The Great Railroad Revolution (60 page)

The costs were so high that it was not uncommon for these luxury services to be killed off despite remaining popular and being well loaded. For example, according to Saunders, “The
California Zephyr
had an average occupancy rate of nearly 80 per cent (that would make any airline envious) right up to its last trip on March 22, 1970.”
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However, the economics just did not stack up in a world where railroads had lost their monopoly and the alternatives had become cheaper. Overall, passenger numbers were in steep decline. Whereas in 1944 there had been 600 million intercity passenger journeys, already by 1949 this had halved, as gasoline was no longer rationed, and by 1966 the number was just 105 million.

Commuter journeys, too, were falling, as cars became universal and jobs were less concentrated in downtown areas accessible by rail. By the late 1950s, all but a couple of railroads were losing money on their passenger services: the New Haven, centered around Boston and Connecticut, which had just about broken even but would soon go under and have to be taken over unwillingly by the Penn Central; and the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter railroad in the country, which had gone bust in 1949 and
was partly subsidized by the State of New York, which eventually took over the railroad in the mid-1960s. There was a similar pattern elsewhere— either the commuter networks were simply abandoned, or they were taken over by local city or state governments. The paradox was clear. As David P. Morgan, the editor of
Trains
magazine put it, commuter services were “a civic blessing” but “a corporate horror.”
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In other words, they lost the railroads a fortune but made life far more pleasant both for the passengers and for motorists who found the roads clearer. They saved city administrations a fortune, since, without them, more expensive roads and parking lots would have had to be built, but this basic fact was rarely taken into account in the rush to create the car-based economy.

Streetcar networks, which had started being pruned in the 1930s, were mostly closed down in the 1940s and 1950s. There were, however, a few exceptions, including the heritage systems in San Francisco and New Orleans and parts of the network in major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh as a result of particular geographical circumstances such as tunnels running into hills that would have been difficult to turn into highways. The story of the closure of the Los Angeles network of streetcars and interurbans became a cause célèbre because it was widely seen as a conspiracy by the automobile industry, but the truth was more complex. The huge networks of “big red cars” of the Pacific Electric Railway that served the suburbs and the “big yellow cars” of the Los Angeles Railway that ran the streetcars in the central urban area both started struggling in the interwar period. Ridership had peaked in 1924 and then declined steadily, with a small recovery in the run-up to the war. There was much local debate about what to do with the system, and considerable hostility toward it was generated as car ownership rose and accidents between streetcars and automobiles became frequent. In 1940, the interurban Pacific Electric Railroad system was taken over by National City Lines, a subsidiary of the huge car manufacturer General Motors, and closed down. Four years later, the same company took over the Los Angeles Railroad and by the late 1950s had similarly abandoned the system. It was, therefore, easy to sense a conspiracy, especially as this was a nationwide phenomenon. Overall, between 1936 and 1950, National and another General Motors subsidiary, Pacific City Lines, took over more than one hundred streetcar systems in forty-five
cities and converted them to buses provided by General Motors. The story in Los Angeles was one of the key cases used in a successful prosecution in 1949 of General Motors, along with Standard Oil and Firestone Tires, which had backed National City Lines, for breaking antitrust laws, and it featured as a subplot in the 1988 Steven Spielberg film
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
General Motors and its codefendants were found guilty of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses, gasoline products, and tires used by local transportation companies but not of forcing the replacement of electric-driven streetcars with buses. That was a key difference and rather dented a hole in the conspiracy theory.

Paul Mees, a strong supporter of public transportation, who has examined the story in detail, suggests that the streetcar systems were doomed anyway, since their problems stretched back to the end of the First World War. The number of passengers was falling rapidly just at the time when big sums of money were needed for reequipping them. Moreover, the local authorities responsible for the services were often lumbered with long-term franchise arrangements with private operators that they could not change and therefore found it difficult to raise fares or close down unprofitable lines or increase service levels on profitable ones. When buses, which were far cheaper to operate, were offered by General Motors to replace the decaying streetcars, the local authorities grabbed the chance to close down their burdensome streetcar systems. Of course, the very fact that General Motors bought up all these streetcar systems suggests that there was at least in part an ulterior motive, as the company stood to benefit from bus sales, but, as Mees suggests, without the type of intervention by local or national government that became commonplace in Europe, the streetcar systems were doomed: “Problems with privately operated, government-franchised urban public transport had arisen by this time all over the developed world. The solution virtually everywhere except the US was a public takeover upon the expiry of the franchise or even earlier.”
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In the United States, however, nationalization was seen as impractical and even unconstitutional by the federal government. It was, therefore, not so much General Motors and its fellow automotive industry companies that were at fault, but rather the strong American antipathy toward government involvement in the provision of services that led to the demise of the streetcar networks. Of course,
the increase in traffic as the people took to their cars was another factor in their downfall, because the streetcars became embroiled in jams on the busy streets. However, when it came to the threat to all passenger rail services in the United States a few years later, as we see below, a public-sector solution was found at the instigation of the federal government.

It was not just the competition from the car and the airlines or the rigidity of the unions that was killing intercity passenger rail. Government policy, which had once so helped the railroads, was turning against them. The real killer was Eisenhower's curse, the creation of the interstate network of superhighways linking every town of significance in the United States. When Eisenhower became president in 1953, he had not forgotten his awful experience on his trip across the continent as a young officer, and he supported a bill to create the interstate network of superhighways that would not only ensure it was quicker to drive than take the train on most journeys but also, in effect, be a vast hidden subsidy to the trucking industry. Created by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the forty-six-thousand-mile system, officially named after Eisenhower, was built over a period of thirty-five years and cost in excess of $425 billion.
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Federal funding was allowed because the system was seen as essential for military purposes and for use at times of national emergencies, and consequently the roads were engineered to very high standards, paid for by a national tax on fuel. It was the biggest construction project in American history and represented a crippling blow to the railroads, especially as road construction has continued to be supported through related highway-funding legislation also enacted by Eisenhower's administration in 1956.

Then there was the support given by many local authorities to the construction of airports. Every city wanted at least one, and occasionally two, and gave land and other help in kind, such as tax concessions. There was more covert help in the form of air traffic control services: “The tab for air traffic control was picked up by the federal government. Railroads installed their own signals at private expense and they paid taxes on their railroad stations,” and, indeed, on all their other property, such as goods yards and even the track.
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As if that was not bad enough, the railroads lost a major source of revenue in 1967 as a result of another government decision when the Post Office Department removed almost all mail cars, a
long-established source of steady income, from passenger trains. There was even the St. Lawrence Seaway project that was funded by the Canadian and American governments, which opened up the Great Lakes to deepwater ships and seemed to threaten the viability of various railroad routes from eastern ports to the Midwest. In the event, the seaway soon proved to be built on a scale that was too small to accommodate big-enough ships, but nevertheless it was yet another project built by public cash that affected the privately owned railroads. The dice always seemed to be weighted against them.

The overall effect of all these factors was the gradual gnawing away at the profitability of the railroads. A microcosm of their problems can be gleaned from the story of the Elmira Branch, an unassuming minor line that ran between the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York and central Pennsylvania. It was part of the Pennsylvania Railroad and ran deep into New York Central territory, principally carrying coal but also a wider range of other goods. It remained, in the immediate postwar period, a busy railroad. Although its flourishing ice business had been killed off by refrigerated trains in the 1930s, milk was still carried in the 1950s, and there was considerable movement of agricultural produce, ranging from fresh fruit to flowers, in what were disparagingly called “cabbage trains.” Processed food from various canneries and food plants, including a big Bird's Eye factory, was transported on the Elmira, along with a host of industrial products from companies big and small, several of whom had sidings connected with the line. There were junctions with a dozen other lines linking with five other railroads. It was not exciting, but it was profitable. Passenger trains had never played much of a role on the Elmira, being cut from four per day in the 1930s to just one in the 1950s, a night train with a through sleeper service linking Rochester, New York, to Washington, DC, that was discontinued at the beginning of 1956. That was, effectively, the beginning of the end: “Across the next decade, plants closed or shifted their business to trucks or converted from coal to oil; and shipper by shipper, the traffic fell away.”
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The last straw came in the form of Hurricane Agnes, a particularly violent storm that swept across the East Coast in the summer of 1972; it caused havoc to several rail lines and, in particular, damaged so many bridges and embankments on the Elmira
that it was abandoned for through traffic, though a few sections linking with other railroads survived. Thus, in the space of barely a quarter of a century, a once thriving and profitable railroad was wiped off the map.

In a famous and remarkably prescient feature, published as early as April 1959, “Who Shot the Passenger Train?” in the magazine
Trains
, the editor, David P. Morgan, listed a series of reasons for its demise: “Man has yet to invent an overland passenger mode of transport with the train's unique combination of speed, safety, comfort, dependability, and economy. Yet the passenger train is a museum candidate today. Its native profitability has been frustrated by archaic regulation, obsolete labor contracts, unequal taxation and publicly sponsored competition.” Morgan added, too, that railroad managers had failed to adopt sufficiently customer-friendly practices. He said that since 85 percent of the railroads' revenue came from freight, the only solution was to hive off the passenger trains and run them as a separate business. His words fell on deaf ears. Neither the railroads nor the politicians were ready at the time to take his advice, though eventually his idea was accepted by the government with the creation of Amtrak in 1971.

By the early 1960s, almost every major railroad was trying to close lines to passengers or reduce services, but they first had to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission, which did not always grant permission. There were, of course, covert ways of making services so unpalatable for any remaining passengers that closure was inevitable. There were a lot of tricks, both overt and underhanded, such as using old rolling stock, providing short trains with no catering or other facilities on board, demolishing station waiting rooms and restrooms, reducing the timetable to make it impossible to use the service efficiently, and so on. In Britain, during the same period, British Railways became a master of such practices.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad, principally an anthracite-carrying railroad but which also had at one time run the prestigious Black Diamond service between New York and Buffalo, was the first to petition the commission in 1958 when fewer than 350 people per day were using its service. Its last trains ran early in 1961, by which time two other major railroads, the Maine Central and the Minneapolis & St. Louis, had managed to abandon all their passenger services. A further eight railroads followed by the end of 1967, and then at the end of the decade the movement threatened to become
a flood, as big names such as the Erie (which had now joined with the Lackawanna to form the Erie Lackawanna) and the Western Pacific sought to abandon passenger services. By then, passenger railroads were costing the railroads some $470 million per year in losses.

The railroads were so eager to get out of the passenger business that several of them simply stopped any trains that happened to be running when permission came through from the ICC, with the result, in the case of the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin, that the company's daily commuters were left stranded in town after services were cut in the middle of its final day in July 1957. Similarly, in January 1969, the Louisville & Nashville dumped its last fourteen passengers, who had the misfortune to be on its final Humming Bird service between Cincinnati and New Orleans, in Birmingham, Alabama, more than four hundred miles short of their destination and, after a delay, bused them the rest of the way. The Burlington tried the same trick, forcing its passengers to leave the train at a small town in Nebraska, but failed to notice that one passenger was a congressman—who promptly persuaded the commission to force railroads to give forty-eight hours' notice of any closure. Others, who had been allowed to end services in one state but not another, just stopped at the boundary, leaving passengers stranded. It was generally not long, of course, before the other state caved in. Such incidents were evidence of the railroads' desperation to quit the passenger business. Freight was quiescent and did not answer back. Passengers had, in the eyes of many railroad managers, always been a pain to deal with anyway. As Albro Martin sums it up, “Industries which have the bad fortune to deal directly with the public—especially where the public's total physical and mental welfare are one's responsibility for periods of from an hour to three or four days at a stretch—will always be fair game for public abuse.”
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