The Great Railroad Revolution (40 page)

Drunk engineers were only one cause of discomfort for ordinary passengers. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the railroad well established as the only means of traveling long distances, rail travel was still rarely a happy experience. Indeed, the conditions that passengers were obliged to tolerate would be one of the reasons the railroad companies gradually became pariahs. The Pullman cars were one end of the spectrum of services offered by the railroads. At the other end, even during the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s, when the railroads were expanding at a ferocious rate, train travel for the masses remained pretty grim.

The conditions that immigrants had to face were undoubtedly the worst. Despite improvements in services and connections, there were no coast-to-coast services, and it was only toward the end of the century that there were regular through trains between New York and Chicago. The
completion of the bridge over the Missouri in 1872 theoretically allowed for an easier transfer, but the eastern railroads refused to cooperate with the Union Pacific, forcing passengers laden with their baggage to use the wagons of a special transfer company to reach the other side. Given the need for all these changes, and the slowness of the trains, an immigrant might take seven days to reach the West Coast, whereas passengers enjoying the faster and better-appointed trains might complete the journey in four or five. Even after the Missouri bridge was built, the journey necessitated several changes. People arriving at Chicago heading west would already have been “forced to change trains once or several times, probably at Buffalo, Pittsburgh or Detroit.” And Chicago itself inevitably brought a change of train: “During the heyday of American railroad passenger travel, one of the common sayings was that a hog could travel across country through Chicago without changing cars at Chicago, but a human being could not.”
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Immigrants were designated special cars—and sometimes entire trains— consisting of the oldest and least-comfortable equipment. Thus, they traveled in wooden coaches with flat roofs, fitted out with hard wooden benches, and still heated with the potbellied stove in the middle that fried those near it and was of no use to those farther away. There was a “convenience” at each end of the coach, a mere hole giving out onto the rails. There was no running water of any kind. The news butcher (see
Chapter 3
) provided bottled water and other basics, but the trains still stopped for meals that had to be bolted down with great haste, as the railroad staff were intent on avoiding delays. According to George H. Douglas, “Crews on immigrant trains were apparently especially sadistic, and would sometimes start up after only five or ten minutes, without the slightest warning to passengers, perhaps delighting in being able to leave part of their troubling horde for the next day's immigrant train.”
²⁷
Pullman service it was not.

In 1879, before he achieved fame as the author of
Treasure Island
and
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, Robert Louis Stevenson traveled on an immigrant train nearly ten years after the completion of the first transcontinental. On these trains, conditions were not much better than those described by Dickens nearly forty years earlier, as cited in
Chapter 3
. The discomfort began the moment he boarded the train at Castle Garden
Station in New York: “There was no waiting room, no refreshment room, the cars were locked; and for at least another hour or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit platform.”
²⁸

After several changes of trains, Stevenson was put on an immigrant train at Council Bluffs, Iowa, consisting of just three passenger coaches— known for some unaccountable reason as “Zulu trains” in the West—to which were added a baggage car, various freight wagons, and a caboose and which, at times, carried entire families along with their chickens and even a goat or cow for milk. One of the passenger cars was reserved for Chinese, at least fifty of whom were crammed into the car with their baggage. Indeed, in this period in America, the Chinese suffered much racism and were generally provided with separate cars, just like the separate “Jim Crow” cars that were becoming standard for black people on the segregated trains of the South. Stevenson was shocked to find his fellow travelers discussing the Chinese in terms of such stereotypes as uncleanliness—in fact, the Chinese were likely to have been cleaner than most of the Caucasians on the train— deviousness, and clannishness, the last being an all too understandable and sensible response to their pariah status. Stevenson also found the train staff almost brutally rude. He asked a conductor three times when a dinner stop would be made, and the man merely “looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away.”
²⁹

Stevenson installed himself in the men's car, where for $2.50 he managed to buy three straw cushions and a board on which he could sleep when placed across the backs of seats. Except he found sleep almost an impossibility, as Dee Brown reports, “with his fellow travelers sprawled on boards, seats, and flooring, all being continually shaken by the rough motion of the train groaning and muttering in their half slumber.”
³⁰
Stevenson thought it strange that women, with their children, had no compunction about wandering into the men's car, despite the spitting, swearing, and card playing. The car was spartan in the extreme, with no upholstery, no springs to soften the journey, and poor ventilation. And the journey was slow, all too slow. Stevenson moaned that the train was constantly driven onto sidetracks to wait for other services, all of which were given priority over the immigrant trains, with the result that their final arrival time could not be predicted even within a day or so. On the tracks, the trains managed as
little as nine miles per hour in sections where the track had been hastily laid and perhaps thirty-five at best. In the early 1870s, the average speed was around twenty miles per hour, but this improved quickly and would double in the following decade.

Stevenson also complained that at the dinner stops, “the train stole from the station without note of warning,” whereas on all other trains a warning cry of “all aboard” was issued.
³¹
He just missed out on the big improvement in meal services brought about by the innovative Fred Harvey, who realized that there was good money to be made from providing better-quality eating houses for the great majority of train passengers who could not afford Pullman. Harvey, who had worked for the railroads as a caterer for several years, decided in 1878 to set out on his own and opened the first of a series of restaurants at the stations of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, which became renowned for service and quality and in particular for the “Harvey Girls,” the waitresses chosen for their attractiveness and attentiveness. These young women were subject to a strict regime, being made to wear prim uniforms and required to live in hostels where they were barred from consorting with passengers—or any other men, for that matter. They acted as a civilizing influence on the customers, who previously had a reputation for being so unruly that the girls' predecessors, mostly black men, had to carry firearms. The Harvey Girls achieved such widespread popularity that they featured in a raucous eponymous 1946 musical. These restaurants were to become a feature of rail travel in the West, providing a vital service, until dining cars became universal,
³²
and even then Harvey, credited with creating the first American restaurant chain, responded by opening several eateries in the big union stations springing up in places such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles that survived until the decline of the railroads after the Second World War.

Whereas immigrants were at the bottom of the scale in terms of the service they received, many poorer travelers on branch and local lines fared little better than before. There was a fantastic proliferation of such railroads, most still serving local interests and businesses, and the service on these lines usually consisted of just a few mixed-traffic trains, combining a few freight wagons with a couple of passenger cars per day. The trains would stop at all stations, often taking a long time to unload freight,
but they would still represent a lifeline for local people. Traveling conditions remained primitive. Whereas the large railroad companies were, by the 1880s, introducing improvements such as electric lighting and steam heating on the trains, most passengers on these smaller lines did not see such progress until well into the twentieth century—if ever, given these lines were among the first to close.

These short lines, as they are known, tended to live off hand-me-downs from the larger companies, both locomotives and rolling stock. Sometimes these were ill-suited for purpose, such as on the West River Railroad in Vermont, where longer trains had to be split in two to be hauled up the sharper inclines. On the Walla Walla & Columbia River Railroad in Washington State, the engineers reportedly had to fill up the water tank with bucketfuls hauled up by rope from the local creek. It was not unknown, either, for the passengers to have to help out when the train was held up: “Obstacles such as rainstorms, which revealed leaky roofs in the cars, or blizzards . . . stopped trains for days while the passengers and crew dug [them] out.”
³³
Nevertheless, most of these lines survived because they were a lifeline for the local economy, and many, too, benefited from mail contracts that were an effective hidden subsidy.

Since roads and road transportation were still primitive, branch lines were built to the remotest places, often at the whim of the local landowner. Their very names evoke a world that seems rather more than just over a century away. Take the eight-mile Narragansett Pier Railroad, which opened in 1876 to serve the fashionable Rhode Island resort of that name on a branch from the New Haven Railroad. It was family owned and “employed only the ricketiest of engines and rolling stock once the summer people were gone.” At one point, for obscure reasons, the Pennsylvania sought to buy it and sent a telegram to its president asking for the price. The response is part of railroad legend: “Mine not for sale, how much for yours?” Journeys on such lines might be delayed by the conductor's deciding it was a good time to shoot a rabbit or, more seriously, because beavers had decided to make a meal of a bridge, a common hazard on the two-foot-gauge lines in western Maine. These lines were run informally, and rarely for profit: “The engineer might well be the president of the company, the brakeman his brother.”
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One kind of local line did prosper, however. This was the period when the number of commuting services began to spread, notably in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, stimulating the growth of the urban sprawl that would later be served so much better by the automobile. In fact, as early as the 1840s, a few railroads had begun offering “commuted” tickets—reduced fares for regular use—to stimulate travel, but demand was limited, as there were few businesses needing such workers or, indeed, suburbs from which they could commute. Boston was an exception, as it boasted eighty-five commuter stations within fifteen miles of the city center by 1848 when a fifth of its managerial class lived in surrounding suburbs and came to work by train.

However, for the most part, it was not until after the Civil War, when industrialization began to attract vast numbers of workers to the cities, that the need for commuter services became pressing. The relationship between the railroad companies and developers was instrumental in stimulating the demand. Typically, suburbs were built around a main square housing a railroad station, to which the commuters were expected to walk, which meant that stations were spaced about a mile apart. The lines would often extend out farther to “exurban” areas, past the suburban fringe to where the really wealthy lived on “larger estates, horse farms and country retreats whose occupants would be driven to the nearest station by carriage, or, later, ‘station wagon.'”
³⁵
By the 1880s, commuting was becoming commonplace in numerous eastern towns and even as far west as San Francisco, where the first commuting line opened in 1864. Soon, on the busiest lines, there was a differentiation between the types of worker, with manual and blue-collar employees taking earlier trains, as they worked longer hours, whereas white-collar and managerial staff traveled later. The more affluent groups organized their own club cars, supplied by the railroad and paid for by subscription. These coaches were for the exclusive use of members, who joined by invitation, and were furnished with comfortable chairs, card tables, and, principally for the return journey home, a bar. The suburban sprawl was, of course, to be the urban railroad's undoing, as it spread beyond easy reach of the railroads and therefore was better served by the automobile, which would supplant these suburban rail services within a couple of generations. The effect on the towns was to
relieve pressure on housing. People crammed into tenements could, at last, breathe more easily as they moved into suburban houses cheap enough for even modestly paid workers to afford the rent.

Black people, many of whom were becoming more prosperous, as demonstrated by the emergence of a small black middle class, were flocking to the railroads, too, but had a varied experience on the trains. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the trains were integrated, even if individual whites were wont to show their displeasure at sharing accommodation with blacks. However, it was not long before the southern railroad companies soon began to create what became known as “Jim Crow” cars. However, segregation was not universal, depending often on the whim of the conductor and the courage of the black passengers to face up to discrimination. Whereas poor blacks obviously used coach class—the American trains were largely unclassed, but on some services there was “coach” and “parlor” accommodation—some of the more affluent ones were carried for a time without problem in the parlor cars: “Segregation policies were not hard and fast during the 1880s and 1890s, and no individual, black or white, could know with certainty what the policy on services for black people would be in any given part of the country.” The railroad companies themselves disliked the policy of segregation for practical reasons, as it imposed an unnecessary cost on them. However, white travelers, especially those in second class, pressed for it, since to many segregation was seen as necessary for the protection of female virtue. They were concerned, too, about the less servile generation of blacks who had no memory of slavery and thus “did not know their place,” in the way their fathers had. In the early years of the twentieth century, therefore, attitudes hardened: “By the turn of the century, segregation had fastened its grip on practically every arena in the South where the races might come into public contact.”
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Conditions were supposed to be “separate but equal,” but that was a sham that the Interstate Commerce Commission failed to enforce. In fact, lives were even put at risk by the habit of putting black people in old wooden cars in trains where the white folk traveled in steel cars that, in the event of an accident, would plow into their wooden neighbors.