The Great Railroad Revolution (65 page)

24
. Most accounts suggest he was black, but this may well be motivated by racism.

25
. George H. Douglas,
All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life
(Paragon House, 1992), 26.

26
. Hamburg is now a completely moribund place.

27
. John Latrobe, quoted on the website
www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/tom
thumb.htm. There is a full-scale model of the locomotive in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

28
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 23.

29
. This figure comes from the very comprehensive website
www.oldrailhistory.com
, which includes some very basic railroads not counted by official sources but whose inclusion it justifies with a definition available on the site. The variation is small, however, and the figure of 987 miles given for the end of 1835 can be taken as the best estimate.

1
.
Bloodgood v. Mohawk & H.R.R.
, 18 Wend. 9, 48 (N.Y. Ct. Err. 1837).

2
. Quoted in George H. Douglas,
All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life
(Paragon House, 1992), 37, 75.

3
. Ibid., 75, 76.

4
. Sarah H. Gordon,
Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929
(Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 19.

5.
Douglas,
All Aboard
, 77.

6
. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, say enough to support 150 miles of line, or say a subsidy of 2.5 percent, given there were around 4,000 miles by then.

7
. Stewart H. Holbrook,
The Story of American Railroads
(Bonanza Books, 1947), 40–41.

8
. James A. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887
(University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 28.

9
. Charles Caldwell, “Thoughts on the Moral and Other Indirect Influences of the Rail-Roads,”
New England Magazine
2 (January–June 1832): 299.

10
. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America
, 75, 80, 57 (emphasis in the original).

11
. Ibid., 57, 93.

12
. The term
booster spirit
was first mentioned by Daniel Boorstin.

13
. Even modern trains struggle up anything greater than 1–2 percent.

14
.
Navvies
is an abbreviation of
navigators
, for these men were the direct descendants of the workers who had built the canals. They are described in a wonderfully thorough and evocative book,
The Railway Navvies
by Terry Coleman (Hutchinson, 1965).

15
. Theodore Kornweibel Jr.,
Railroads in the African American Experience
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 11.

16
. Ibid., 18.

17
. Ibid., 15; William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, and Roberta L. Diehl, eds.,
Encyclopedia of North American Railroads
(Indiana University Press, 2007), 454.

18
. Even today there are still nearly two hundred thousand such crossings that result in accidents that cause a couple of hundred deaths annually.

19
. Dee Brown,
Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West
(1977; reprint, Touchstone, 1994), 24; Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 31.

20
. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America
, 31.

21
. Quoted in Charlton Ogburn,
Railroads: The Great American Adventure
(National Geographic Society, 1977), 16.

22
. Jim Harter,
World Railways of the Nineteenth Century: A Pictorial History in Victorian Engravings
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 248.

23
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 35.

24
. George Rogers Taylor,
The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860
(1951; reprint, Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 53–54.

25
. Mark Aldrich,
Death Rode the Rails
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 13, 14.

26.
John F. Stover,
American Railroads
(University of Chicago Press, 1961), 18.

27
. According to US Census figures, though some historians question the accuracy of this statistic.

28
. We even find a particularly incongruous
& Eastern
in Chapter 10.

29
. George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu,
The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890
(1956; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2003), xi.

30
. Douglas,
All Aboard
, 28.

1
. Andrew Dow,
Dow's Dictionary of Railway Quotations
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 6.

2
. George H. Douglas,
All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life
(Paragon House, 1992), 31.

3
. Ibid., 72, 35.

4
. In American literature it is sometimes referred to as the world's first trunk railroad, which is very far from accurate, since several European countries already boasted substantial main lines.

5
. Stewart H. Holbrook,
The Story of American Railroads
(Bonanza Books, 1947), 60.

6
. There was, however, a 1946 book by Edward Hungerford,
Men of Erie
, published by Random House.

7
. See my earlier book
Blood, Iron, and Gold
(PublicAffairs, 2010) for a description of the struggle to create a railroad through the Western Ghats.

8
. The origin of the name is unclear. It is also uncertain whether the animosity between the two groups, which flared up in various parts of the United States on canal and railroad projects, was based on religion—the Corkonians as Catholic, the Fardowners as Protestant.

9
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 61.

10
. Ibid., 62, 63.

11
. H. Roger Grant,
Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad
(Stanford University Press, 1994), 1.

12
. Ironically, in recent times China has built many hundreds of miles of its high-speed rail network using a similar system of a raised railroad on piles.

13
. Initially, it was four feet and eight inches, but the half inch was soon added.

14
. Mark Reutter, introduction to
The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890
, by George Rogers Taylor and Irene D. Neu (1956; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2003), xii.

15.
Ibid.

16
. Albro Martin,
Railroads Triumphant
(Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.

17
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 61.

18
. Now Harriman, New York.

19
. The word
order
refers, here, to a signaling instruction.

20
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 68.

21
. A railroad term for drivers and other crew who ride in the coaches as passengers.

22
. Martin,
Railroads Triumphant
, 260; Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 82.

23
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 84.

24
. Originally called the Chicago and Aurora Railroad.

25
. There is, however, a through line running alongside Union Station.

26
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 139.

27
. The lack of direct rail links between Chicago's various stations was fine for the first century or so while the railroads were effectively a transportation monopoly, but eventually it was to cost them dearly. (The legacy of this competition remains. In 2010, when I traveled around America by rail, I arrived from Pittsburgh in a train that terminated at Chicago's Union Station, and when the next day I headed off west for Seattle, the service left from the other side of the same building on entirely separate tracks, as even today there is no through-passenger service.)

28
. John F. Stover,
American Railroads
(University of Chicago Press, 1961), 20.

29
. Charles Dickens,
American Notes
(Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842). All these quotes taken from pages 69–74. Available online at Google Books.

30
. Quoted in Stover,
American Railroads
, 33.

31
. Robert Louis Stevenson,
Across the Plains
(1879; reprint, Bibliobazaar, 2006), 10.

32
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 37.

33
. Sarah H. Gordon,
Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929
(Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 68.

34
. Douglas,
All Aboard
, 57; Gordon,
Passage to Union
, 69.

35
. Douglas,
All Aboard
, 58.

36
. Tyrone Power,
Impressions of America
,
www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=514357&pageno=53
.

37
. Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 77.

38
. Douglas,
All Aboard
, 67.

39
. Anthony Burton,
On the Rails
(Aurum, 2004), 89;
New York Tribune
quoted in Holbrook,
Story of American Railroads
, 35.

40
. James A. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887
(University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 66.

41
. Charlton Ogburn,
Railroads: The Great American Adventure
(National Geo graphic Society, 1977), 17.

42
. In a bizarre coincidence, one of the worst railroad disasters in postwar US railroad history occurred in September 1993 when a barge hit a bridge at Big Bayou Canot, near Mobile, Alabama, pushing the rails out of alignment and subsequently derailing an Amtrak train, which plunged into the creek, killing forty-seven people.

1
. Quoted in James A. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887
(University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 45.

2
. Sarah H. Gordon,
Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929
(Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 75.

3
. Ward,
Railroads and the Character of America
, 55.

4
. See my earlier book
Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways
(Atlantic, 2010) for a detailed analysis.

5
. Albro Martin,
Railroads Triumphant
(Oxford University Press, 1992), 15.

6
. Gordon,
Passage to Union
, 138.

7
. Martin,
Railroads Triumphant
, 52; John F. Stover,
American Railroads
(University of Chicago Press, 1961), 55.

8
. Gordon,
Passage to Union
, 136.

9
. Ibid.

10
. Ibid., 137.

11
. John Westwood,
Railways at War
(Osprey, 1980), 24, 21.

12
. They would not, in fact, escape direct nationalization in the next major conflict, the First World War, as we will see in Chapter 9.

13
. Joseph Hankey, “The Railroad War,”
Trains
(March 2011): 32.

14
. This was the first of two major battles at this location. To add to the confusion, they are known as the Battles of Manassas by the Confederates, who tended to name battles after towns or villages, in contrast to the Unionists, who used creeks or rivers.

15
. Ibid., 27.

16
. Ibid., 24.

17
. Stover,
American Railroads
, 55.

18
. Martinsburg later became part of West Virginia, which separated from secessionist Virginia in 1863.

19
. George H. Douglas,
All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life
(Paragon House, 1992), 107.

20
. James M. McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War
(Penguin Books, 1990), 527.

21
. Quoted in Charlton Ogburn,
Railroads: The Great American Adventure
(National Geographic Society, 1977), 24.

22
. Quoted in Thomas Weber,
The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–1865
(1952; reprint, Indiana University Press, 1999), 144.

23
. George Edgar Turner,
Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 201.