The Great Railroad Revolution (51 page)

All this was taking place in the context of a changing transportation world. Although the automobile had not yet started to impinge on the railroads' profits, remarkably, a new type of railroad had done so. This was the streetcar or, after electrification, trolley, because of the “trolley pole” connecting with the overhead wire. The streetcar had recently been transformed by the change of traction from horse to electricity, and, later its mutation, the interurban, which was a hybrid between streetcars and conventional railroads. The first streetcars, horse-drawn of course, appeared in 1832—on the New York & Harlem—a natural development of the omnibus that had appeared a few years previously when it was realized that putting the coaches on rails ensured a far smoother and more reliable journey than on the muddy urban streets and reduced the amount of effort required from the horses. Streetcars flourished and soon spread to towns and cities around the country, but they were always inefficient: the horses or mules they used were expensive to feed and soon required replacing as they died or became exhausted from pulling the heavy vehicles, which strangely were mostly based on train-coach design.

In the 1880s, a few pioneering towns such as Boston, Massachusetts, and Richmond, Virginia, began experimenting with electric traction. These tests
proved so successful that it took less than two decades for almost every system in the country to adopt electricity, and by 1902 only a handful of systems relied on animal power. The remarkably rapid adoption of this new technology inevitably led to the use of electric traction being considered for longer journeys. As we will see below, there was some electrification of conventional railroads, particularly around New York City, but it was the interurban network that grew exponentially in the first decade of the 1900s.

Electric streetcars enjoyed a remarkable boom in the following years. Before electrification, in 1880 there had been around three thousand miles of track in cities and towns across America used by around twenty thousand horsecars. Major cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago each boasted several hundred miles of line, but electrification, together with the rapid increase of urban populations as people were attracted to work in the factories springing up as a result of industrialization, stimulated a remarkable expansion of streetcar systems. The transformation was swift and virtually universal. By 1902, more than 90 percent of streetcar lines had been electrified, and the new technology inspired a remarkable boom in construction, which resulted in the track mileage across the United States reaching twenty-two thousand, operated by more than sixty thousand streetcars. Apart from, oddly, Manhattan and a few small towns, the horses had disappeared, as had the cable systems that had once been seen as the natural successor to animal power—with the exception of San Francisco, where cables had long been used because horses were unable to cope with the steep hills.

The electrified streetcar lines accelerated the growth of suburbs started by the railroads and resulted in the low-density cities of today's America. The suburbanization of America was a joint enterprise of the railroads and the streetcars. Without efficient transportation systems, it would have been impossible for developers to make profits out of building homes far from the town centers where most of their potential customers worked. With the car and roads not yet ready to challenge the railroads, the decades around the turn of the century saw a massive expansion in suburban services: “Between 1880 and World War I, the pattern of railroad commuting to bedroom suburbs became a fixture of American social life.”
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The iron road had initially stimulated the rapid development of towns and cities, and now, as much by accident as design, it allowed urban areas
to sprawl: “Suburban railroad traffic changed the American landscape in the 1880s and 1890s [forging] a new kind of link between the city's core and pastoral environs that had once been thought of as far away.”
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The railroads' role in creating suburbia was key. A common pattern was for developers to identify a greenfield site in the environs of a town or city and buy up land cheaply on which to build houses without revealing their intent. The developer had to ensure that there was either an existing railroad connection or one that could be easily extended to the site and then persuade the railroad company to provide a station. Failing that, the developers themselves would have to spend their own money on building the station, because without it, the housing would have little value.

The railroads not only created the early suburbs but also established the rhythm of life that went with them. Daily travel by train meant a regimen determined by the clock, as people generally traveled on the same service every day: “Office routines in the city were in fact adjusted to fit the times when railroads actually ran the largest number of trains on the most rapid schedules.” Office hours were determined by the arrival of trains, and the nine-to-five routine was born. Railroad commuting bred a lifestyle of habits and fashion and created countless Groundhog Days. People would use the same car, the same seat even, every day, often sitting with the same fellow commuters, and read the same paper or play the same card game. They might even be on first-name terms with the train conductor. They wore the same clothes, bought their coffees at the same kiosks, and even followed the same trends: “Briefcases, attaché cases or other accoutrements went in and out of fashion over the years; they were highly stylized but uniformly accepted.”
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The most affluent commuters would often club together to pay for a special coach to be attached to their regular service, solely for their use—hence the expression
club car.
Schedules tended to remain pretty much the same, too, over the years, often serving generations of users. The Lackawanna could boast the longest-running US commuter train service, which left the railroad's Hoboken terminal in New Jersey at 4:15 p.m. every afternoon to travel nonstop to the leafy towns of Madison and Morristown. It was introduced in 1883 and retained the same spot in the Lackawanna's timetable until the demise of the company in the 1970s. The popularity of the train among the wealthy elite earned it the unofficial
moniker the “Millionaire's Express,” which suggests that the elite of the white-collar workforce did not have to endure long hours in the office. The Lackawanna could also lay claim to having carried America's longest-serving commuter, W. Parsons Todd, onetime mayor of Morristown and founder of the town's museum, who reportedly regularly traveled between his New York office and his home between 1899 and 1970.

The early commuting lines, described in
Chapter 7
, had by the first few years of the twentieth century proliferated in many eastern and midwestern states. Towns with suburban rail services included not just New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where the rail-commuting habit survives and which had developed very extensive suburban networks in the three decades before the First World War, but also Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New Orleans, where the local rail networks have all but disappeared.

For the railroad companies, this burgeoning commuter market was a mixed blessing. If there were sufficient concentrations of commuters and available train paths—that is, sufficient space in the timetable without disrupting longer-distance services—suburban rail could be profitable. However, the trains themselves were expensive to provide and might be used just twice daily, sitting idle in sidings the rest of the time, unlike stock used for longer journeys that could earn revenue all day long. The commuters themselves could be a demanding bunch, dissatisfied with the service provided in return for their expensive season ticket—though they received a considerable discount as regular travelers—and therefore ever pressuring the railroad to improve its facilities. The tribulations of the longest commuter line in the United States, the Long Island Rail Road, demonstrate the difficulties of achieving consistent profits over a long period out of commuter traffic. Despite also being America's busiest commuter service by some measure, the Long Island has had a turbulent existence with periods of prosperity interwoven with leaner times. The company went broke in the 1870s, then prospered under the inspired leadership of Austin Corbin, until the 1903 panic again plunged it into difficulties. In 1900, the Long Island was taken over by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which saw the benefits of combining long-distance services with suburban traffic in a single new, massive New York terminal. With passenger numbers growing rapidly, the
Long Island prospered, thanks to New York's population explosion, electrifying large sections of its routes, and taking over several connecting lines and streetcar services, only to start closing lines in the 1930s. Then, after the Second World War, the Long Island Rail Road fell into difficulties again (see
Chapter 11
), not least because it was prevented by the authorities from raising fares between 1918 and 1947, despite a doubling in operating costs.

Commuters also needed to get around towns, and one solution was the elevated railroad. Subway systems were initially rejected as being too difficult technically, despite the example of the London Underground; instead, the idea of putting railroads on raised platforms down the middle of the invariably straight city streets (US cities were required by planning statutes to be built on a grid pattern) was taken up in several places. New York's extensive network of elevated railroads started with the opening in 1870 of the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway, a four-mile line operated by cable. The company collapsed almost immediately, but its assets were picked up by the Manhattan Railway, which built a series of lines. Soon, four of New York's avenues—which are essentially on a north-south axis—were overshadowed by heavily engineered metal structures stretching up to sixty feet in the air and carrying steam locomotive–hauled trains. By the end of the decade, there were more than fifty miles of track in New York, but, not surprisingly, given their ugly infrastructure and the smoke and cinders they rained down on the public below, the New York elevated railroads, or Els, were never particularly loved. The fact that they were owned by the reviled Jay Gould, who eventually gained control of the whole network, did not make them any more popular. They were also slow, never averaging more than around 12 mph, and difficult to reach. Nevertheless, with no alternative yet available—the subway system would not open until the early years of the twentieth century—they were heavily used. In their heyday, the mid-1880s, they carried well over 100 million passengers annually and were so profitable that they were able to reduce their fares to the five cents universally charged by streetcars of the age. Inevitably, though, their days were numbered. The Els were an intermediate technology that was never quite satisfactory, even when, soon after the turn of the century, the network was electrified. After Manhattan's first underground railroad was completed in 1904, the Els started to be gradually replaced by the subway. Most of the Manhattan Els survived into the 1950s, whereas in the other
New York boroughs many of the overhead structures were incorporated into the subway system. The other city that favored elevated railroads was, of course, Chicago, where much of the system survives and where the “L” (oddly, the system was known as the “El” in New York but the “L” in Chicago) has become a proud part of its transportation heritage. Its first line, which was steam operated, opened in 1892, and the system, which was soon converted to electricity, expanded rapidly in the years before the First World War. Elevated railroads, though, were expensive and cumbersome, and conventional railroads could not be built profitably to serve the local needs of smaller towns. The railroads had gotten in there first, taking advantage of the easier sites, but the streetcars' greater flexibility and lower costs enabled them to reach places that the railroads could not have served profitably. Once the streetcars were electrified, their flexibility and cheaper infrastructure allowed them to become the key driver of the expansion of the suburbs. There was almost no place too small to sustain a viable trolley network. While large towns soon had tracks on every major thoroughfare, almost every town with a main street was getting in on the act: “Streetcar lines were designed with the express purpose of opening new residential tracts whose appeal would be to people of some means who were repelled by conditions in the central city. They were called streetcar suburbs.” Until the First World War, streetcars were highly profitable: “The expectation— actually, the faith—was that ridership and profits, even with the 5 cent fares seemingly inviolate, would continue to grow far into the future.” Most lines started out as local concerns but were soon consolidated, first into urban networks, and later into major streetcar corporations that owned systems in several cities and were regarded by the public with increasing suspicion since they were effectively monopolists. That perception was not entirely fair because the streetcar companies did invest heavily in new equipment and cars after they consolidated into bigger concerns. Apart from a few affluent suburbs whose residents were worried that streetcars would attract the local riffraff, “the expansion of street railroads was regarded as a municipal boon even as the men who controlled them grew richer and lost favor in the eyes of the public.”
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Every small-town mayor and councilor saw street railroads as the harbinger of growth and prosperity. Initially, their main purpose was to carry commuters to work and back, but soon streetcars were built to connect the
city with a host of other destinations: “There were lines running out beyond the suburbs to the countryside, to cemeteries (there were special funeral cars), or to scenic sites for picnics and outings.” The weekend was indeed big business, and the streetcar companies expanded into providing leisure activities. A census in 1907 found that there were no fewer than “467 ‘parks and pleasure resorts' owned or operated by street railway companies,” all, of course, connected to the streetcar network.
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The ride in the trolley was part of the day's fun, especially when the windows were taken out in the summer, affording the passengers a welcome cool breeze.