Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
University, Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Stephanie Manke
THE RAILROAD BUILDERS
A CHRONICLE OF THE WELDING OF THE STATES
Volume 38 In The Chronicles Of America Series
By John Moody
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
CONTENTS
I. A CENTURY OF RAILROAD BUILDING
II. THE COMMODORE AND THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
III. THE GREAT PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM
IV. THE ERIE RAILROAD
V. CROSSING THE APPALACHIAN RANGE
VI. LINKING THE OCEANS
VII. PENETRATING THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
VIII. BUILDING ALONG THE SANTA FE TRAIL
IX. THE GROWTH OF THE HILL LINES
X. THE RAILROAD SYSTEM OF THE SOUTH
XI. THE LIFE WORK OF EDWARD H. HARRIMAN
XII. THE AMERICAN RAILROAD PROBLEM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE RAILROAD BUILDERS
CHAPTER I. A CENTURY OF RAILROAD BUILDING
The United States as we know it today is largely the result of
mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and
the railroad. One transformed millions of acres of uncultivated land
into fertile farms, while the other furnished the transportation which
carried the crops to distant markets. Before these inventions appeared,
it is true, Americans had crossed the Alleghanies, reached the
Mississippi Valley, and had even penetrated to the Pacific coast; thus
in a thousand years or so the United States might conceivably have
become a far-reaching, straggling, loosely jointed Roman Empire,
depending entirely upon its oceans, internal watercourses, and imperial
highways for such economic and political integrity as it might achieve.
But the great miracle of the nineteenth century--the building of a new
nation, reaching more than three thousand miles from sea to sea, giving
sustenance to more than one hundred million free people, and diffusing
among them the necessities and comforts of civilization to a greater
extent than the world had ever known before is explained by the
development of harvesting machinery and of the railroad.
The railroad is sprung from the application of two fundamental
ideas--one the use of a mechanical means of developing speed, the other
the use of a smooth running surface to diminish friction. Though these
two principles are today combined, they were originally absolutely
distinct. In fact there were railroads long before there were steam
engines or locomotives. If we seek the real predecessor of the modern
railroad track, we must go back three hundred years to the wooden rails
on which were drawn the little cars used in English collieries to
carry the coal from the mines to tidewater. The natural history of this
invention is clear enough. The driving of large coal wagons along the
public highway made deep ruts in the road, and some ingenious person
began repairing the damage by laying wooden planks in the furrows. The
coal wagons drove over this crude roadbed so successfully that certain
proprietors started constructing special planked roadways from the mines
to the river mouth. Logs, forming what we now call "ties," were placed
crosswise at intervals of three or four feet, and upon these supports
thin "rails," likewise of wood, were laid lengthwise. So effectually did
this arrangement reduce friction that a single horse could now draw a
great wagon filled with coal--an operation which two or three teams,
lunging over muddy roads, formerly had great difficulty in performing.
In order to lengthen the life of the road, a thin sheeting of iron was
presently laid upon the wooden rail. The next improvement was an attempt
to increase the durability of the wagons by making the wheels of iron.
It was not, however, until 1767, when the first rails were cast entirely
of iron with a flange at one side to keep the wheel steadily in place,
that the modern roadbed in all its fundamental principles made its
appearance. This, be it observed, was only two years after Watt had
patented his first steam engine, and it was nearly fifty years before
Stephenson built his first locomotive. The railroad originally was as
completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship. Just
as vessels had existed for ages before the introduction of mechanical
power, so the railroad had been a familiar sight in the mining districts
of England for at least two centuries before the invention of Watt
really gave it wings and turned it to wider uses. In this respect the
progress of the railroad resembles that of the automobile, which had
existed in crude form long before the invention of the gasoline engine
made it practically useful.
In the United States three new methods of transportation made their
appearance at almost the same time--the steamboat, the canal boat,
and the rail car. Of all three, the last was the slowest in attaining
popularity. As early as 1812 John Stevens, of Hoboken, aroused much
interest and more amused hostility by advocating the building of a
railroad, instead of a canal, across New York State from the Hudson
River to Lake Erie, and for several years this indefatigable spirit
journeyed from town to town and from State to State, in a fruitless
effort to push his favorite scheme. The great success of the Erie Canal
was finally hailed as a conclusive argument against all the ridiculous
claims made in favor of the railroad and precipitated a canal mania
which spread all over the country.
Yet the enthusiasts for railroads could not be discouraged, and
presently the whole population divided into two camps, the friends of
the canal, and the friends of the iron highway. Newspapers acrimoniously
championed either side; the question was a favorite topic with debating
societies; public meetings and conventions were held to uphold one
method of transportation and to decry the other. The canal, it was
urged, was not an experiment; it had been tested and not found wanting;
already the great achievement of De Witt Clinton in completing the Erie
Canal had made New York City the metropolis of the western world. The
railroad, it was asserted, was just as emphatically an experiment; no
one could tell whether it could ever succeed; why, therefore, pour money
and effort into this new form of transportation when the other was a
demonstrated success?
It was a simple matter to find fault with the railroad; it has always
been its fate to arouse the opposition of the farmers. This hostility
appeared early and was based largely upon grounds that have a familiar
sound even today. The railroad, they said, was a natural monopoly;
no private citizen could hope ever to own one; it was thus a kind of
monster which, if encouraged, would override all popular rights. From
this economic criticism the enemies of the railroad passed to details
of construction: the rails would be washed out by rains; they could
be destroyed by mischievous people; they would snap under the cold
of winter or be buried under the snow for a considerable period, thus
stopping all communication. The champions of artificial waterways would
point in contrast to the beautiful packet boats on the Erie Canal, with
their fine sleeping rooms, their restaurants, their spacious decks on
which the fine ladies and gentlemen congregated every warm summer day,
and would insist that such kind of travel was far more comfortable than
it could ever be on railroads. To all these pleas the advocates of the
railroad had one unassailable argument--its infinitely greater speed.
After all, it took a towboat three or four days to go from Albany to
Buffalo, and the time was not far distant, they argued, when a railroad
would make the same trip in less than a day. Indeed, our forefathers
made one curious mistake: they predicted a speed for the railroad a
hundred miles an hour--which it has never attained consistently with
safety.
If the American of today could transport himself to one of the first
railroad lines built in the United States it is not unlikely that he
would side with the canal enthusiast in his argument. The rough pictures
which accompany most accounts of early railroad days, showing a train
of omnibus-like carriages pulled by a locomotive with upright boiler,
really represent a somewhat advanced stage of development. Though
Stephenson had demonstrated the practicability of the locomotive in 1814
and although the American, John Stevens, had constructed one in 1826
which had demonstrated its ability to take a curve, local prejudice
against this innovation continued strong. The farmers asserted that
the sparks set fire to their hayricks and barns and that the noise
frightened their hens so that they would not lay and their cows so that
they could not give milk. On the earliest railroads, therefore, almost
any other method of propulsion was preferred. Horses and dogs were used,
winches turned by men were occasionally installed, and in some cases
cars were even fitted with sails. Of all these methods, the horse was
the most popular: he sent out no sparks, he carried his own fuel, he
made little noise, and he would not explode. His only failing was that
he would leave the track; and to remedy this defect the early railroad
builders hit upon a happy device. Sometimes they would fix a treadmill
inside the car; two horses would patiently propel the caravan, the
seats for passengers being arranged on either side. So unformed was the
prevalent conception of the ultimate function of the railroad, and so
pronounced was the fear of monopoly that, on certain lines, the roadbed
was laid as a state enterprise and the users furnished their own
cars, just as the individual owners of towboats did on the canals.
The drivers, however, were an exceedingly rough lot; no schedules were
observed and as the first lines had only single tracks and infrequent
turnouts, when the opposing sides would meet each other coming and
going, precedence was usually awarded to the side which had the stronger
arm. The roadbed showed little improvement over the mine tramways of the
eighteenth century, and the rails were only long wooden stringers with
strap iron nailed on top. So undeveloped were the resources of the
country that the builders of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1828
petitioned Congress to remit the duty on the iron which it was compelled
to import from England. The trains consisted of a string of little cars,
with the baggage piled on the roof, and when they reached a hill they
sometimes had to be pulled up the inclined plane by a rope. Yet the
traveling in these earliest days was probably more comfortable than in
those which immediately followed the general adoption of locomotives.
When, five or ten years later, the advantages of mechanical as opposed
to animal traction caused engines to be introduced extensively, the
passengers behind them rode through constant smoke and hot cinders that
made railway travel an incessant torture.
Yet the railroad speedily demonstrated its practical value; many of the
first lines were extremely profitable, and the hostility with which they
had been first received soon changed to an enthusiasm which was just
as unreasoning. The speculative craze which invariably follows a new
discovery swept over the country in the thirties and the forties and
manifested itself most unfortunately in the new Western States--Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Here bonfires and public meetings
whipped up the zeal; people believed that railroads would not only
immediately open the wilderness and pay the interest on the bonds issued
to construct them, but that they would become a source of revenue to
sadly depleted state treasuries. Much has been heard of government
ownership in recent years; yet it is nothing particularly new, for
many of the early railroads in these new Western States were built as
government enterprises, with results which were frequently disastrous.
This mania, with the land speculation accompanying it, was largely
responsible for the panic of 1837 and led to that repudiation of debts
in certain States which for so many years gave American investments an
evil reputation abroad.
In the more settled parts of the country, however, railroad building
had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of
the forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was
incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an
individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than
as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart.
The roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A few
miles of iron rail connected Albany and Schenectady. There was a road
from Hartford to New Haven, but there was none from New Haven to New
York. A line connected Philadelphia with Columbia; Baltimore had a road
to Washington; Charleston, South Carolina, had a similar contact with
Hamburg in the same State. By 1842, New York State, from Albany to
Buffalo, possessed several disconnected stretches of railroad. It was
not until 1836, when work was begun on the Erie Railroad, that a plan
was adopted for a single line reaching several hundred miles from an
obvious point, such as New York, to an obvious destination, such as
Lake Erie. Even then a few farsighted men could foresee the day when
the railroad train would cross the plains and the Rockies and link the
Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the
United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them,
even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were
separately owned and separately managed.
Successful as many of the railroads were, they had hardly yet
established themselves as the one preeminent means of transportation.
The canal had lost in the struggle for supremacy, but certain of these
constructed waterways, particularly the Erie, were flourishing with
little diminished vigor. The river steamboat had enjoyed a development
in the first few decades of the nineteenth century almost as great as
that of the railroad itself. The Mississippi River was the great natural
highway for the products and the passenger traffic of the South Central
States; it had made New Orleans one of the largest and most flourishing
cities in the country; and certainly the rich cotton planter of the
fifties would have smiled at any suggestion that the "floating palaces"
which plied this mighty stream would ever surrender their preeminence to
the rusty and struggling railroads which wound along its banks.
This period, which may be taken as the first in American railroad
development, ended about the middle of the century. It was an age of
great progress but not of absolutely assured success. A few lines
earned handsome profits, but in the main the railroad business was not
favorably regarded and railroad investments everywhere were held in
suspicion. The condition that prevailed in many railroads is illustrated
by the fact that the directors of the Michigan and Southern, when
they held their annual meeting in 1853, had to borrow chairs from an
adjoining office as the sheriff had walked away with their own for debt.
Even a railroad with such a territory as the Hudson River Valley,
and extending from New York to Albany existed in a state of chronic
dilapidation; and the New York and Harlem, which had an entrance into
New York City as an asset of incalculable value, was looked upon merely
as a vehicle for Wall Street speculation.
Meanwhile the increasing traffic in farm products, mules, and cattle
from the Northwest to the plantations of the South created a demand for
more ample transportation facilities. In the decade before the Civil
War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of
these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government. The
first of these, the Illinois Central, received a huge land-grant in 1850
and ultimately reached the Gulf at Mobile by connecting with the Mobile
and Ohio Railroad which had also been assisted by Federal grants.
But the panic of 1857, followed by the Civil War, halted all railroad
enterprises. In the year 1856 some 3600 miles of railroad had been
constructed; in 1865 only 700 were laid down. The Southern railroads
were prostrated by the war and north and south lines lost all but local
traffic.
After the war a brisk recovery began and brought to the fore the first
of the great railroad magnates and the shrewdest business genius of the
day, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Though he had spent his early life and had
laid the basis of his fortune in steamboats, he was the first man to
appreciate the fact that these two methods of transportation were about
to change places--that water transportation was to decline and that
rail transportation was to gain the ascendancy. It was about 1865 that
Vanderbilt acted on this farsighted conviction, promptly sold out his
steamboats for what they would bring, and began buying railroads despite
the fact that his friends warned him that, in his old age, he was
wrecking the fruits of a hard and thrifty life. But Vanderbilt perceived
what most American business men of the time failed to see, that a change
had come over the railroad situation as a result of the Civil War.
The time extending from 1860 to about 1875 marks the second stage in
the railroad activity of the United States. The characteristic of this
period is the development of the great trunk lines and the construction
of a transcontinental route to the Pacific. The Civil War ended the
supremacy of the Mississippi River as the great transportation route
of the West. The fact that this river ran through hostile
territory--Vicksburg did not fall until July 4, 1863--forced the farmers
of the West to find another outlet for their products. By this time the
country from Chicago and St. Louis eastward to the Atlantic ports was
fairly completely connected by railroads. The necessities of war led
to great improvements in construction and equipment. Business which had
hitherto gone South now began to go East; New Orleans ceased to be the
great industrial entrepot of this region and gave place to St. Louis and
Chicago.
Yet, though this great change in traffic routes took place in the course
of the war, the actual consolidations of the various small railroads
into great trunk lines did not begin until after peace had been assured.
The establishment of five great railroads extending continuously from
the Atlantic seaboard to Chicago and the West was perhaps the most
remarkable economic development of the ten or fifteen years succeeding
the war. By 1875 these five great trunk lines, the New York Central, the
Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Grand Trunk,
had connected their scattered units and established complete through
systems.
All the vexations that had necessarily accompanied railroad traffic in
the days when each one of these systems had been a series of disconnected
roads had disappeared. The grain and meat products of the West,
accumulating for the most part at Chicago and St. Louis, now came
rapidly and uninterruptedly to the Atlantic seaboard, and railroad
passengers, no longer submitted to the inconveniences of the Civil War
period, now began to experience for the first time the pleasures of
railroad travel. Together with the articulation of the routes, important
mechanical changes and reconstruction programmes completely transformed
the American railroad system. The former haphazard character of each
road is evidenced by the fact that in Civil War days there were eight
different gages, with the result that it was almost impossible for the
rolling stock of one line to use another. A few years after the Civil
War, however, the present standard gage of four feet eight and one-half
inches had become uniform all over the United States. The malodorous
"eating cribs" of the fifties and the sixties--little station
restaurants located at selected spots along the line--now began to
disappear, and the modern dining car made its appearance. The old rough
and ready sleeping cars began to give place to the modern Pullman. One
of the greatest drawbacks to ante-bellum travel had been the absence of
bridges across great rivers, such as the Hudson and the Susquehanna.
At Albany, for example, the passengers in the summer time were ferried
across, and in winter they were driven in sleighs or were sometimes
obliged to walk across the ice. It was not until after the Civil War
that a great iron bridge, two thousand feet long, was constructed across
the Hudson at this point. On the trains the little flickering oil lamps
now gave place to gas, and the wood burning stoves--frequently in those
primitive days smeared with tobacco juice--in a few years were displaced
by the new method of heating by steam.
The accidents which had been almost the prevailing rule in the fifties
and sixties were greatly reduced by the Westinghouse air-brake, invented
in 1868, and the block signaling system, introduced somewhat later. In
the ten years succeeding the Civil War, the physical appearance of the
railroads entirely changed; new and larger locomotives were made, the
freight cars, which during the period of the Civil War had a capacity of
about eight tons, were now built to carry fifteen or twenty. The former
little flimsy iron rails were taken up and were relaid with steel. In
the early seventies when Cornelius Vanderbilt substituted steel for iron
on the New York Central, he had to import the new material from England.
In the Civil War period, practically all American railroads were single
track lines--and this alone prevented any extensive traffic. Vanderbilt
laid two tracks along the Hudson River from New York to Albany, and
four from Albany to Buffalo, two exclusively for freight and two for
passengers. By 1880 the American railroad, in all its essential details,
had definitely arrived.
But in this same period even more sensational developments had taken
place. Soon after 1865 the imagination of the American railroad
builder began to reach far beyond the old horizon. Up to that time the
Mississippi River had marked the Western railroad terminus. Now and then
a road straggled beyond this barrier for a few miles into eastern Iowa
and Missouri; but in the main the enormous territory reaching from the
Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean was crossed only by the old trails. The
one thing which perhaps did most to place the transcontinental road on
a practical basis was the annexation of California in 1848; and the wild
rush that took place on the discovery of the gold fields one year later
had led Americans to realize that on the Pacific coast they had an
empire which was great and incalculably rich but almost inaccessible.
The loyalty of California to the Northern cause in the war naturally
stimulated a desire for closer contact. In the ten years preceding 1860
the importance of a transcontinental line had constantly been brought
to the attention of Congress and the project had caused much jealousy
between the North and the South, for each region desired to control its
Eastern terminus. This impediment no longer stood in the way; early in
his term, therefore, President Lincoln signed the bill authorizing the
construction of the Union Pacific--a name doubly significant, as marking
the union of the East and the West and also recognizing the sentiment of
loyalty or union that this great enterprise was intended to promote.
The building of this railroad, as well as that of the others which
ultimately made the Pacific and the Atlantic coast near neighbors--the
Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Great
Northern--is described in the pages that follow. Here it is sufficient
to emphasize the fact that they achieved the concluding triumph in what
is certainly the most extensive system of railroads in the world. These
transcontinental roads really completed the work of Columbus. He sailed
to discover the western route to Cathay and found that his path was
blocked by a mighty continent. But the first train that crossed the
plains and ascended the Rockies and reached the Golden Gate assured
thenceforth a rapid and uninterrupted transit westward from Europe to
Asia.