All that land, said a congressman referring to the entire American West, wasn’t worth ten cents until the railroads came.

It was the same everywhere in the country. Following the Civil War the United States started to build so rapidly, so madly, and continued to the end of the century in such a frenzy of exploitation, that it might have wrecked itself had it not been for the railroad. The country did crack several times, but it never quite blew up, or collapsed, and the reason it not only survived but prospered in wealth, in population, and in power was the railroad. Charles Francis Adams, our great philosopher of railroads, said it. The simple truth was, he wrote, that through its energetic railroad development, the country was then producing real wealth as no country ever produced it before. Behind all the artificial inflation which . . . so clearly foreshadowed a catastrophe, there was also going on a production that exceeded all experience.

The new element of the railroad, Adams believed, did away with the best of reasoned conclusions. Acting upon undeveloped and almost inexhaustible natural resources, it dragged the country through its difficulties in spite of itself—as if all the fraud, the ignorance, and speculation that greedy men could think up and practice were quite unable, because of the railroad, to precipitate disaster. Every mile of steel laid was quietly adding many times its cost to the aggregate wealth of the country.

What maddened Adams was the complacency with which a certain class of philosophers mistook the operation of a great, quiet natural force for the results of their own meddling. One school of these professors, he said, attributed the freedom from commercial disaster to their jugglings with paper money. Another clique saw in the great prosperity of the day nothing but a vindication of their own meddling with the tariff. While socialists talked, however, cried Adams, "the locomotive was at work, and all the obstructions which they placed in its way could at most only check but never overcome the impetus it had given to material progress. . . .*

Although Mr. Adams did not say so, the building of the American railroad system was one of the greatest dramas of modern times. Unlike the Republic itself, whose founding can be dated well enough for all practical and symbolic purposes as of July 4, 1776, the American railroad system cannot be said to have a birthday. For many years it existed only in the minds of a few visionaries who, try as they did, could make little impression on the great mass of Americans, just then charmed by the wonders of canals. The greatest of these visionaries, or prophets, was an odd genius named Oliver Evans who soon after the Revolution petitioned at least two legislatures for exclusive rights to use what he termed his improvements in steam carriages in their states.

A few other prophets were stirring, among them John Stevens of Hoboken, who built a miniature locomotive, which he ran around on a track in the yard of his home. The states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania good-naturedly granted Stevens the charters he wanted, which proposed to build a railroad across those states. Stevens was a veteran of the Revolution, hence they humored him, knowing nothing would come of his aberrations. And nothing did, though the noise he made did prompt a group of Pennsylvanians to send William Strickland to England to learn what he could about the new steam railways there.

England had taken to the steam engine, especially in its locomotive form, with a readiness that seems to have been lacking in America. News of the first English railroads came across the sea, and Strickland and other Americans had seen with their own eyes what was going on. Like an imported virus, the idea at last began to function in American port towns. In 1827 a group of citizens incorporated the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road Company, and a bit later prevailed on old Charles Carroll, sole surviving Signer of the Declaration, to lean on a spade and turn a sod, while a band played and cannon boomed. In quick succession other railroad companies were organized in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Boston already had a railroad of a sort, three miles of wooden rails laid on stone ties to move granite from Quincy to the banks of the Neponset River, where the stones would be transported by water to Charlestown, there to form the Bunker Hill Monument. Horses were its motive power. Nor was the Baltimore & Ohio quite ready to take the big step to steam. They fooled around with sail cars and with horsepower in its direct and in its treadmill form. In Charleston, South Carolina, however, a group of railroad builders engaged Horatio Allen, who wanted steam, to run their line. Allen had the first American-built locomotive made in New York and hoisted it aboard his rails where, in December 1830, it pulled the first train of cars ever moved by steam in the United States. This six miles of railroad may properly be said to have fathered all lines since in this country. It was more the true source than the much-heralded, much-pictured race between Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb engine and a gray horse, the horse winning hands down.

The success of the South Carolina railroad brought a rash of incorporations in all of the settled regions except New England where, so solid Yankees said, commerce was tied to the sea and always would be. By 1840 there were almost 5,000 miles of steam railroad in the United States, of which Pennsylvania had almost one-fifth, with New York second on the list, followed by Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

In the meantime, competing philosophers had emerged from their lairs to argue what a railroad was. Some said it was merely an improved turnpike, a semipublic way over which, by the payment of a fee, any man might operate his steam engine and carriages. If this contention seems odd today, it did not seem odd to a people who were familiar with turnpikes but had never seen a steam railroad. Other philosophers contended that a railroad was not and could not, with impunity, be considered a turnpike. Chief of this school was the remarkable Jonathan Knight, civil engineer who surveyed for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company, laid out the federal government’s National Road, then became engineer for the Baltimore & Ohio. A railroad, he said, could not operate successfully if more than one company ran steam carriages upon it. Since that day Knight’s basic philosophy of single ownership has remained unchanged, although on thousands of miles of track more than one railroad operates trains on a rent or lease arrangement.

In the wake of the prophets came the incorporators of railroads. Incorporators were not necessarily builders. Many of these men were simply gull-catchers who had previously discovered easy money in selling stock in companies ostensibly formed for the purpose of digging canals, or building plank roads. The canals were never dug, the planks never laid, and now their railroads were never built. How numerous were these crooks is to be judged by the expression that became current if not popular: As worthless as railroad stock.

But there were also honest and capable men among the organizers of railroad companies, men who at last had caught the vision of the steam locomotive, and they worked to some purpose to lay the first lines of iron rails. Conservatives were seldom among them. Conservatives at first paid the railroad no heed at all, but presently they roused and in the manner of their kind time out of mind, they fought the innovation. Enlisting both the law and the clergy, to say nothing of hired free-lance orators and makers of Railroad Disaster lithographs, the conservatives, or merely the owners of canal stock and stagecoach lines acting like conservatives, fought the railroad with every means ingenious men could devise.

They had lost, of course, before they started to fight. On went the rails, connecting two towns here, another two towns there, and over the rails went dinkey little engines hauling either stagecoaches with flanged wheels, or long boxes. Steam-railroad travel was a novelty, but it was hardly pleasure. No one ever knew, when a brigade of cars left a depot, when or if it would arrive at the other terminal. Farmers piled logs across the tracks. Bulls at pasture, offended by the sight of the puffing engines, charged them head on and butted them from the rails—until Isaac Dripps, boss mechanic of the Camden & Amboy, invented the deadly parent of all cowcatchers, which speared the rambunctious bulls and tamed them somewhat.

Passengers discovered they not only had to pay to ride on the cars; they had often to help lift them back onto the rails and to push entire trains over slight grades. Smoke sooted them, cinders burned their broadcloth and bombazine, yet there was no keeping them from riding behind what was soon heralded as the Iron Horse, the animal that was going to change and make America.

Men of outstanding imagination and ability were presently showing interest in the railroad. John Edgar Thomson took hold of the newly formed Pennsylvania Railroad, added a dilapidated line here and there, purchased a state-owned streak of rust, and set his own crews to laying track from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. When he died in 1874, his road was one of the great systems in the country. Erastus Corning, nail maker of Albany, New York, and associates, got a pot of cash together, purchased ten small railroads, then forged them into the New York Central, one of the wonders of the time. Up in now waking New England, John Poor, on foot and in sleigh, set out to find a route from Portland to Montreal, and then with efforts to be described only as epic, built what became the Grand Trunk. In Georgia, in Tennessee, in Ohio, even in far Minnesota, men of push and determination were connecting their towns with other towns, or with rivers or lakes, laying rails, buying rolling stock, naming their roads . . . & Pacific with a superb indifference to the 2,000 or more miles that stretched out beyond the farthest western railhead.

The challenge of the plains and mountains, however, was to be met. Brisk men in New York and California asked the government to help them bridge the continent, and the government donated land and a lot of money and sent soldiers to protect the construction crews from the dismayed Indians who knew well enough what the Iron Horse would do to their buffalo. The Union and the Central Pacific outfits went to work at both ends, making fortunes for a few, impoverishing many more, seducing senators and other noble statesmen into what one voluble critic said were cunning, craft, chicane, guile, and knavery; yet, in the end, providing the United States with a steel highway of incalculable value. When impassioned orators spoke of this first transcontinental as a Path of Empire, they were not speaking bombast; it was sober truth. It was also no less than a monument to Grenville Dodge, an able soldier and the greatest railroad builder of his time.

In a little more than two decades, three transcontinental railroads were built with government help. All three wound up in bankruptcy courts. And thus, when James Jerome Hill said he was going to build a line from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, without government cash or land grant, even his close friends thought him mad. But his Great Northern arrived at Puget Sound without a penny of federal help, nor did it fail. It was an achievement to shame the much-touted construction of the Erie canal.

Along with the era of feverish construction went the era of buccaneering. Perhaps Uncle Dan’l Drew started it. Perhaps he merely gave it impetus. In any case this drover of cattle who salted his steers, then let them drink their fill before weighing—thus giving us Watered Stock—turned his great talents to railroad speculation, trying his hand first on the New York & Erie. I got to be a millionaire afore I knowed it, hardly, he liked to say. And so he did. With Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, Jr., Drew wrecked the Erie again and again, and tried to wreck the New York & Harlem, running plumb into old Commodore Vanderbilt, who was too much for him. After looting here and there for more than a decade, Uncle Dan’l softened to the extent of setting aside suitable sums, in the style of so many rascals, for the founding of seminaries of God.

The old Commodore used methods akin to Drew’s, yet on an even grander scale, and was so eminently successful that the vast New York Central system, which he and his son William H. built out of lines they clubbed into compliance, was often known simply as Mr. V’s Road. Both father and son were of outstanding ability in the business of amalgamating and operating railroads, even though the younger man has been continuously discredited because of a statement which, honest though it was and quite reasonable from his point of view, proved most offensive to the public; for sixty years it has been used against Capital in all its forms. The public be damned! said the younger Mr. Vanderbilt, doing his own class more harm than all of the vaporings of Johann Most and the Haymarket anarchists combined.

Raids similar to those of Drew, Gould, and Vanderbilt were being staged in the West. Out where the deer and the antelope are said to play, Ben Holladay, Henry Villard, and a number of other go-getting men were fighting for control of rails and boats in the Pacific Northwest; and the war proved so wide and bitter that reverberations were felt in England, Germany, and Austria, where Lords and Junkers began to wonder why the laying of simple American iron rails could cost so much good European money.

In California a quartet of singularly grasping men named Crocker, Huntington, Stanford, and Hopkins, commonly known as the Big Four, were using the courts, the legislatures, and hundreds of gunmen to build a monopoly out of the Southern Pacific, the Central Pacific, and sundry lines bought under pressure.

Fighting the Big Four in the Southwest were the men of the Santa Fe, virtually a Yankee railroad, owned and run from Boston, operating in the most remote region possible, and using tactics that combined the worst in Dan’l Drew and certain characteristics of the late and unfortunate William Kidd, a sea captain of New York City who was hanged on the 23rd of May, 1701, in England, but not before he had addressed the judge. My lord, said he, it is a very hard sentence. . . . Kidd was a softie compared to the American railroad buccaneers of the late nineteenth century; few of them, so far as I can learn, ever asked for quarter—or gave any.

Industrial America of the time was a savage state within the Republic, a state of anarchy operated (nobody ruled) by ruthless men who were thoroughly convinced, if not by Herbert Spencer then by mere observation, that, the world would be a better place if there were no weaklings among men. The most efficient way to remove weaklings was to set a pace so swift that only the most rugged characters could keep abreast. Horatio Alger, Jr., a writer of stories for boys, said it again and again, said it one hundred and thirty-five times in as many books, in milder words than Mr. Spencer used but even more effectively than the Master: You did not work Upward & Onward, from Train Boy to Railroad President, by hanging around pool halls and kicking tambourines out of the hands of street evangels. You got to be Railroad President by getting ahead of the other fellow and possibly running him down on the way.

Industrial America was a jungle, made for jungle law. Industrial America fanned out to follow the steel rails wherever they went, and the jungle laws went along too. This fact has been much deplored these past sixty years and more by well-meaning if naïve writers who seem to think that Bad Men were running the country, grinding Good Men down into the muck of poverty. Nothing could be farther from the truth, which was that all men were competing at a time and in a place when and where the prizes possible were immense and all rules in abeyance. Ethics, conduct, morals, all were pragmatic. The so-called ruthless industrialists, including the railroad operators, were no worse and no better than their fellow Americans who happened to be politicians or preachers, or simply nonentities. The governments, state and federal, were not better and possibly no worse than the men they pretended to govern. Let one not forget that if railroads offered and gave bribes, there were always ready takers.

Let one not forget, either, that it was these ruthless railroad builders and operators, whose morals and principles were average but whose abilities were very great—that it was these men, perhaps more than any other class, who were making the United States into the first industrial nation on earth, ready to take her place in world councils on any subject, whether of commerce or war. If these industrialists are to be damned, and I say they are to be damned, it is not because of what they did, but what they didn’t do. The world they were building had little place in it for the artist of painting, of letters, of music, nor for the thinker who was other than pragmatic. Let them be damned and doubledamned for these shortcomings, but not because they rode roughshod over their fellows.

With America building so frantically, it was natural that the cost came high. You do not get speed except at an extra cost. America paid for it in many ways, and is still paying. It began to pay for speed, and greed, in the 1850 period, when disasters on the shoddy and hurrying railroads became a disgrace. With heavy irony Harper’s Weekly of June 31, 1858, said it: Nobody’s murders. The railroads are insatiable. Boilers are bursting all over the country—railroad bridges are breaking and rails snapping—human life is sadly and foolishly squandered—but nobody is to blame. Boilers burst themselves. Rails break themselves. And it may be questioned whether the consequent slaughter of men, women and children is not really suicide. . . .

Those were harsh words, from Mr. Harper’s periodical, yet no harsher than conditions warranted, as the State of New York discovered when it made an investigation into the operating practices of its railroads. It learned that a difference of at least five minutes was to be expected of the watches of engineer and conductor. It found that a train might expect to encounter an unguarded and wide-open drawbridge either by day or by night, and that an engineer might well run his train on the supposition he would find another train out of its scheduled running order at any old place along the line. So careless had locomotive engineers become and so erratic their rolling stock, that No. 238 of the two hundred and fifty regulations that an alarmed New York saw fit to set up, required that The engineman must invariably start with care and see that he has his whole train before he gets beyond the limits of the station.

First Connecticut, then New York, then other states, desperate at the horrors committed almost daily by the railroads, attempted to stay the slaughter. Regulations tumbled out of the legislative committees like a snow storm—and had little more effect. True, equipment did improve simply from necessity; rails were made better and heavier for the same reason. Humanitarianism did not enter into it. But inventors were busy. Janney and his automatic coupler and other devices, Westinghouse with his air brake, they and a thousand other gadgeteers were offering the roads marvelous or indifferent or hopeless ideas. Janney and Westinghouse made an impression, but their fine devices were used sparingly until the fanatic Alonzo Coffin arose to cry aloud at the murder, and to club the railroads and the government until the Interstate Commerce Commission came into being and forced the automatic coupler and air brake on the recalcitrant railroads.

Another great improver of railroad travel, George Mortimer Pullman, was made of the same stout stuff as the railroad operators. So was Webster Wagner. Pullman and Wagner, and half a dozen other men, started separately to build sleeping cars, then parlor cars and dining cars. gauding them with all the art forms beloved of Victorians, including plush and damask and paneled wood, mirrors on every hand and silver-plated cuspidors, thus achieving a true rolling horror on wheels that caught the fancy of the mass of new eleganti who were just emerging from the log-cabin era and were likely to confuse elaborateness with beauty, whether in a house design by M. Mansard or a railroad coach by G. Pullman.

Busy as they were with their manufacturing, Pullman and Wagner found time to fight each other, using the same tactics employed by the railroad men—gouging, cheating, suborning perjury, bribing. They also found some time to devote to their employes, especially Mr. Pullman, whose barony near Chicago became the scene of one of the bitterest industrial wars the country has known.

Yet, because of Wagner and Pullman and their competitors, travel on the steam cars grew much better and immeasurably more comfortable.

By 1870 the railroad was safer than it had ever been, and more comfortable. Almost everybody agreed with that. There were also many Americans who thought it was altogether too costly—not the Pullman cars, not even the day coaches, but simply the cost to the public of having any railroads at all. These men were the farmers, mostly farmers of the Midwest, and they had known, and were to know again, some tragically bad times, times when drought killed their cattle, when myriads of grasshoppers appeared without warning to leap at their crops and devour them; times when corn at ten cents a bushel was too expensive to ship, so they burned it for fuel. And, above all, times when speculators and the railroads seemed in combine to rob the farmer of everything he had.

Flitting through the Midwest like a wind running through the wheat, and with no thought of railroads on his mind, Oliver Hudson Kelley, a fanatic with an idea for a social and educational society for farmers, nevertheless founded the Patrons of Husbandry, the Grange, which burgeoned swiftly into a mighty army of rustics in the West and South, then attacked the railroads in force and from all sides. Until the Grangers, no group in the United States had ever been a real challenge to the railroads, grown as arrogant as they were powerful. The Grangers actually tamed the carriers, taught them a few manners, then subsided into the kind of group Founder Kelley had envisioned from the first. It was a happy occasion for all America when the farmers rose against the railroads. When it was over, the lines were better and more useful citizens.

Although railroads were hardly agencies of reform, nevertheless it was they who gave the United States its one and only reform in the important matter of time. Until an October day in 1883, railroads and all else in the United States operated on clocks set by the sun or on some whim held by local commerce or industry. How many different standard times there were in the country is not to be known. This situation, which had been no hardship in canal and stagecoach days, became serious with the railroads. After more than ten years of agitation, started implausibly enough by the principal of a school for young ladies, Prof. C. F. Dowd, noon of the 18th of October, 1883, was set by the railroads as the moment when four time belts would come into existence—that is, so far as the railroads were concerned.

If you think that the proposal was accepted with joy by the United States, then you do not understand your countrymen. There was plenty of opposition to the time belts, ranging all the way from the federal government, which officially ignored time belts for the next thirty-five years, to the Rev. Mr. Watson, Tennessee preacher, who pounded his dollar watch into pulp with a claw hammer, right in the pulpit, to indicate that the four time belts would make all timepieces worthless because, so it appeared to Mr. Watson, they interfered with God’s own ideas about time. Incidentally, and all prophecies to the contrary, the adoption of the time standards was accomplished without an accident to a railroad train.

The time belts were of tremendous advantage to the country, railroads and all else. Another advance was the forming of the Interstate Commerce Commission, stemming from the Granger movement, which helped the carriers to improve their morals and also to protect their employees from needless injury. As for the employees, they were helping themselves, organizing first one Brotherhood, then another, staging or taking part in strikes only when they felt nothing else would do; but when they did strike, they struck with desperate determination. The years 1877 and 1894 were wreathed in the smoke of burning cars and gunpowder, while would-be travelers stayed at home and little freight moved. Out of the violence the railroad unions emerged both strong and stable, to be of immeasurable help in making railroad employees dependable, self-reliant, well-paid, and efficient. For a long period hard liquor was the greatest enemy to good railroad operation. Education and pressure, both by the unions and the carriers, plus the celebrated Rule G, brought such sobriety that for a long time past few Americans have seen a drunken railroad man on duty.

Railroads permeated every last corner of American geography and mind. The trunk lines stretched out to reach Chicago, to reach the Gulf, to reach the West Coast. Branch lines came to the main lines in patterns like the ribs to a fish’s backbone. And before the great period of construction had reached its climax, stub lines forked off from branch lines until one would have been hard put to trace all the relationships. Into the second decade of the twentieth century new rails were being laid, although by then, too, many a branch line was finding the going difficult indeed; and soon they were fading, one after the other, as the internal combustion engine took hold of America and started to change its habits once more, just as the rails had changed things seventy-five years before.

A huge book, set in fine type, would not find room even to list the countless occupations brought into being by the railroads. All railroad jobs were, of course, new occupations, and so were many jobs merely associated with railroads. Express service was virtually unknown until a few men like William Harnden, Daniel Niles, and Alvin Adams took to riding the steam cars, carrying inside their tall beaver hats the important and valuable parcels of businessmen who did not like the slowness of the mails, nor consider the postoffice wholly reliable. The individual express men filled a real need. In a little while their business was such as to require them to carry carpetbags, then trunks, until finally they were renting whole cars and the express business became of great importance to the railroads.

The federal government did not favor express companies, and for a considerable period harassed them as lawbreakers; yet, because express did fill a need, it grew famously in spite of all objections and probably had an influence in forcing Uncle Sam to give better service with his mails. The Fast Mail came into being. All America was greatly excited and immensely pleased to see mailbags snatched from stanchions at little depots by the iron arm of the mail car while the train thundered by in full flight. Mail cars were painted prettily. They were marked with the symbol of the Union, flying with her own wings. The Fast Mail train itself was a grand symbol of Progress in an age that was certain Progress led, if not to Utopia, then to a fine condition of things anyway.

In these handsome cars rode young men who sorted letters and papers while the train rolled through the night, while it spanned rivers and crossed mountains, speeding the correspondence of the nation, bringing the far outposts on the Pacific shore twenty-four hours closer to the old settled regions. It was wonderful, and any man who doubted the future was no man to live in America.

From Mr. Pullman’s sleeping cars came a new occupation that proved to be a boon to colored men who were chattels no longer but were still not free from their heredity. The Pullman porter grew into a type, a character, as standard and recognizable as that of the policeman, the cowboy, or the commercial drummer.

Other jobs, too, stemmed from the rails, among them jobs to be filled by hundreds of boys and young men who were known as train boys or news butchers, half salesmen, half carnival folk, who walked the rolling trains and hawked their wares, supplying the latest news to literates, and the Facts of Life to adolescents in the form of Only a Boy and the snappy Paris Package, not to be opened in the cars, and tons of salted peanuts and chewing gum to ruminants.

Telegraphy did not come into its own until its conjunction with the railroad, a fact Ezra Cornell made clear at some effort to himself and to his own great fortune. Telegraphers soon were a race apart, a fraternity comparable to that of the tramp printers in some respects, yet leading to better things. More than one railroad president got his start pounding a key at some obscure junction or way station.

Inspired by the new railroads, the Reno brothers of Indiana invented the profession of train robber, highly thought of and much romanticized for a hundred years, due in part to the spectacular professional technique developed by members of the James and Younger families, together with the hard-riding Daltons and the persistent and determined firm of Evans & Sontag, in some respects the greatest of them all.

Hero though the train robber was to much of America, an even greater hero was the Brave Engineer, the man in the right-hand side of the locomotive cab, who drove his train safely through night and storm; or tragically into some other train, or washout, or defective bridge or rail. The Brave Engineer largely supplanted the Soldier and the Sailor as what Young America wanted to be when he grew up. Keen-eyed, tanned to leather by the elements that constantly played upon him, the lines in his face marked with soot, the engineer always looked ahead, scanning the bright rails for danger, his mind weighted with responsibility for his charges in the cars, his left arm resting on the throttle. It was his duty to put her through, or to die at his post, and die he too often did, to go into balladry along with the boy upon the burning deck and the kind if inefficient skipper of the doomed Hesperus.

He was a great, a magnificent figure to Young America. More than one banker and college president and eminent divine envied him, too, for his was the post they all had wanted and once meant to have, the calling for which superb whistles blew and noble bells rang, to the accompaniment of pounding drivers on the rails. He was the man who put her through, come what might of the weather or other deviltry.

Time was his very god, this man. No matter what the timecard showed, no matter how able the officials, the division superintendents, the dispatchers, switchmen, and fireman, it was at last and finally the engineer who put her through on time. With the coming of the railroad, Time for the first time in history really became an important measure in the lives of most Americans. To be on time was railroad fashion. Even so ordinarily detached a man as Henry David Thoreau, in his cabin in the woods on Walden pond, came to reflect a good deal on Time and The Railroad. They come and go, said he of the trains that passed his pond, with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-regulated institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office?

Yes, Mr. Thoreau, they did, and do. A thesis that the most punctual peoples on earth are those best served by railroads could doubtless be supported by incontrovertible evidence. In addition, when the railroad is applied to a new country, such as most of America was in 1840, the railroad demands that a people be up and coming in all ways, if they would survive. Languor, indolence, beget themselves in no greater degree than does speed, hurry, being on time, or ahead of it. The railroad begat not only speed, but also precision and promptitude. The United States rapidly built itself into a great country by reason of many acquired habits, chief among them stemming, I am convinced, from the very force and urgency of the railroad.

The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, said Thoreau, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. That was it. The Brave Engineer and his Iron Horse had begun, even in Thoreau’s day, to set the pace that was to hurry America to its material triumph. Pious men sought to stop its progress, on the first day of the week; but not even the tablets of Moses, at least in translation, could stop the Brave Engineer from making his run. Plain greed of speculators came nearer to stopping it than did the Fourth Commandment.

Plain greed, in the form and style of watered stock, was the first dangerous disease to attack the railroads, and watered stock was a great and almost continuous scandal for half a century. It laid many a fine carrier low, and put them into bankruptcy courts, where they had no more real need of being than could be imagined. Plain greed also did much good. It tended to consolidate many small or weak carriers into one or another of the big systems which could and did, and do to this day, serve vast regions so well that newer forms of transportation will have a time of it to dislodge them.

Into every last part of the American credo the railroad has permeated. Our ballads and stage plays and movies, our literary fiction, our studies in economics and geography—aye, and politics—all have felt in some degree the effects of the steam carriers. Makers of luggage had to conform to the limitations of seats and shelves in day coaches and Pullman cars. They had also to build well in order to defeat the muscular temperament of baggage men, often called smashers. Inventive minds compounded mixtures to alleviate or prevent the ills suffered from car smoke and gas and the motion of moving cars. Printers sat up nights to devise methods of numbering the endless tickets and bills and forms needed for travel and transportation. Folk living near imposing mountains or beside gorgeous lakes suddenly discovered the Summer Visitor trade and have lived on it ever since. Other folk found their regions salubrious and warm in winter. The railroad was happy to bear these tidings and prompt to carry people thither, while forward-looking man erected huge hotels to accommodate the visitors.

There was no end to the ramifications of the steam cars. Hordes of calculators and orderly thinkers had to pool their resources to formulate the interminable records and the gigantic bookkeeping machine that apportions the proper amounts of passenger income from through tickets to this or that road. Other moles had to burrow into the deep morass of routes and public needs to produce schedules by which a man on the peak end of Florida could travel without delays to Port Angeles on the Olympic peninsula of Washington, or ship a box of fruit from San Diego, California, to Fort Fairfield, Maine, and have it arrive in good condition.

It was the Brave Engineer that the public knew and admired. The public never saw or thought of the railroad bookkeeper, a whole army of him, who had to devise, then to operate the system by which thousands of freight cars, owned by a thousand different roads, could be run over all those roads and their every moment, their every penny of expense and income charged and credited to the proper lines. It gives one a monumental headache just to consider such a task. Next time you watch a passing freight, note the owners of the cars—Wabash, Pere Marquette, Soo, Kansas Pacific, Fruit Growers Express, Central of Jersey, Rock Island, Canadian Pacific. There they roll, all in one string, touring the country, forty-eight states, and nine provinces, all carrying something to somebody from somebody. There is magic in the names on their sides, but they move and are accounted for not by any magic but because of the plodding and accurate work of thousands of men and women who keep the records. Nobody ever found Charley Ross, the Lost Boy, but the railroad people know where their hundreds of thousands of cars are, any week, any day, almost at any hour.

There go your long timbers at forty miles an hour, like battering rams sent against the city from the woods. Back to the woods goes a chair to sit in, or a mackinaw to wear, or a case of fruit to keep scurvy away. The movement is shuttle-like. Always there is something needed at a distant point, and the railroad that does not or cannot carry goods both ways is headed for the courts or the boneyard. Shrewd men in insulated offices look at maps, scan industrial and agricultural statistics, keep one eye on the calendar, another on the weather, in order that the Milwaukee or the Rutland or the Texas & Pacific shall not be caught without cars when time and weather conspire to force movement of whatever is seasonable. They never get into the ballads or the plays, these men, and seldom into the newspapers, but it is because of them that the Brave Engineer puts her through on time.

Coordination of effort has been a notable achievement of American industry and business generally. Nowhere is this factor to be found in better working order than in the American railway system. So smooth, so precise, so punctual is this system that the average person seldom has reason to reflect on it. He is served, whether as passenger or shipper, so well that he takes for granted the complicated and vast network of rail carriers.

This network is a giant, a giant so familiar, so close to our daily lives, that we seldom if ever appreciate its real size. Consider that the United States has 227,335 miles of railroad, almost one-third of the world total. Included in this American system are 398,730 miles of track. Over these tracks, every day, run 24,000 freight trains and 17,500 passenger trains.

It requires more than one million persons to operate the Class 1 American railroads alone, and of these employees (in 1944) 115,000 were women.* Wages paid in 1944 total $3,853,345,000.

The railroad dollar earned comes from four major sources: 74.2 cents from freight, 19.0 cents from passengers, 1.5 cents from express, and 1.4 cents from the mails; all other sources contribute the remaining 3.9 cents.

Incidentally, American railroads are publishers to the extent of 80 million copies of timetables yearly.

What railroads mean to the financial structure of the country is indicated by their evaluation, set in 1944 at $27½ billions.†

The railroads have usually been run by ingenious men, quick to sense a challenge of any sort, and quick to meet it. Of challenges and other dangers they have had their share, and now, in mid-twentieth century, the challenge of the internal combustion engine is the greatest they have had to face. It seems to be the history of ideas and methods that the steam carriers either will become obsolescent, then disappear, or will survive in some modified form, although still tied to rails. It is certain, I think, that they will survive, even in modified form, for many years. I hope they will survive, nor change too much, either, for to me the steam railroad is the essence of America, the America I have known and believe to be the finest place on earth. Railroads had a great deal to do with making it that way.

To me, the distance between two points is still in railroad mileage, and not by air line or bus line. Perhaps this is as good a sign as any that one does not belong to the younger generation, either in years or in spirit. It is one of the penalties for being born in a time when the Brave Engineer was one of the noblest Americans of them all, when a train of steam cars was magic that took one to all known places, and beyond, even in Oz. I find I bear this particular penalty of age very lightly. I even find room for pity of the generations too young to have known the steam railroad in its heyday, that lasted for some eighty years and cast a sorcery from which I, for one, have never attempted to escape. Let me sing of the magic steam cars of my day, and of two generations before.

* Chapters in Erie and Other Essays.

* Class 1 railroads are those with operating expenses of more than one million dollars annually.

† Current statistics are not available with respect to institutional holdings of railroad bonds. According to the Interstate Commerce Commission, and based upon testimony submitted to it in 1937 on behalf of the Railroad Security Owners Association, in hearings in Ex Parte No. 123, nearly 56 per cent of the total net railroad funded debt at the end of 1936 (excluding intercompany railroad holdings) was held by insurance companies, banks, endowed educational institutions, and foundations.—Railroad Finance; A Report by the Subcommittee on Finance. Railroad Committee for the Study of Transportation. Association of American Railroads. 1947.

CHAPTER II

The Prophets

I do verily believe that carriages propelled by steam will come into general use, and travel at the rate of 300 miles a day.

—OLIVER EVANS, 1813

NEARLY all great innovations seemingly must be preceded by prophets, men for the most part ignored or ridiculed, who have the vision to comprehend the implications inherent in a new discovery or a new invention. Stating something novel, something that differs radically from what is currently believed, is dangerous business. It used to be common practice to feed such prophets a stout dose of hemlock brew, or simply burn them at the stake. In any period the role of prophet is no life of joy.

It is probably true that a majority of prophets become monomaniacs and bores, tramping streets and turnpikes, stopping all who will listen or who can’t escape, haunting legislatures, writing tracts and pieces for the papers, ringing doorbells, and standing hat in hand to plead futilely with some wealthy and completely unimaginative nobody for a little cash to aid in transforming the shadowy nimbus into the hard fact of substance.

These prophets, or advance men for the new day, are pretty certain to have a hard time of it, and ’tis little wonder that many of them fell finally into habits of vice, such as the taking of drams. Because they see clearly what their fellows cannot see at all and do not even believe possible, they are set down as fanatics—at best dreamers, lookers at the moon when it is full, sitters on clouds, men who permit their poor wives to drudge, their children to starve, all for the sake of some nebulous idea in a distorted mind. At worst, the prophets of things to come are reviled as agents straight from the pit that has no bottom and are treated as enemies of the established order, as indeed often they are.

One, and perhaps the greatest, disregarded prophet of the steam railroad in the United States was a persistent and cantankerous genius born Oliver Evans in 1755, in Delaware. When he was seventeen he read about the steam engine that James Watt had recently perfected in England, and from that point to the end of his life Evans’ great ambition was the utilization of the steam engine, chiefly as a locomotive force. His first work, however, took the form of valuable and rather startling improvements in the machinery of a gristmill operated by his brothers at Wilmington. He also experimented with steam engines of his own construction.

Right after the close of the Revolution, Evans had progressed so far with his steam experiments that he petitioned the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Maryland for the exclusive rights to use his improvements in flour mills and steam carriages in those states. Pennsylvania granted the flour-mill part of the petition, and Maryland granted the whole request, showing its complete disbelief in its stated reason that whatever Evans did with steam carriages could harm no one.

Evans devoted the next thirteen years to developing a steam-propelled carriage. During this period he remained as poor as a dormouse, using what cash came his way for his experiments. He also tried, futilely, to find someone who would put up sufficient money for a practical demonstration. At last he gave up his steam carriage idea for the time, and built a steam dredge, which he prodigiously named Orukter Amphibole and which he drove overland, under its own steam power and to the horror or amazement of all who saw it, from his shop in Philadelphia to the Schuylkill River. A contemporary drawing of the contrivance indicates it to have been startlingly similar to the amphibious automotive machines used in World War II.

Although Orukter Amphibole was a ten days’ wonder, it got Evans nowhere. Meanwhile, his steam-milling inventions, which performed every necessary movement of the grain and meal from one part of the mill to another without