The Great Railway Revolution E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 808

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In the 1830s, The United States underwent a second revolution. The opening of the Baltimore & Ohio line, the first American railroad, set in motion a process which, by the end of the century, would enmesh the vast country in a latticework of railroad lines, small-town stations and magisterial termini, built and controlled the biggest corporations in America. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, as the automobile and the aeroplane came to dominate American journey-making, the historic importance of the railroads began to be erased from America's hearts and minds. In The Great Railway Revolution, Christian Wolmar tells us the extraordinary one-hundred-and-eighty-year story of the rise, fall and ultimate shattering of the greatest of all American endeavours, of technological triumph and human tragedy, of visionary pioneers and venal and rapacious railway barons. He also argues that while America has largely disowned this heritage, now is the time to celebrate, reclaim and reinstate it. The growth of the US railroads was much more than just a revolution in mode, speed and convenience. They united the far-flung components of a vast and disparate country and supercharged the economic development that fuelled its rise to world-power status. America was created by its railroads and the massive expansion of trade, industry and freedom of communication that they engendered came to be an integral part of the American dream itself.

Leseprobe

Also by Christian Wolmar

Engines of War

Blood, Iron & Gold

Fire & Steam

The Subterranean Railway

On the Wrong Line

Down the Tube

Broken Rails

Forgotten Children

Stagecoach

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2012

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85789-035-1 E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-779-4

Text design by carrdesignstudio.com Maps by Jeff Edwards Index by David Atkinson

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Illustrations

Maps

Introduction

1. The railways win out

2. A passionate affair

3. The railways take hold

4. The battle lines

5. Harnessing the elephant

6. Railways to everywhere

7. Getting better all the time

8. The end of the affair

9. All kinds of train

10. The roots of decline

11. A narrow escape

12. Renaissance without passengers

Bibliography

Notes

Index

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Railroads, 1880.

2. Railroads, 1916.

3. Pennsylvania Railroad.

4. Railroads, 1850.

5. US Rail Network, 2010.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Atlantic locomotive built by Phineas Davis. © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.

2. The Best Friend of Charleston. Getty Images.

3. Completion of the first Transcontinental railroad. © Bettmann/Corbis.

4. Railroad travellers shooting buffalo. Getty Images.

5. The ticket office of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. © Bettmann/Corbis.

6. ‘The Immigrants’ Guide to the Most Fertile Lands of Kansas’. © Bettmann/Corbis.

7. Farmers versus the railroads cartoon. © Corbis.

8. Completion of the Great Northern Railroad. © Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis.

9. Historical caricature of the Cherokee Nation © Corbis.

10. Texas Central Railway Yards in Houston. © Corbis.

11. Crowded passenger car illustration. ClassicStock/Alamy.

12. Railroad station in the Catskills. © Bettmann/Corbis.

13. Elevated railway section in New York. Getty Images.

14. B & O Railroad electric locomotive. © Schenectady Museum; Hall of Electrical History Foundation/Corbis.

15. Edward H. Harriman cartoon. © Corbis.

16. Dutch immigrants. © Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis.

17. A logging railroad in a forest. © PEMCO - Webster & Stevens Collection; Museum of History and Industry, Seattle/Corbis.

18. Cartoon on railroad influence. Getty Images.

19. Red Cross workers and World War I soldiers. © Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis.

20. Steam train on a trestle bridge. © Corbis.

21. Illinois State troopers at a railroad strike. © Bettmann/Corbis.

22. Pennsylvania Railroad Station. © Bettmann/Corbis.

23. Red Cap porter. © H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis.

24. Three streamlined locomotives. © Bettmann/Corbis.

25. The Twin Cities Zephyr. © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.

26. Pennsylvania Railroad poster. © Swim Ink 2, LLC/Corbis.

27. Southern Pacific poster. © Swim Ink 2, LLC/Corbis.

28. Passengers watching a movie on a train. © Bettmann/Corbis.

29. ‘Is Your Trip Necessary?’ poster. © Swim Ink 2, LLC/Corbis.

30. Senator Alben Barkley and President Truman. © Bettmann/Corbis.

31. Santa Fe Chief train wreck. © Bettmann/Corbis.

32. Amtrak’s Acela Express. © Ken Cedeno/Corbis.

INTRODUCTION

America was made by the railways. They united the country and then stimulated the economic development that enabled the country to become the world’s richest nation. The railroads also transformed American society, changing it from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse in the space of a few decades of the nineteenth century. Quite simply, without the railways the United States would not have become the United States.

The extraordinary growth of the railways changed the very nature of America. From modest beginnings in the 1830s, the mileage grew to cover nearly 200,000 miles by the turn of the century, more than in any other country in the world. Yet, the epic tale of the growth of the railways and their influence on the development of the nation is now largely forgotten and ignored. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the automobile and the aeroplane continued their relentless march towards domination of the US domestic transport network, the historical importance of the railroads was being written out of the nation’s consciousness. Passenger railways were reduced to a loss-making rump. Mention the American railways to most people, and they will talk about them as a spent force. Yet railways still flourish in the United States, and are a vital part of the infrastructure. The tracks are still there but even when the huge freight trains run through town centres they somehow remain invisible to the American public. It is a surprising fact that America’s railroad network remains the world’s largest, and is the bedrock of the country’s freight transport system. There are, too, signs of a revival in passenger railways with money available from the federal government thanks to President Obama’s welcome, if flawed, stimulus package of 2009 and a rise in passenger numbers on Amtrak services. America may have gradually disowned its railroad heritage – but now is the time to reclaim and reinstate it.

This book attempts to do just that. While there are countless tomes on railway history, few have tried to tell the story of the railroads and their impact in one concise narrative. Obviously, that has meant taking a very selective approach and inevitably many facets of the rich story of the American railways have been left out. Inevitably, it has been impossible to be comprehensive and I have had to be selective on what aspects to cover in detail. I have, for example, chosen particular railways to look at in some depth as examples since there is no way that any book of a reasonable length could adequately cover the history of 250,000 miles of track which was America’s route mileage at the railways’ height. Obviously most of the prominent companies are mentioned in the book but there are numerous omissions for reasons of space or repetition.

As with several of my other books, I have focused more on the nineteenth century than the twentieth. That is deliberate. It was in the nineteenth that the railways were being built and they reached their zenith soon after the turn of the century. The story of the twentieth is one largely of decline and waning influence, a time when railways were losing their importance and where opportunities to make best use of this historic legacy were missed. While this period is covered in less detail than the early times, I try to explain why what started out as a love affair between the American people and their railways has turned out so badly and why an industry that makes such a positive contribution to America’s economy today is largely ignored or even reviled.

I have highlighted for particular attention the role of a few of the individuals who created or ran the railways, but again for reasons of space I have left out many other great characters who have contributed to the making of American railways during its near two centuries of existence. I make no apology, but hope the reader will understand how difficult this selection has been.

The first chapter looks at how railways emerged and why they developed as opposed to other forms of technology. Each aspect of what constituted a railway had to be conceived, developed and refined: track beds, rails, carriages and locomotives. Railways brought together the most complex set of technologies developed since the dawn of civilization. And America was a pioneer, joining the railway age just after the first modern railway had been opened in the United Kingdom. America was a young country, ripe for the railway revolution, and within a few years of the first line opening there were already a thousand miles in short separate lines laid principally on the Eastern seaboard.

Quite clearly, the railroad’s moment had arrived. It soon became obvious to its early promoters that – on grounds of efficiency and cheapness – locomotives rather than horses must be used to pull the carriages and railroad trucks. The first significant railway had been developed in Britain in 1830 and several European countries had quickly followed suit. The United States fast caught up and was soon leading the world in railway mileage. The railway age had arrived and nothing could stop it.

The second chapter shows how America’s relationship with the railroads soon became a passionate affair. They grew symbiotically, rapidly spreading across the more economically advanced states. From harbouring doubts about the railways, suddenly everyone wanted to be connected to the railway. The burgeoning United States adopted railroad technology faster and with more enthusiasm than any other nation, embracing the new invention which seemed to reflect the pioneering spirit of the age. Up and down the East Coast, railway lines sprang up with amazing speed, stimulating economic growth that would change the way people lived and eventually make America the most powerful nation on earth. Of the twenty-six states that comprised the Union in 1840, only four – Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Vermont – had not completed their first mile of track. The beginnings of what would become the major railroad companies were established during the 1840s with the opening of the New York Central & Hudson River and Pennsylvania lines. However, for the most part in the 1830s and 1840s the development of the railways was a local affair. People wanted to have easy access to the local town, or possibly to the other end of the state, rather than across the nation. These early railway companies were a true ragbag of outfits, ranging from, literally, one-horse companies carrying coal out of a mine, to longer lines stretching into the outback and carrying thousands of passengers a week.

The third chapter shows how the railways took off as an industry in the years running up to the Civil War. The 1850s saw a massive increase in the pace of track development and the mileage more than tripled during the decade. This was a period of strong economic performance, both driven by the railroads and speeded up by their construction. Although most of the railroads were built by the private sector, little of this remarkable growth would have been possible without government support through various mechanisms, such as allowing companies to run lotteries, the granting of monopolistic rights, tax exemptions and land grants. It was the start of a difficult relationship between government and the railroads.

The American railroads were bigger in every sense than those in Europe. They covered longer distances, used larger locomotives and hauled longer trains. The railways seemed to be tailor-made for the huge American land mass and for the indomitable spirit of its people. European countries were constrained by reactionary governments slow to recognize the social and economic benefits of the railways and by old-fashioned customs that those with vested interests worked hard to protect. Americans, however – free from the shackles of tradition and unencumbered by obstructive government – took to the new method of transportation with far more gusto and enthusiasm than their European peers.

The Civil War, covered in Chapter 4, was the first true railway war and was particularly lengthy and bloody as a result. Key battles were fought around railroad junctions, railroad sabotage became a key tactic of the war, and troops were transported huge distances in a way that would have been impossible even a decade previously. The North, industrially stronger than its rival, was lent a key advantage by its superior railroads, which, crucially, were far better managed during the war than those of the South. The Unionists quickly realized that the operation of the railroads could not be left to chance and placed them under military control early in the conflict. By contrast, the Secessionists never established government rule over their railroads, with the result that they operated far less efficiently.

The war would also witness remarkable examples of derring-do on the railroads: the Andrews Raid (or Great Locomotive Chase) in April 1862 – in which Union volunteers commandeered a locomotive on the Western & Atlantic line, deep in Confederate territory, and created mayhem as they drove it north – has entered American folklore but somewhat obscured the true story of the railroads in this conflict.

The fifth chapter tells the story of the construction of the first Transcontinental railway in the United States. The idea of a coast-to-coast line had first been mooted as early as 1820 but it was not until the 1850s that the idea was seriously considered; its start was delayed by the Civil War, although ironically it was the absence of the Southern politicians which allowed the legislation to be passed by Congress. It was by far the most ambitious railway project of this period in the world – to be surpassed only by the Transsiberian, the subject of my next book – but its exact purpose was somewhat unclear. To reach the Pacific Ocean, 3,000 miles away, was an obvious ambition for the federal government in Washington seeking to unify the new nation, but it was never going to be a commercial proposition. Therefore financial and land grants were made available to the two companies building the line.

Thanks to lobbying by a remarkable young dreamer, Theodore Judah, who gained the political backing of Abraham Lincoln, Congress passed the Act to build the line in 1862. The law also allowed for massive subsidies in the form of both cash and land grants to the two companies building the line, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific.

Like much of the story of the US railroads, the building of the Transcontinental encompassed both the best and worst aspects of pioneering American culture. On the one hand, there was the extraordinary achievement of building nearly 2,000 miles of line through two mountain ranges and a long stretch of desert, making it by far the longest railway in the world up to that point; on the other, the shameless corruption which allowed the directors of both companies to make extraordinary riches through the simple expedient of contracting the work through dummy construction companies. The Crédit Mobilier of America, established in 1864 by Dr Thomas Durant, was at the centre of the scandal that broke in 1872, when it was revealed that a number of Congressmen had received cash bribes or shares in the company. There was, too, the excess of competitive zeal which saw, at one point, the ridiculous phenomenon of the two railroad companies grading parallel lines in order to maximize the land grants paid by the government. Nevertheless, the celebration to mark the completion of the Transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869 must be seen as one of the turning-points of US history.

In Chapters 6 and 7, the amazing exponential growth of the railways during the rest of the nineteenth century is explored against the backdrop of their growing unpopularity. No community of any size in the US could afford to be out of range of a locomotive’s whistle, and, by the end of the century, with a network encompassing more than 200,000 miles, very few were. The Transcontinental had prompted growth in the West and the railroad was beginning to knit the nation together. The 1880s saw the biggest increase in rail mileage of any period of US history: 71,000 miles of track were built during this decade, most of it in the states west of the Mississippi. The construction boom was greatly stimulated by the federal government’s continuing programme of offering land grants to the railroad companies constructing these lines. The grants were controversial as they benefited a relatively small number of companies but they undoubtedly played a critical role in bringing the eastern and western parts of the United States together. Without them the widespread settlement of the West by newly arrived immigrants might not have been possible.

For passengers, technical improvements were making their journeys better. Significant improvements to the quality of the tracks allowed faster speeds, while better locomotive technology enabled the railroads to carry heavier loads at a cheaper rate. Introduction of better brakes, steel rails and improved couplers enhanced the performance of an industry that had been widely criticized for delays and accidents. The needs of passengers were catered to by such innovations as dining and sleeping cars promoted by the inventor and industrialist George Pullman. In addition, the railroads began to standardize equipment and operating procedures, further reducing costs and making it easier for trains to run on the lines of other companies.

During this period of rapid growth, the very nature of the rail system changed in fundamental and highly visible ways: for instance, towns with two or more stations often built one consolidated ‘union’ station, and separate lines that had hitherto been separate were linked up for the first time. In November 1883, time was standardized into four zones to help the railways keep to schedule. A truly national rail network was taking shape.

Despite these many positive developments for the railroads, services remained basic on many lines, adding to the unpopularity of the railroads with some members of the public. The post-bellum period was also the age of ‘bare knuckles’, as the major companies began to slug it out for increased market share. Powerful and unscrupulous railroad magnates – men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew and the banker Jay Gould – became a feature of the industrial landscape of America’s ‘Gilded Age’ and they exacerbated the railroads’ unpopularity, as did their response to the increasing labour unrest. The resentment engendered by several railway strikes would be a significant factor in the birth of labour unions in the US. The farmers became an especially strong force opposed to the monopoly of the railroads, and even though many of their accusations were unfair, they were a potent and influential opposition. Over the course of barely a generation the railways became, first, disliked, and then widely resented. It was partly a natural cycle. At first the railways had been the plucky innovator, the new kid on the block bringing prosperity and opening new horizons, then they became the established but respected business and eventually they turned into the rapacious monopolist, reviled by almost everyone.

Chapter 8, taking a breather from the chronological narrative, looks at how, despite the increasing hostility towards them, the railroads had changed America. Few aspects of American life remained unaffected. Most of the changes brought about by the railway were beneficial: economic growth, creation of jobs, more efficient markets, opportunities to travel, easier distribution of goods and so on. There were numerous others ways in which trains and stations stimulated local economic activity. The trains brought in mail-order goods from department stores in the city, fresh produce for the local shops, mail, packages and newspapers. Even the station clock was a useful public amenity, providing what was probably the best local estimate of the time. The station, or depot, however modest, would become a key part of the town’s amenities, the start or end of most people’s visits or of journeys by local inhabitants to far distant lands. The relationship between the town and the station would be symbiotic, and as with much of this story it is difficult to disentangle the causation.

There were, though, negatives too. Because the poor could not afford to travel, it could be argued that the railways exacerbated the differences between have and have-nots. The big towns prospered thanks to these crowds who boosted their economies as they shopped, ate in restaurants and stayed in hotels. The consequent rapid and unplanned growth of the cities, stimulated by the railways, was not necessarily a welcome change. Railways, as with all transport improvements, benefit the areas where people want to go, and while there may have been the occasional rural excursion, for the most part it was the cities which profited from the ability of people to travel more easily. Central business districts sprung up near railway stations and, in order to maintain as much density as possible, the notion of the office block, and later the skyscraper, was born. These buildings full of white-collar staff were the new factories of the age, housing hundreds, if not thousands, of office workers in the way that manufacturing industry had done earlier.

The ninth chapter looks at the effect of the restrictive legislation, born of the increasing mistrust of the railways, which was to do them great harm in the twentieth century when their stranglehold over the transportation industry was lost. By the early years of the new century, the railroads had consolidated into seven major groupings (although many other smaller companies remained independent), a process that both increased their efficiency and allowed them to invest more in improvements. New lines were no longer the priority since virtually every community was now connected to the network, but there was a need for massive investment in the system. While many improvements were made in the pre-First World War period, the strictness of the control by the new regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, reduced the railroads’ profits and therefore their ability to invest. The key question was whether the railroads would actually have used any extra profits to good effect, or would they have simply paid out more money to their shareholders?

Consequently, the railroads entered the First World War in a relatively poor state. The neglected railways were now called upon to provide for unprecedented levels of demand and were found wanting. They were short of every type of capital asset, from new rails to functioning locomotives, and the lack of co-ordination between them meant services were inefficient and slow. As a result, the government was forced to take over control of the railways during the war, an unprecedented and largely unwelcome situation, which also posed the dilemma of what to do with them when the fighting ceased.

Chapter 10 covers the interwar years when, to arrest the decline in passenger numbers, the railroads invested heavily in new equipment and, after prevaricating, began to move over to the new technology of diesel that offered cheaper and faster services. This was the period when the rail companies provided the most exciting trains that ever ran on the American rail network, although sadly only for a relatively brief period as competition from roads and later aviation killed off these services. This time, in 1941, the railways entered the war better equipped and ready to co-operate with each other in order to ensure there was no repeat of government takeover.

And, finally, the final two chapters show how the performance of the railways in the Second World War was a last heyday, preceding a remarkably rapid decline, first in passengers, and then in freight which actually could have resulted in the closure of much of the network. In the event, the railways were rescued by the government and by changes in legislation. The freight railways are now flourishing and passenger rail growing, amid much discussion about increased investment and, in particular, high-speed rail. Towns and cities across the country see rail as a way of reducing the burden on the roads and, despite opposition, many new schemes are being put forward. The railway, a nineteenth-century invention which struggled in the latter part of the twentieth, undoubtedly has a great future in the twenty-first.

I have used the word ‘railway’ for the most part as the generic expression while the American equivalent ‘railroad’ has been used to refer to a company or companies. I dislike the expression ‘road’, shortened from railroad and used very widely in America, because of the confusion it might have caused among readers little versed in railway history, and therefore have rarely used it. I have, too, eschewed initials. The Baltimore & Ohio remains just that, rather than the B & O, because the proliferation of initials makes for difficult reading. This style, too, imposed on me a discipline not to use the names too often.

There are a few passages which are based on my earlier book, Blood, Iron & Gold. This although covering the world’s railways, detailed the US story and therefore inevitably I have drawn upon some parts of the narrative but expanded it. Similarly, a few events described in Fire & Steam, my book on the history of Britain’s railways, have inevitably been repeated in the first chapter, which recounts the pre-history of the railways, and the chapter on the Civil War relies in part from the equivalent chapter in Engines of War.

I have ignored the Canadian and Mexican railways, although they are in many ways part of the same interconnected system, not least through shared ownership. That is particularly true of the Transcontinentals – like the US, Canada built far too many too quickly, ending up with three to serve a tiny population – but I have left them out for reasons of simplicity and brevity. Recounting those stories is another book.

I am sure there are mistakes, and errors in interpretation. They are, of course, all my own. I hope though that they do not detract from the thrust of the book, which is to show the railways in context and to explain how they helped to create the America of today, even though that has been largely forgotten. Please do point out any mistakes by emailing me via my website www.christianwolmar.co.uk. This has proved very useful in the past and any corrections will find their way into future editions.

Special thanks are due to the hardy individuals who read the full draft and provided detailed corrections and suggestions: Clyde Williams, Gerald Rawling, John Fowler, Andrew Dow and John Sears. I cannot thank them enough. Some of the mistakes they uncovered required a level of attention to detail and knowledge that astonishes me. Many other people provided support, advice, corrections or information. In no particular order: Robert Lester Porter, Fritz Plous and the people on his email list, Diana Bailey Harris, Teresa Glynn (for office support), Xavier Bryce, Rupert Brennan Brown (only once), Andrew Adonis, Deborah Reddig, Craig Haberle and all at the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum, Kelly Ohler, Mike Forter (for fridge help), Nigel Harris, Pip Dunn and Tony Streeter.

Because of a hard drive failure at just the wrong time, I may have omitted several people, to whom I am deeply apologetic. I would, too, like to thank Amtrak, which did provide me with free travel – though not sleeper accommodation – for my tour around the country in the autumn of 2010. I may be a bit hard on the company, but at least it is still there celebrating its fortieth anniversary, which many thought it would never reach.

My agent, Andrew Lownie, steers me through the confusing world of publishing and the team at Atlantic Books are ever supportive. In particular, special thanks are due to my editor, Richard Milbank, who did so much to improve the book with amazingly detailed and thorough work, to Toby Mundy, who always believes in my ability to pull off these projects, and to Orlando Whitfield. And special thanks to my partner, Deborah Maby, who is always there for me.

Dedicated to all my children and stepchildren – Molly, Pascoe, Misha, Harriet and Robyn – and in memory of Tony Telford (1942-2011), who sadly died in the summer of 2011 and had helped me greatly with several of my earlier history books.

ONE

THE RAILWAYS WIN OUT1

It was a particularly prescient remark. Indeed, so prescient that it has subsequently become the stuff of legend. The speaker was an old man, Charles Carroll, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The event was the ceremonial turning of the first sod of earth to begin work on the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s pioneering railroad. The date, inevitably, was Independence Day, 4 July 1828, just over half a century after the declaration that resulted in the creation of the new nation. The words were simple: ‘I consider what I have just now done to be among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if indeed, it be even second to that.’

And so it proved. If the Declaration of Independence in 1776 marked the birth of a nation, the advent of the railroads enabled America to become the most prosperous nation on earth within a few decades of Carroll’s spadework, turning a pre-industrial society into an economic powerhouse. America and the railroads were to be a perfect fit, their joint growth intertwined so intimately that countless historians have been unable to determine whether it was the growth of the American economy that sparked the expansion of the railways or vice versa. The Baltimore & Ohio was not the first entity in America to call itself a railroad and, as we shall see, its reputation as the first modern railway in the United States rests on shaky ground, but there is no doubting the importance of its inauguration as a stimulus in creating America’s most important industry of the nineteenth century.

Railways had, in fact, been a long time coming. The first American railways were the product of a disparate series of inventions stretching back centuries, but which were mostly spawned by the Industrial Revolution in Britain that began in the first half of the eighteenth century. The long gestation period of the railways can be explained by the fact that it only became possible to construct them once the various aspects of technology which prefigured their birth had been developed and subsequently improved through application. A railway was a far more sophisticated concept than any previous invention, requiring several elements to come together: the technology, both for the traction and the track, the finance to pay for it, the permission of the state to build it, the creation of an appropriate legal framework, and, of course, the labour for construction. Such a co-ordination of different agencies, technologies and resources had only ever been effected for military purposes, and required vision and ambition, as well as the co-operation of the various entities involved. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the emergence of the railways was a stuttering process, conducted in fits and starts with numerous failures and dead ends along the way. Once they had been established, however, the railways would spread far faster than any of their pioneers could have imagined.

The precursor to railways, normally called wagonways2 or tramways, which consisted of wagons pushed or hauled along tracks by animal or human power, was actually quite an old invention. There are some suggestions that the ancient Greeks used tracks built into the road to drag boats across the Isthmus of Corinth. Traces of heavy, flat-topped stone blocks placed along a Roman road, the Fosse Way, near Leicester in the English Midlands – possible evidence of an early form of wagonway – can be found in the local museum. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century, however, that the increase in demand for coal prompted the invention of more sophisticated wagonways. The replacement of stone blocks with wooden tracks to support the wagons provided a better all-weather surface that could be used in conditions that turned conventional roads into mud. Soon there were extensive networks of these tracked wagonways, all with the same purpose, namely hauling heavy material, such as coal or slate out of the mines and, usually, to the nearest waterway. Wagonways also appeared in Germany and France but it was in Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, that their number grew fastest. While these early lines were crude and mostly quite short, several were substantial operations whose scale reflected the increased demand for coal. The Tanfield Way in County Durham, northeast England, opened in 1725 and soon built up to an astonishing traffic of 450,000 tons annually (or, as has been calculated, ‘one fully loaded wagon every 45 seconds on working days’3) and necessitated the construction of the Causey Arch, the world’s oldest stone railway bridge.

As loads became heavier, the simple wooden timbers laid on earth were quickly worn away. To counter this problem, the wood was covered with a layer of iron to protect the rails, a practice which was first recorded as early as 1738. This innovation led to a rapid spread in wagonways. Until the introduction of iron-covered rails, the total extent of the network was limited to a few hundred miles, with the longest wagonway stretching about a dozen miles, but the greater durability of the new rails encouraged the building of thousands of miles of iron ways. By the middle of the eighteenth century some longer tracks had been built to connect different mines, although sometimes less co-operative mine owners would ban their neighbours and rivals from transporting coal across their land, thus blocking the easiest access to waterways.

The next requirement was to stop the wagons slipping off the rails. Various ideas were tried, such as sinking the rails into the ground, as with some tramway lines today, and L-shaped rails to keep the wheels aligned, but the crucial idea of putting a flange all around the wheel began to be developed only in the late eighteenth century. There were two ways of ensuring the wheels stayed on the track. Either the edge of the rails could be turned up, making an L-shape to guide the wheel along the track, or the wheel could be fitted with a flange – a projecting rim – with similar results. The L-shaped rail was first tried out in 1776 at the Duke of Norfolk’s colliery in Yorkshire.

Not for the first or last time, a technological development proved unpopular with those affected by its introduction. In this instance, it was the colliers, who, on finding that the new type of rail required the use of fewer horses and men to haul the coal, broke up the rails – called plates – and chased the terrified platelayer, one John Curr, into the forest, where he hid for three days. L-shaped rails, though, proved cumbersome and inefficient, and various inventors tried putting the guiding flange on the wheel instead of the track. The pioneer of this method seems4 to have been William Jessop, who used flanged wheels on a wagonway in Loughborough, in the English Midlands, in 1789, a design which, of course, became the norm on all railways. Jessop is also credited with another crucial improvement, the laying of transverse sleepers (or ties as they are known in America) on which to lay and fix the rails, greatly improving the stability of the track.

There was fun to be had with these innovations, too. A century before Outram and Jessop, the idea of coaches running on tracks had appealed to King Louis XIV of France. The Sun King used to entertain his guests by giving them rides on the Roulette, a kind of roller-coaster built in the gardens of his château at Marly, near Versailles, in 1691. It was a carved and gilded carriage on wheels that thundered down a 250-metre wooden track into a valley, and, thanks to its momentum, up the other side – much to the amusement of the king’s bewigged guests.

None of these early lines, whether for hauling coal or entertaining French aristocrats, which were operated by human or animal power supplemented at times by gravity, could truly be said to resemble a ‘railway’ in the modern sense of the word. A convenient definition for a true railway might be a track-borne transport system powered by mechanical means – though horses were used in some early systems – able to carry freight or passengers in both directions and intended for public use. This latter was a crucial step forward. Railways would not have had their transformative effect if their use had been confined to the owner’s personal needs or to a single purpose such as hauling minerals. The next logical stage in their development was to become common carriers – i.e. to provide the facility not just for the owner, but to make it available to all-comers. These new lines tended to be run by canal companies, using the railways as feeders for their own networks. In July 1803, however, the nine-mile-long Surrey Iron Railway – in what is now suburban south London – was completed and was the first public railway open to anyone prepared to pay the toll. Numerous similar enterprises followed, connecting mines and waterways within their localities, and allowing a wider range of potential customers, including mills and factories, to transport their goods along the tracks.

With long-lasting track now available, the other requirement for a railway was the development of a power source other than the wretched animals that would never be suitable for anything beyond hauling relatively light loads for short distances. Steam power was the obvious answer, but, again, there were numerous technical and practical obstacles to overcome. The first engines driven by steam were probably devised by Thomas Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon, early in the eighteenth century. His work was based on the pioneering efforts of a seventeenth-century French scientist, Denis Papin, who had recognized that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam. Newcomen, using a recently improved version of smelting iron, developed the idea into working engines that could be used to pump water from mines. His invention proved to be crucial in keeping the tin and copper ore industry viable in Cornwall, since all the mines had reached a depth where they were permanently flooded and existing water-power pumps were insufficient to drain them. By 1733, when his patents ran out, around sixty Newcomen engines had been produced.

Working in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Scottish inventor and engineer James Watt made steam commercially viable by improving the efficiency of engines, and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. Boulton & Watt, his partnership with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, became the most important builder of steam engines in the world, cornering the market by registering a patent which effectively gave them a monopoly on all steam engine development in the UK until the end of the eighteenth century. Steam power quickly became commonplace in the early nineteenth century, and it was Boulton & Watt who provided the engine for the world’s first ‘practical’ steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, which made its short maiden voyage on a Glasgow canal in 1803. Various attempts to propel boats by steam power had been made in both Europe and America since the mid eighteenth century, but they had proved short-lived as a result of technical failure or other factors, notably fear of explosions. The most successful experiment had been the steamboat built by the US inventor John Fitch, which in 1788 operated a regular commercial service on the Delaware River between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, New Jersey, carrying up to thirty passengers. Fitch’s steamboat travelled more than 2,000 miles during its short period of service, but competition from the roads meant that it was not a commercial success.

Boulton & Watt’s much improved engines led to the construction of numerous steamboats which were to prove particularly useful in America with its vast distances and long stretches of navigable waterway. Steam power, therefore, was to be the catalyst for the early opening up of America – but on water rather than on rails. As George Rogers Taylor, author of the standard work on early transport systems in the US, suggests, right from its birth as a nation the United States was ‘peculiarly dependent upon river transportation’.5 River courses determined the location and size of settlements as, for a generation and more, waterways were the only way to reach much of the huge land mass eventually occupied by the United States.

The rivers, however, were obstacles as well as pathways, and navigating up them was an arduous and perilous task. On the lower reaches of the bigger rivers like the Mississippi or the Hudson, it was possible for the seagoing sailing ships to tack upriver for a few miles, but elsewhere swift currents and shallow waters made even such limited progress impossible. Produce from inland was, therefore, floated down on crude rafts and flatboats which were too unwieldy to make the return journey and were broken up for lumber. According to Taylor, ‘transportation up the rivers proved extremely time consuming and costly’.6 Labour costs to operate the narrow keelboats that were able to travel upriver were so high that these boats carried only the most essential items. The further west, the greater the difficulty of river transport. Pittsburgh could be reached only by a journey of nearly 2,000 miles from New Orleans that took four months ‘and required a crew of strong men prepared to utilize every known method in overcoming the difficulties of upriver navigation’.7 Sometimes these tireless men rowed or towed, or even, occasionally, ‘bushwhacked’, pulling themselves along with whatever overhanging vegetation might be available.

Steamships, therefore, transformed the scope of travel by river and the economies of the inland towns and villages. Once Watt’s engines had been refined by a series of inventors on both sides of the Atlantic, the feasibility of regular steamboat travel was demonstrated on northeastern waterways such as the Delaware and Hudson rivers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The North River Steamboat, designed by the distinguished inventor and entrepreneur Robert Fulton, plied the New York to Albany stretch of the Hudson River from September 1807, becoming the first commercially successful paddle-steamer. In the winter of 1811–12, another Fulton venture, a vessel optimistically named New Orleans, steamed down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and thereby became the first steamship to navigate the western waters of the United States. Going back upriver, however, proved too tough and the New Orleans never made the return journey. It was not until 1815 that a steamship, the Enterprise, successfully made the journey in both directions, confirming the potential of steamboats to navigate long distances both up and down river. This epoch-making journey ushered in the heyday of the steamship. While New York City quickly became the centre of the steamboat industry, rivers and bays along the whole Eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida were soon filled with steamers. On the Great Lakes steamships took longer to displace the sailing boats that were well suited to local conditions and cheaper to operate, but they eventually did so. From their first appearance on the Great Lakes around 1816–17, steamships grew steadily in size and number.

Further west, the advent of the steamship changed the whole economy of the region: ‘In the great valley of the Mississippi, steam-driven vessels proved the most important factor in the great industrial development of that region from 1815 to the eve of the civil war.’8 By 1820, sixty-nine steamships were navigating the western rivers and the total peaked at 727 in 1855, demonstrating why it took some time for the railroads to establish their complete domination of inland travel. The mileage of the river system, with the Mississippi as its spine, was impressive: ‘One of the great pioneers of western expansion, Senator Thomas Hart Benson (1782–1858) of Missouri – which in 1821 had been admitted as the first state wholly west of the Mississippi – reckoned that some 50,000 miles of water in the Mississippi river system were navigable by some kind of boat; in any case some 16,000 miles of steamboat routes are recorded.’9 It would take until the mid-1850s for the mileage of railroads to exceed even the latter figure. Indeed, at first, railroads and steamships complemented each other since many of the great rivers had not been forded and it was not until the completion of continuous rail routes through the construction of bridges that the decline of the waterways became inevitable.

Ships, of course, were limited to where they could go by the course of the rivers and it was not really until the advent of the steamship that the notion of changing the features of the landscape to suit the mode of transportation, rather than the other way round, was born. The resulting canal boom came late to America. While in Europe the heyday of canal-building was already well under way by the turn of the century, following the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in northwest England in 1761, there were still fewer than 100 miles of canal in the United States half a century later and only two of these man-made waterways were more than a couple of miles long. There was no shortage of ambitious projects being put forward by entrepreneurs, but few canals were actually built. As with the turnpikes, the nascent road network, it was the difficulty of finding capital, together with the failure of early ventures, which underlay this lack of interest. America’s belated canal mania was triggered by the brave decision to build the Erie Canal, an astonishingly ambitious project, which stretched 363 miles across New York State between the lower Hudson River at Albany and Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie. First proposed in 1807, it was built remarkably quickly between 1817 and 1825, becoming, by far, the longest man-made waterway in the world. Despite the difficulties of operation – there was only one towpath, and every time two boats met, one had to drop its towline into the water to allow the other to pass – its economic impact was immediate. Even before the canal’s completion, traffic crowded on to the finished sections and there was soon talk of overcrowding and expansion.

The wider economic impact of the canals demonstrated the same pattern that later would be seen in the railway boom. Transport costs to the interior were reduced dramatically, by as much as 95 per cent according to some assessments, and trade between the East Coast and the Midwest expanded dramatically. The Erie Canal stimulated early westward migration and enabled farm produce from the interior to be transported east, beginning the process of uniting America. From Maine to Virginia, the success of the Erie set off a nationwide enthusiasm for canal-building with the expectation that similar ambitious projects would be equally profitable. Projects which had been put forward before the construction of the Erie were quickly dusted off and now found ready investors, though for the most part this was through bonds sold and guaranteed by state governments. Even when canals were built privately, they often relied on some form of financial support from the states. These canals were mostly designed to improve connections between the Atlantic ports and inland communities and waterways, and, in the West, to connect the Ohio–Mississippi river system with the Great Lakes. Despite the fact that many of the projects did not, ultimately, see the light of day, there were more than 3,300 miles of canal in the US by 1840.

The canals, however, struggled. The biggest failure of the period was the 365-mile-long Pennsylvania Main Line between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio, an attempt to marry railway and canal technology. It consisted of canals for most of its length except on the steep gradients through the mountains, where there were inclined planes on which a cable system hauled up canal boats over the brow and then eased them down on the other side. The inclined plane railway sections proved to be a bottleneck as they had less capacity than the rest of the system, and the scheme never became a true competitor to the far more successful Erie, not least because it had 174 locks, more than twice the number of its rival. Indeed, most of the canal projects never made money for their investors and the brief canal boom came to an end by the late 1830s because of two financial crises and a general lack of confidence in the idea. The failure of the canals stemmed from several internal factors: they were expensive to build, had severe capacity limitations (which meant that even at times of maximum usage many remained unprofitable), and were vulnerable to severe weather conditions (most crucially, they had to close in winter when they froze over, and were also susceptible to floods – which made towpaths unusable – and droughts). On top of all this, the canal companies were bedevilled by management failures, reflected in poor maintenance of the water in the canals and the encroachment of vegetation.

However, they might have survived all these difficulties had it not been for the arrival of the railways which proved to be their undoing. While Taylor is keen to avoid the suggestion that the history of the canals was wholly lacking in success (‘the student of the canal era will do well not to dismiss the canals as obvious “failures,”’10 he advises), they had mostly been built after the emergence of the railways and consequently faced immediate competition. As Taylor concludes, the canal-building mania came too late to give them even a brief period of monopoly, as they had enjoyed in Europe: ‘It was the misfortune of most canals to become obsolescent even before they were opened for traffic. The advantages of the railroads were so great that even the strongest canals could not long retain a profitable share of the business.’ He suggests, rather regretfully, that such projects as the Main Line of Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal would be remembered today as great monuments of the age, had not the railways usurped their position as the most efficient mode of transportation. As with the railways, however, profits should not be the only criterion by which to judge the success of America’s now largely forgotten canal network. The hidden benefits that arise from the availability of improved and cheaper transportation – what economists call ‘externalities’ – far outstrip the purely monetary profits that can be earned through the payment of tolls or fares but these gains end up in the hands of third parties who do not contribute towards the cost of providing these expensive schemes.

The success of steamships and the brief flourishing of canals invites the question as to why roads did not become a more successful mode of transport earlier, given that boats were obviously limited to water courses and the cost of digging lengthy canals was prohibitive. In the early nineteenth century, there were, indeed, numerous roads crisscrossing rural areas, but they were crude affairs that were little more than tracks. Taylor remarks that in 1815 the roads were ‘unbelievably poor by [modern] standards, they were hardly more than broad paths through the forest’.11 When it rained, they turned into a series of muddy ruts, and when too dry, they became a powdery dust bowl. For the most part, they consisted of mere cleared paths, but in swampy or marshy land logs were laid at right angles to the direction of the road to form what were known as ‘corduroy roads’. Given the impossibility of travelling far on these terrible roads, villages were generally built close to waterways.

The condition of the roads was a result of the way they were managed. Their upkeep was the responsibility of the local ‘community’, which, as in Britain, was supposed to provide labour to build and maintain them. In reality, it was a haphazard process; local farmers were press-ganged into providing their labour for a few days, normally in winter. This arrangement was fine for the farmers, as they had little else to do during that season, but it was hardly conducive to effective road improvement since winter was the worst time of the year to prepare a stable surface. The farmers were understandably unenthusiastic about working on roads other than those that led to the nearest village, market or waterway. Nor did they have the requisite skills for making and maintaining a decent road surface. Despite these limitations, some local roads were joined together to form through routes. By 1816 there was a highway of sorts running north–south between Maine and Georgia, but it had few tentacles stretching westwards.

More significant was the development, beginning in the 1790s, of a series of turnpikes – roads on which tolls were payable. Turnpikes were typically built by private companies given permission in the form of charters by local state governments. The private toll road movement had been boosted by the success of a number of early turnpikes, notably the Lancaster Turnpike, connecting Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was completed in 1794. Its profitability stimulated several imitators with the result that by 1815 eastern Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and southern New England were blessed with good roads between their main commercial centres, several of which were well constructed with a solid stone foundation topped with a gravel dressing.

As more states joined the Union, and settlers sought to move west, the logic would have been to create a network of these roads. However, this would have required federal funding, which was regarded with great suspicion in Washington and in many states. Furthermore, the idea of encouraging centralized national projects was seen as contrary to the Constitution, but Taylor sees a more prosaic reason behind the reluctance to spend money on these schemes: ‘The real obstacle which defeated a national system of internal improvements is to be found in the bitter state and sectional jealousies which were wracking the new nation.’12 In particular, the more developed New England states felt that federal support for road schemes would undermine their hard-earned competitive advantage and would encourage western migration to their detriment. In the South, too, there was widespread opposition to the construction of roads and a lack of capital to build them.

The turnpike boom of the first quarter of the nineteenth century was largely funded by private local investors, which greatly limited both their extent and their quality. States did, on occasion, provide additional financial support, and they were ready to grant charters to all manner of road-building schemes, many of which never saw the light of day or only survived a few years. The most ambitious scheme was the National Road, one of the rare roads to be supported by funding from the federal government. Construction of the road began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and it reached Wheeling, West Virginia,13 on the Ohio River – which would also be the intended destination of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad – by 1818. It was extended to Columbus, Ohio, in 1833 and finally to Vandalia, Illinois,14 by the middle of the century, but by then the railroad was emerging as the preferred mode of transport for most people and freight carriers.

For the most part, however, turnpikes were, like the canals, a failure: ‘Though a boon to travelers, turnpikes generally did not cheapen and stimulate land transportation sufficiently to provide satisfactory earnings from tolls.’15 Many turnpike companies were not even able to collect sufficient tolls to provide for the maintenance and operation of the road, let alone make a contribution to capital for the investors who had put up the money: ‘Even in New England, where they were relatively most successful, only five or six out of 230 turnpikes paid barely satisfactory returns to investors.’16 They were not helped by ‘shunpikes’, detours around tollbooths built by mischievous locals, or long-distance travellers’ habit of waiting until nightfall, when toll collectors went off duty, to use the road. A scarcity of honest tollbooth operators was another obstacle to profitability and some companies simply sold the right to run the tollbooth for a fixed sum, knowing they could never collect the true income. The turnpikes could not, crucially, tap into the most significant market, the long-distance transport of agricultural goods such as wheat, corn or pork, because the tolls were simply too high in relation to the value of the produce. As the railway historian Albro Martin sums it up, ‘Road haulage could only be had at rates per ton that exceeded by several times the market value of such commodities at eastern points.’17 Consequently many roads deteriorated for want of money to maintain them. As early as 1819 turnpikes were being abandoned by owners unable to make a profit while paying for the operating costs. It was not, therefore, the competition of canals and railroads which did for the turnpikes, but their own shortcomings: ‘Many turnpike companies had failed even before this [railway and canal] competition appeared and those which lasted after about 1830 [the advent of the railroads] had for the most part already demonstrated their financial unprofitability.’18

Moreover, railroads would have the advantage of a technology that ultimately proved to be their most effective weapon. While steam engines were quickly adapted to operate on rails, they could not function on roads because they were too heavy and appropriate steering mechanisms had not yet been devised. A road carriage had to be light enough to spare the road surface while having to carry all the paraphernalia of its own heavy and hot machinery in addition to the payload of passengers or freight, all crammed into a single vehicle and perhaps, at most, one trailer. As a study into the rival technologies of the period put it, steam road carriages ‘were lacking in a number of technical respects’19 despite all the efforts to develop them. There were a few hardy inventors in Europe who tried to develop ‘road carriages’, but as it became clear, by around 1840, that railways would become dominant, they gave up for a generation or so, leaving the field open to the iron road.

Thus at the start of the railway age, in 1830, neither turnpikes nor canals had proved sufficiently profitable to maintain a sustained boom in their construction and continued operation. Railways, therefore, held all the trump cards in relation to their rivals, but they still needed the technology of steam locomotives to ensure their success. The engines in steamships may have been precursors of those used in locomotives, but they were different in several respects: most notably they could be far bigger since they did not have to drag their weight along on land, and they could be less efficient since ships had the capacity to carry vast quantities of fuel. Nevertheless, thanks to the steamships, by the time serious thought was being given to railways, the key requirements for locomotive technology were in place. However, it was one thing to fit a large steam engine into a ship where space was not at a premium, and quite another getting it down to a size small enough to move itself under its own power.

To progress from the production of steam power to the development of a railroad required two significant steps. First, the engine had to be put on wheels to make it mobile and then the wheels had to be placed on rails. As we have seen, this second step was essential because of both the primitive nature of the roads and the absence of any steering mechanism. Provided sufficiently sophisticated and small engines could be developed, the railways offered a neat solution to both these limitations.

The first attempt to create a self-propelled locomotive had taken place as early as 1769 in Paris, when Nicolas Cugnot’s fardier20 – which rather fancifully is mentioned in some motor car histories as the world’s first automobile – took to the streets but was declared a danger to the public when it hit a wall and overturned. Various other similar patents were taken out, even one by Watt, and several devices intended to run on roads were built in the late eighteenth century. None, however, met with any success, owing to their technical limitations or to the inability of the poorly built roads to support their weight.