The Great Railroad Revolution (39 page)

These developments were all part of a wider process of standardization and equipment and operating procedures, which further reduced costs and made it easier for railroads to operate their trains on the lines of other companies, creating the beginnings of a truly national rail network. This was a period of rapid expansion and consolidation, during which the very nature of the rail system changed visibly. For example, many towns with two or more stations built one central “union” station, linking lines that
had hitherto been separate. The first such joint station was opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1862, and the concept was picked up in subsequent decades in many major cities, though also in some relatively small towns such as Worcester, Massachusetts, where the station served no fewer than five railroads.

A key development was the near-universal adoption of the standard gauge of four feet and eight and a half inches for the tracks, which became inevitable after Congress had decreed that the transcontinental line would use it. The decision had been hotly debated. Lincoln favored the five-foot gauge that was in use throughout much of the South, but he eventually bowed to northern interests who lobbied for standard gauge. There were some who thought it was a mistake: “That additional 3½ins of track width would have meant even more inches of car width, hence roomier seats, wider aisles—making it possible for two fat people to pass each other in the aisle without danger of throwing the train off the track.”
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Even more useful today in the age of obesity! Following the transcontinental decision, the vast majority of railroads built in the aftermath of the Civil War used standard gauge, and many other lines were converted in this period.

As railroad companies expanded to serve national rather than local interests, the idea that it was better for a railroad to have a separate gauge from its local rivals had become redundant.
Cooperation
rather than
confrontation
was now the watchword. Railroads work best as an integrated system: the longer that passengers and freight can travel without changing trains, the better the service. Even the Erie, with its magnificent broad gauge of six feet, had to swallow its pride in order to allow through trains on its tracks. In the South, the five-foot gauge was changed to standard over two days in the early summer of 1886, large gangs of track workers moving one of the rails on thirteen thousand miles of track. The operation—staggering in its organizational scope—also required converting eighteen hundred locomotives and forty thousand coaches, although some of these already had adjustable axles. Until this time, trains heading in and out of the South had been subject to a delay of up to a half hour as their cars were lifted by hoists and attached to wheel sets of the right gauge. The efforts of tens of thousands of workers over a momentous thirty-six-hour period on May 31–June 1, 1886, created—at last—a unified railroad for almost the whole United States.

Apart from accidents, railroad passengers faced a rather more mundane risk, but one that was all too common: robbery. Although exaggerated in films and popular culture, this was a genuine danger in the last decades of the nineteenth century. According to the
Encyclopedia of North American Railroads
, train robberies “grew into a uniquely American phenomenon” that plagued the railroads for a half century.
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Numerous figures emerged, many of whom have been mythologized in westerns: Sam Bass and the Reno brothers from Indiana, the Younger and James brothers from Missouri who formed a joint gang, and the Daltons from Kansas.
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Initially, most robberies were in the Midwest, but as the railroads expanded in the West, so did the number and location of attacks. Contrary to legend, Native Americans did not attack the passenger trains that now crossed their land. Although, as we have seen, they had occasionally tried to disrupt construction of the railroads, by the time the lines were completed, the indigenous peoples of the plains and farther west had been defeated, massacred, or pacified. Indeed, passengers heading out west were often excited by the prospect of coming across Indians, with romantic notions of seeing half-naked “noble savages” with feathered headdresses skillfully riding their horses, suggesting there were sexual undertones in these Victorian ladies' descriptions of their encounters with Native Americans. The reality was sadly different. In some cases, as with the Central Pacific, the Indians had been given free passes to travel on the lines, and, as trains full of tourists and immigrants started arriving, they would congregate at stations, begging or selling a few knickknacks. Although through the car window the Native Americans might present an exciting image, travelers began to fear encountering them for rather more prosaic reasons than being attacked: “On the train or at close range in the station they did not appear to be as clean as some tourists would have liked.”
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The white robber gangs, however, were another matter and remained a problem for the railroad companies right until the end of the century and even, occasionally, beyond. The many armed and rootless men left by the Civil War were for the most part the perpetrators of these audacious crimes. The earliest recorded attack, near Cincinnati on the Ohio & Mississippi during the last few days of the war in May 1865, was probably the result of military action. A gang of thieves derailed the train and promptly
robbed the passengers, though sparing the women, and escaped over a river toward Kentucky. The first peacetime armed train robbery was in October the following year at Seymour, Indiana, on the same railroad. The target was an express mail wagon that the messengers were forced to open after being threatened with a gun. The two masked robbers snatched thirteen thousand dollars from the safe, pulled the bell cord to stop the train, and escaped into the night. This was a typical pattern. For the most part, it was the high-value mail and the safe in the mail car rather than, as in the cowboy films, the passengers who were targeted.

Several similar successful attacks were carried out that year on midwestern railroads, and most were the handiwork of the Reno brothers' gang. Their biggest heist, on the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad in May 1868, netted a staggering ninety-six thousand dollars and resulted in the death of a messenger, beaten and thrown from the train, but a few months later vigilantes and sheriffs caught up with the three Reno brothers along with a fourth gang member, and they were later lynched. After a two-year lull, in the early 1870s there was a spate of robberies in several states, from Kentucky to Nevada, and even one in the East, on a train run by the Boston & Albany. Most of the attacks followed the same modus operandi. At a remote stop, the robbers would climb on the baggage car, where they could not be seen by either the locomotive men or the train crew, and would clamber over the roofs of the coaches to the tender, where they forced the driver to stop the train. There were, in truth, probably not as many attacks as suggested by the sensationalist publicity they attracted, but the robberies certainly had an impact on the railroad companies. Anxious to maintain the image of being a safe form of transportation, they strengthened their mail cars and improved their security. Most controversially, they employed security guards from the Pinkerton Agency to act as a kind of private army not only to protect the trains but also to pursue actively the perpetrators. The Pinkertons, whose uncompromising methods came to the fore in strikebreaking toward the end of the century (see next chapter), almost matched the robbers in their ruthlessness. The most famous of the train robbers was the James-Younger gang led by Jesse James and his brother Frank, former Confederate guerrillas in the Civil War who turned to a life of banditry.
Having robbed various banks and become outlaws, in July 1873 the gang turned to train robbery on the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad near Adair, Iowa. Their method—simply removing a rail—lacked subtlety and caused the death of the driver, who was crushed under the locomotive when it keeled over, but that did not stop them from raiding the safe and grabbing valuables from the passengers. Several more robberies ensued, and the Pinkerton men were soon on the case. After a shoot-out in March 1874, in which one gang member and two Pinkerton agents were killed, it was, strangely, the Pinkertons who attracted the wrath of the public by committing a crass public-relations blunder through an unlawful attack on the James home in Missouri early the following year. Unbelievably, the Pinkerton men used the rather unsubtle method of simply shoving a hefty bomb through a window, killing a half brother and injuring the mother of the James boys, who, contrary to their information, were not in the house at the time. The resulting press onslaught against the Pinkertons' methods did much to make the James brothers, ruthless murderers though they were, almost respectable. Their image was helped by the fact that when robbing trains, they usually left the passengers alone while they robbed the safe and took the mail. Most of the gang were eventually captured or killed in a bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876, though Jesse survived until April 1882, when he was shot in the back by a bounty hunter who had infiltrated the gang.

Although passengers were rarely targeted in these robberies, one attack did have catastrophic results. In December 1896, a gang dislodged a rail on a bridge on a branch of the Louisville & Nashville, sending a local train plunging into the Cahaba River near Birmingham, Alabama. The death toll was twenty-seven, and the robbers compounded their calumny by going through the cars to steal from the dead and injured before help could arrive.

An attack such as this was, however, very much the exception, which explains, perhaps, why the public attitude toward these attacks was surprisingly sympathetic. The James gang, in particular, attracted favorable publicity, thanks to the support of the founder of the anti-Republican
Kansas City Times
, John Newman Edwards, who saw Jesse James as a potential leader of a revived Confederate insurgency and published a series of letters
from him proclaiming his innocence. The action of the gangs, too, reflected, albeit in extreme form, the growing public dislike of the railroads as corrupt and domineering organizations that had become too powerful. Indeed, Stewart H. Holbrook suggests the James gang was able to continue operating for so long because “the public attitude towards the railroads in the 1870s . . . was one of fear and hatred combined.” The robbers were perceived as Robin Hood figures, with the wealthy railroad companies and the more affluent travelers as their target—even though in truth for the most part the robbers were intent only on getting their hands on large amounts of cash. A few attacks, however, notably by the outlaw Chris Evans and various associates against the Southern Pacific in California, were motivated by anger at the railroads' exploitation of their monopoly position against the interests of local settlers: “Many people had no sympathy for the railroad and saw train robbers as democratic heroes rather than villains.”
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Countless songs and poems were composed in honor of the thieves, often recounting highly sanitized versions of their actions in which they stopped a train, restricting themselves to robbing the rich and raiding the safe, and then rode off on horseback into the desert. It was part of a folklore that was both born of the growing antipathy toward the railroads and also further stimulated it, a phenomenon that will be analyzed in the next chapter.

It was the same suspicion and dislike of the railroad companies that led to the romanticization of the hoboes who jumped freight trains and traveled free. Like train robbers, they enjoyed a measure of public support because they were perceived as getting one over on rapacious corporations who saw fit to hand out huge numbers of free passes to VIPs, especially politicians, who might be useful to them and were contemptuously known as “deadheads” or “fare beaters.” The phenomenon of hoboes jumping trains had its roots in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, when large numbers of rootless men traveled the country with little clear purpose. Some were tramps, living life permanently on the road and never seeking work, but most men jumped trains in order to seek work or a new life, most commonly out west. It was a precarious way to travel. If possible, they boarded the trains at stations or freight sidings, but sometimes they hopped on trains trundling slowly through towns, running the obvious risk of being dragged underneath. There was a constant game of cat and
mouse between the train conductors and the hoboes, who rode anywhere on the train where they could keep out of view of the crew. The most perilous hiding place was on top of the cars, where falling asleep could prove fatal, but it could be equally dangerous to ride between or underneath the cars. The lucky ones found an empty wagon or broke into one, which they raided for any food or portable valuables. They risked the wrath of the conductors, who, however, sometimes turned a blind eye to these free-loaders, not least because many of them were former railroad workers or, indeed, were seeking a job on the railroads. Many of the hoboes, of course, had a drinking problem, as did many railroad workers, especially the drivers. According to Dee Brown, “Pioneer engineers on the Western railroads had a reputation for heavy drinking” as an antidote to the stresses of operating trains in such dangerous conditions, with the risk of attacks by robbers, derailments caused by the poor track, or collisions with other locomotives or livestock.
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Passengers occasionally attributed particularly bumpy rides to the lack of sobriety of the train crew, and, although drinking was a fireable offense, the railroad companies often took a lenient attitude, recognizing the pressures of the job. Use of alcohol was so prevalent that after his successful campaign, Coffin, the great safety campaigner, turned his attention to the issue and established a Railroad Temperance Society in an effort to try to reduce drinking among railroad workers.