The Great Railroad Revolution (15 page)

In the 1850s, the consolidation of smaller lines to create a larger railroad was a new idea in America, but would be adopted widely across the United States, particularly after the Civil War as the Hamiltonian ethos prevailed. Big companies like the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central were still, in the antebellum period, the exception. Most railroads in this era remained small, rarely connecting with a neighboring company line and, if they did so, requiring passengers to change trains with all the hassle that entailed. No one thought of the railroads as a network; they were viewed, rather, as a series of disparate lines, best illustrated by the lack of any rail connection between lines in towns blessed with more than one railroad. Separate stations were the norm, and therefore railroad maps of the period can be confusing, suggesting links and connections where, in fact, there were none.

By 1850, America's railroad mileage had tripled to 9,000. As New York included both the Erie and the Central, it could lay claim to having the most mileage of any state at the midcentury point, with 1,361 miles. Pennsylvania, thanks to its eponymous trunk line, was not far behind. The railroads remained most extensive in the East, but considerable mileage had been constructed in the South. Georgia was beginning to establish the preeminence that it was to maintain for a century, and Atlanta was becoming the hub for a variety of lines. In the old Northwest, Ohio and Michigan were the leaders, but their mileage was still modest. That would change in the next decade, helped by the establishment of Chicago as the nation's railroad hub.

Chicago's dominance was by no means a foregone conclusion. Other western cities such as Sandusky, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri, had potential, having been reached early by the iron road, but Chicago had natural advantages that made its location as a railroad hub ideal. When the inaugural section of the Baltimore & Ohio opened in 1830, Chicago had consisted of a few wood cabins and trails scratched out of the marshy land on
the southwest corner of Lake Michigan. As soon as it was incorporated in 1833, Chicago boomed. Thanks to its favorable location, it grew rapidly in the 1830s, reaching a population of four thousand by the end of the decade. Yet it came surprisingly late to the railroad, with its first line, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, built by William Ogden, not being completed until 1848 when, already, there were innumerable railroads farther to the west. The small, unassuming town, with problems of perpetual flooding because of its position on the banks of Lake Michigan, did not seem natural railroad territory. While the rest of America was busy building railroads in the 1830s and 1840s, Chicagoans were to be convinced that the future lay with plank roads, laid to connect the burgeoning town with surrounding communities and used increasingly by farmers to take their goods into the city. These crude highways were, literally, made of wooden boards nailed into timbers on the ground and, for a time, earned their owners huge dividends from tolls, as Chicago grew rapidly in the 1840s. But they required constant maintenance, as they were damaged by the ever-heavier wagons using them that, incidentally, were wont to bully smaller carts into the adjoining mud.

However, the focus of the region was already changing. Chicago had previously looked south to New Orleans along the Mississippi as its main economic outlet, but this was an unsatisfactory transportation corridor, as both the trip downriver and the subsequent voyage across to Europe were lengthy and expensive. With the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s, Chicago had begun to look eastward. The town had become the effective terminus of the waterway, because ships, after reaching the end of the canal at Buffalo, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, could continue their journey to Chicago along the Great Lakes. Whereas previously much of the raw produce of the area, such as meat, timber, and grain, was almost worthless because of the high cost of transportation, the value of these commodities increased as eastward communications improved. Chicago's connection with the Mississippi was greatly facilitated by the completion of the Illinois & Michigan Canal in 1848, but westward extension of the waterway through the vast grain-growing area of the Midwest was impractical given the distances involved. The railroad was the obvious means of exploiting the rapidly growing economy of the region. And Chicago, at its
center, with its easy connections both East and West, as well as the water-front on Lake Michigan, was its natural strategic hub. Ogden's Galena & Chicago Union rapidly became profitable, proving to be far more efficient than the plank roads. Two other, similar, railroads soon sprang up, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
²⁴
and, in the same year, the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, which in 1866 became the Chicago, Rock Island
& Pacific
Railroad, revealing its ultimate ambition of reaching the ocean, which, as with many similarly named railroads of the time, was never fulfilled. These were the three original “Granger” railroads, so called because their primary purpose was to bring farm produce to market. By reducing the price of transportation, these railroads increased the amount of money the farmers received for their produce and were the catalyst for the agricultural development of the huge Midwest prairies.

In 1852, Chicago was connected to the Eastern Seaboard by the Michigan Central, which later became part of the New York Central system. Like the Erie and the Pennsylvania, both of which would eventually reach Chicago, this was a very different type of railroad from those that were swiftly spreading out west of the city. The nature of this difference explains one of the great mysteries of the American railroad system: why did all railroads, from both East and West, stop in Chicago, rather than simply going around or through the Windy City, just as they traversed every other town in the vast space between the two oceans? The answer is that the two sets of railroads that terminated at Chicago—the Granger railroads to the west and the major trunk railroads to the east—were so different as to be completely incompatible in purpose and financial performance, preventing the mergers that would seem logical. The four major eastern trunk railroads—the Erie, New York Central, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore & Ohio (which had finally gotten to Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in 1852)—soon reached Chicago. The reason they stopped there and did not progress westward was because, by the time of their arrival, the Granger railroads had already established themselves. The Grangers were weak railroads, eking out a tenuous existence delivering farm produce to market, a one-way business that offered little potential for growth. The large areas they covered, and the fierce competition—at least initially—between each railroad company, meant that they earned low returns, making them an unattractive acquisition
for the big trunk railroads. For their part, the Grangers could not expand eastward, as they were always too weak to take on the big railroad companies. Once past Chicago, they would have had to build lines all the way to the East Coast, as the existing lines would have refused them access to their tracks, clearly an enterprise beyond them.

The decision of the big trunk lines not to go beyond Chicago was based on caution and custom, since railroads did not like sending their trucks onto another company's tracks through fear of losing them. This rather unimaginative thinking would determine the somewhat fragmented nature of the US railroad network. Perhaps if one adventurous eastern railroad had decided to venture west, braving the inevitable attacks from the Grangers, it might have been able to overcome the initial difficulties. The prize, a genuinely national rail system that would allow untrammeled transcontinental travel, could well have been worth it. In the event, only the Baltimore & Ohio dared, eventually, to try to connect the two types of railroad, through its purchase of the Chicago & Alton, but that was in 1931, when the railroads were already beginning to struggle in the face of competition from road and air transportation.

Thus, by happenstance, a combination of geography and economics, as well as timidity and habit on the part of the big companies, Chicago became America's preeminent railroad hub, though St. Louis became another key transfer point between eastern and western railroads. Even after America's East and West Coasts were linked by the iron road, transcontinental services still started from Chicago rather than the Eastern Seaboard. Throughout the history of the US railroads, in fact, there have been very few transcontinental routes that did not require a change of trains in the Windy City.

Chicago's position as a railroad hub became entrenched as its people and politicians realized the advantages of not allowing traffic to go directly through. Chicago had no genuine through stations,
²⁵
only termini, and although a few freight lines, such as the Belt Railway, were eventually built around the city, the whole nation's railroad industry became geared around Chicago as a transfer station, where trains were broken up and re-formed in massive classification yards for onward dispatch. It would sometimes take days for goods to be moved from one yard to another, and, like the
citizens of Erie, the Chicagoans were in no hurry to suggest that the two different railroad systems serving the town should be unified. Quite the opposite. They benefited enormously from the lack of through routes, none more so than Franklin Parmalee, whose eponymous company enjoyed the highly lucrative monopoly of transferring passengers between the various stations. At least the service he provided was classy. He used old coach-style rigs pulled by the best local horses and painted a distinctive green and driven by smartly turned-out men. The latter developed a reputation for providing not only a cordial service but, more surprisingly, honest information, even if that meant they lost a fare because the destination was too close or best reached by another means, in distinct contrast to the “bunco steerers of various rackets who had been operating on American travelers since the earliest coaching days.”
²⁶
By the outbreak of the Civil War, Chicago was the undisputed rail capital of the United States, boasting no fewer than eleven rail lines.
²⁷

The big trunk lines in the East remained very much the exception right up to the Civil War. Most of the hundreds of railroads being promoted and built in the years before the war were small, local, and limited in intent. The pace of their growth, however, was remarkable, with thirty thousand miles having been completed by the end of the 1850s. This was roughly as many miles as had been built at the time in the rest of the world put together and represented more than a tripling of the mileage of railroad in that decade. It was still, though, not a network but rather a collection of mostly short lines with a huge disparity in standards of provision. Through journeys were, for the most part, a trial, even in the East. For example, five different lines made up the New York–Washington service, making for a long and arduous journey, and it was not until 1863 that passengers could travel between the two cities without changing trains.

Indeed, much rail travel before the Civil War was difficult, slow, and, as traffic increased, potentially dangerous (see
Chapter 6
). In 1840, the American railroad system was merely a “thin, broken network stretching along the Atlantic coast from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the Carolinas.”
²⁸
Broken
is the right word. To go from Boston to Georgia, for example, required a rail trip to Stonington, Connecticut, steamers to New York and then to New Jersey, followed by four different rail journeys to reach
Washington, with changes at Camden, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where the two train stations were at different ends of the town, necessitating a cab ride.

Charles Dickens, an experienced traveler on railroads in Britain, visited the United States in 1842 and was not impressed with what he found, sparking a lifelong controversy between the writer and the new nation when his collection of musings titled
American Notes
was published in October of that year. His first journey was on the Boston & Lowell, which he found lacking in most of the amenities to which he was accustomed: “There are no first and second class carriages as with us; but there is a gentlemen's car and a ladies' car: the main distinction between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the second, nobody does. As a black man never travels with a white one, there is also a negro car; which is a great blundering clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of Brobdingnag.”
²⁹

In fact, on some railroads black people, both slaves and free, could travel in the same accommodation as white people, whereas on others, especially in the South, they were relegated to baggage or freight cars. Contrary to what Dickens says, there was first- and second-class accommodation on some railroads, with variations in fare levels much in line with European practice. When the Western Railroad opened between Boston and Albany in 1842, for example, it charged $5.50 for first class but just $3.66 in second. The Boston & Lowell, on which Dickens traveled, had second-class cars on the services that catered to factory workers, charging them just $0.75 cents compared with the $1.00 that Dickens probably paid.

Most of the early cars on American trains were based on stagecoach design, accommodating perhaps a dozen or possibly thirty people at most. Even the more modern ones were little better, and it was no wonder that Dickens found these “shabby omnibuses” not to his liking. The cars were, in fact, rather like the homes of the day: they were built of wood, poorly lit by candles, and inadequately heated by stoves, and the only ventilation came from opening their rather small windows. Worse, for Dickens, was the layout. Unlike those in the UK, which had individual compartments, the US cars were open plan, accommodating up to fifty people, with the doors at the ends. They were fitted with crosswise seats, separated by a
narrow passage through the aisle, each holding two people. Dickens, a rather private man, did not enjoy the fact that Americans expected to talk to their neighbors during the journey, even raising subjects that would be taboo between strangers in England such as politics and, showing that some things do not change over time, banks. Cotton, too, was a perennial matter for discussion. Being forced to sit among the other passengers meant that Dickens met far more Americans than he probably would have done otherwise, but he used this experience merely to pour scorn on the American tendency toward patriotism and their supposed mispronunciation of the word
route
as
rout.
He was impressed with the ladies' coaches, particularly the fact that they made it possible “for any lady [to] travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere.” However, he disliked the fact that the conductor wore no uniform and walked up and down the car “as his fancy dictates, leans against the door with his hands in his pockets and stares at you.”