The Great Railroad Revolution (38 page)

The proximity of two accidents of such magnitude led to much anguished speculation in the newspapers about the safety of the railroads. There were several more high-profile accidents that year, but with lower death tolls. At the time, the most spectacular accidents were the growing numbers of head-on crashes, known with tombstone humor as “cornfield meets.” Since almost all railroads were single track, with no signaling, early train schedules were simply set by intervals between trains. But without telegraphic communication, which only began to be introduced widely in the 1850s, it was impossible to communicate between train and dispatchers (known as controllers in Britain), placing broken-down trains in great peril. The conductor was supposed to run down the track to put down warning flares, but on occasion this procedure broke down, resulting
in disaster. Operating rules were crude and at times vague. Remarkably, the rules of several railroads, including some major ones such as the Camden & Amboy, the Western & Atlantic, and the Georgia Central, decreed that if two trains met, the one closest to a loop (or “turnout,” sections where there were two tracks to allow trains to pass each other) should reverse. According to Aldrich, “This encouraged train crews to speed, both to go beyond a turnout and if that failed, to back into it.”
¹⁷
The result, on the Camden & Amboy, was predictable. In August 1855, a train from Philadelphia had arrived at Burlington, the normal crossing point, early and, according to company rules, was allowed to leave after waiting ten minutes when the train from New York failed to show up. However, once under way, the driver spotted the train coming from New York, and it was up to him to go back. He reversed at great speed, hitting a horse and buggy driven by an elderly doctor. The rear coach was derailed by the collision with the buggy, pulling four other coaches with it and causing the deaths of twenty-three passengers.

The deadliness of “cornfield meets” was all too baldly demonstrated at Camp Hill on the North Pennsylvania Railroad on July 17, 1856. The world's worst railroad accident to date, with fifty-six fatalities, it became known as the Picnic Train disaster because it involved a Sunday excursion train. (In the history of rail accidents, both in the United States and elsewhere, excursion trains have featured regularly. The reasons for this include the fact that they did not appear in the regular timetables, often used old stock, and were frequently overloaded.) Packed with at least one thousand passengers, mainly Irish teenagers from the local Catholic church heading for a hot day in the park, the train smashed head-on into a local service because the driver, though knowing that the other train would be coming in the opposite direction, was speeding along the line in the hope of reaching the next turnout in order to catch up on lost time. The two trains met at a bend with such force that the explosion was heard five miles away, and the resulting fire caused most of the deaths. The driver of the local train blamed himself and immediately committed suicide by taking arsenic, although in fact he was exonerated by the subsequent inquiry.

The disaster speeded up the introduction and use of the telegraph, bringing about a major improvement in safety. A system of issuing train orders, which authorized a train crew to proceed to a particular point such
as a station or a loop, was developed. However, cornfield meets continued to occur when there was confusion over the orders, or procedures were not followed properly. Silent films would later portray robbers trying to arrange train wrecks by deliberately forcing the dispatcher to issue false orders so that they could steal from the wreckage, but no evidence exists of such a crime ever actually being committed. Head-on collisions were the most spectacular of the litany of possible accidents, but derailments caused by broken rails or proceeding too fast around bends, bridge failures, livestock on the line, and broken axles all contributed to fatal accidents in the early days of the railroads. At root the problem was that the rapid spread of the railroads had not been matched by the technological changes required to keep them safe. For a time, anger about rail safety subsided as the number of spectacular accidents declined significantly. The Civil War diverted attention to the far-bloodier tragedy taking place before the eyes of the public. In the aftermath of the war, however, as both the numbers traveling and the mileage of railroad increased rapidly, safety again became an issue, fueled by a series of yet more eminently preventable accidents.

In many respects, the technology was improving. More powerful locomotives were able to travel faster and to haul a larger number of cars that, since weight became less of a concern, could be fitted with all sorts of extras to make travel more comfortable for passengers. Longer stretches could be covered without stopping, as a locomotive could typically travel around a hundred miles without needing to be resupplied or changed. Furthermore, longer rails, manufactured from steel rather than iron, made for a smoother ride and reduced the number of broken rails, a frequent cause of accidents. However, overall safety was lagging behind. There was no excuse. In the postwar period, the technology was being developed, but there was a lack of will to introduce it. Faced with the obvious need for better safety devices, the railroad companies were not so much resistant as downright obstructive, seeing accidents as an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of an industry in which large machines moved at high speed. They failed to see that investing in safety would improve both the reliability and the image of their product.

Two related safety devices, the automatic coupler and the air brake, were crucial and would make the biggest difference in terms of safety, but it took a lengthy campaign of lobbying to bring about their universal
adoption. Coupling and braking had been a technical and safety problem for the railroads since their very invention. The coupling between cars involved a crude link-and-pin device that required a brakeman to stand between the cars, guide the link into a socket, drop the pin in place, and, if necessary, hammer it down. Not easy, not safe. In the dark, with a slippery oil lantern in one hand, it was even more perilous. It was said that if a man was looking for work as a brakeman and claimed to be experienced, he was asked to show his hands—missing digits were the key confirmation that he had previously worked in the job. The device had the disadvantage, too, of breaking as a result of metal fatigue and causing accidents with runaway cars or wagons. Soon after the Civil War, several better couplers were devised, notably one designed by Ezra Miller that involved a platform with buffers and was adopted by several railroads. Critically, Miller's platform prevented the oscillation that was a risk with link-and-pin devices because they allowed slack. But his invention was not perfect. Although the platform reduced the risk of “telescoping” of cars in an accident, a very dangerous phenomenon, it did not prevent the possibility entirely, especially at higher speeds. An improved device patented by Eli Janney in 1873 had the added advantage of being automatic, which meant that men no longer had to stand between cars to couple and uncouple trains (though they still had to go each time on the tracks to open “the jaws,” the mechanism that enables cars to be connected with one another).

Braking, too, was primitive in the extreme. Locomotives had no mechanism to slow them down apart from putting them in reverse, which good drivers did only in an emergency. Instead, once the driver gave the signal to slow down, a brakeman had to clamber along the roof of the train from the rear and apply the brakes fitted on each car. Normally, there would also be a brakeman at the front who would work his way toward the back of the train. There was no end of potential for accidents with this arrangement, not least the risk to the brakemen themselves. As a former brakeman described the process, it “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance, to go over the top of a freight train—winter or summer . . . rain, snow, sleet, ice all over the roofs and on brake wheels and handholds.”
¹⁸
And it was a very unsatisfactory way of slowing down trains that were becoming increasingly fast. Uneven braking could lead to a snapped coupling, with the risk of runaway cars.

George Westinghouse, a remarkable young engineer, already had a couple of inventions under his belt before devising a solution to this problem: continuous braking. Legend has it that Westinghouse witnessed a railroad accident in which two engineers saw one another, but were unable to stop their trains in time using the existing brakes. Westinghouse's idea was to place a compressed-air tank in the locomotive and run a hose connected to a cylinder on each car that operated the brake shoes. Switching on the air would push the shoes down onto the wheels. It took him a while to overcome various difficulties, such as how to stop the front cars from braking before those at the back, but after three years of development, the method was patented in 1872. A rival invention was the vacuum brake, which operates when air is allowed into the vacuum. There was much debate about which system was superior—both devices were certainly a great improvement on what had gone before—but ultimately it was the air brake that would win out in America, as it would in most European countries.

Janney's coupling and the Westinghouse brake combined well to improve rail safety. However, although some rail companies introduced one or both systems relatively quickly, many resisted or used them only on passenger trains, which meant that freight trains remained a major hazard. It took the fanaticism of one man, with the appropriate name of Lorenzo Coffin, a tall, bewhiskered farmer from Iowa, to badger the lawmakers into making the Westinghouse air brake and the Janney coupler mandatory.

Coffin is an unlikely hero of the history of the railroads. Initially, he had no official role in the rail industry but was one of those local busybodies whose letters appear in the local newspaper when there are no others. He was a self-styled lobbyist on railroad matters and developed considerable knowledge by touring the country, mainly on freight trains, and talking to railroad workers. He had first become interested in the issue when he observed an accident in which a brakeman on a freight train lost the two remaining fingers of his right hand while coupling two cars, having lost the others in similar incidents. Coffin, who had been a chaplain in the Civil War and was blessed with both religious fervor and technical expertise, began to lobby for the railroad companies to install automatic couplers along with air brakes that could be operated from the locomotive.
This system not only provided better braking but also made the brakeman's job safer.

Coffin traveled around Iowa promoting railroad safety and was appointed the state's first railroad commissioner in 1883 at the age of sixty, a mostly honorary position but one that at least gave him a locus from which he could lobby the rail companies. He drafted Iowa's first Railroad Safety Appliance Act, but even after it became state law, railroads ignored its requirements. Coffin realized that federal legislation would be required, and he became something of a one-man-band campaigner, writing countless articles in obscure journals. According to Stewart H. Holbrook, he “invited himself to conventions of railroad officials and equipment builders, and here he was as welcome as leprosy.” Eventually, the Master Car Builders Association was persuaded to hold a series of tests on an eight-mile stretch of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. The Burlington Trials, as they became known, were intended to test the ability of various braking systems to stop fifty-car freight trains. Initially, none of the systems, even Westinghouse's, performed well, which seemed to vindicate the skepticism of the railroad companies, which doubted that these new types of brakes would ever be adequate for anything but short and light trains. However, Westinghouse adjusted his system, and at the third trial, in the summer of 1887, the test train was stopped from forty miles per hour within five hundred feet, a huge improvement on anything previously recorded. The following year the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the federal regulatory board for the industry (about which much more in
Chapter 9
), had begun examining safety in the industry and was influenced by Coffin's arguments. The commission started recording statistics on the industry's safety record that revealed, shockingly, that two thousand workers were killed and ten times that number injured on the railroads in 1888. No fewer than three hundred men died in coupling accidents alone. Coffin, no longer a commissioner, gate-crashed a meeting of state railroad commissioners that year and made a speech that proved highly influential in creating the right political climate for the legislation to be passed. He had been hired by the unions representing brakemen and conductors to lobby for the equipment to be made mandatory and used his powers as an orator to recount, in great detail, numerous tales of needless deaths and personal tragedy on the railroads: “He
piled horror upon horror, and interspersed the bloody statistics with pitiful tales of the aftermath of accidents.” Although Coffin's efforts helped influence public opinion, it took another five years before Congress passed the bill that he had drafted. In March 1893 President Benjamin Harrison finally signed the Railroad Safety Appliance Act, by which all American railroads were required to adopt air brakes and automatic couplers. Coffin, whose efforts had done so much to bring about the legislation, was given the pen used to sign the bill into law: “Coffin [was] a fanatic to the last, one of the most useful fanatics this country has produced, the man Westinghouse and Janney needed to give their inventions real and widespread use.”
¹⁹

The railroads, as ever, objected. Not, of course, because they were oblivious to the mounting death toll, but because they argued it would be a mistake to tie them to a particular technology, rather like Apple being forced into using Microsoft software today. It was a familiar argument of industries wishing to resist regulation. Faced with mounting public pressure as a result of the large number of deaths, the railroads inevitably lost the argument. After the usual delays to give time for the railroads to make the necessary changes, the Railroad Safety Appliance Act became fully operative by August 1900. A further safety feature, and one that did not become widespread until the early years of the twentieth century, was the all-steel coach, which was much more fire and crash resistant than its wooden predecessors, but again it took a long time for the railroad companies to make the required investment. The act, indeed, entrenched a rather different approach to safety from that in Europe. Rather than trying to avoid crashes entirely, which was the European philosophy, America has tended to focus on crashworthiness. This has resulted, for example, in uniquely heavy coaches being mandated and, as we will see in the final chapter, has proved costly to the railroads and detrimental to their interests.