The Great Railroad Revolution (4 page)

Dedicated to all my children and stepchildren—
Molly, Pascoe, Misha, Harriet, and Robyn—
and in memory of
Tony Telford (1942–2011),
who sadly died
in the summer of 2011 and
had helped me greatly
with several of my earlier history books.

It was a particularly prescient remark. Indeed, so prescient that it has subsequently become the stuff of legend.
¹
The speaker was an old man, Charles Carroll, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The event was the ceremonial turning of the first sod of earth to begin work on the Baltimore & Ohio, America's pioneering railroad. The date, inevitably, was Independence Day, July 4, 1828, just over a half century after the declaration that resulted in the creation of the new nation. The words were simple: “I consider what I have just now done to be among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if indeed, it be even second to that.”

And so it proved. If the Declaration of Independence in 1776 marked the birth of a nation, the advent of the railroads enabled America to become the most prosperous nation on earth within a few decades of Carroll's spadework, turning a preindustrial society into an economic powerhouse. America and the railroads were to be a perfect fit, their joint growth intertwined so intimately that countless historians have been unable to determine whether it was the growth of the American economy that sparked the expansion of the railroads or vice versa. The Baltimore & Ohio was not the first entity in America to call itself a railroad, and, as we shall see, its reputation as the first modern railroad in the United States rests on shaky ground, but there is no doubting the importance of its inauguration as a stimulus in creating America's most important industry of the nineteenth century.

Railroads had, in fact, been a long time coming. The first American railroads were the product of a disparate series of inventions stretching back centuries, but which were mostly spawned by the Industrial Revolution in Britain that began in the first half of the eighteenth century. The long gestation period of the railroads can be explained by the fact that it became possible to construct them only once the various aspects of technology that prefigured their birth had been developed and subsequently improved through application. A railroad was a far more sophisticated concept than any previous invention, requiring several elements to come together: the technology, both for the traction and the track; the financing to pay for it; the permission of the state to build it; the creation of an appropriate legal framework; and, of course, the labor for construction. Such a coordination of different agencies, technologies, and resources had been effected only for military purposes and required vision and ambition, as well as the cooperation of the various entities involved. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the emergence of the railroads was a stuttering process, conducted in fits and starts with numerous failures and dead ends along the way. Once they had been established, however, the railroads would spread far faster than any of their pioneers could have imagined.

The precursor to railroads, normally called wagonways
²
or tramways, which consisted of wagons pushed or hauled along tracks by animal or human power, was actually quite an old invention. There are some suggestions that the ancient Greeks used tracks built into the road to drag boats across the Isthmus of Corinth. Traces of heavy, flat-topped stone blocks placed along a Roman road, the Fosse Way, near Leicester in the English Midlands—possible evidence of an early form of wagonway—can be found in the local museum. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century, however, that the increase in demand for coal prompted the invention of more sophisticated wagonways. The replacement of stone blocks with wooden tracks to support the wagons provided a better all-weather surface that could be used in conditions that turned conventional roads into mud. Soon there were extensive networks of these tracked wagonways, all with the same purpose, namely, hauling heavy material such as coal or slate out of the mines and, usually, to the nearest waterway. Wagonways also appeared in Germany and France, but it was in Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, that their number grew fastest. Although
these early lines were crude and mostly quite short, several were substantial operations whose scale reflected the increased demand for coal. The Tanfield Way in County Durham, in northeastern England, opened in 1725 and soon built up to an astonishing traffic of 450,000 tons annually (or, as has been calculated, “one fully loaded wagon every 45 seconds on working days”)
³
and necessitated the construction of the Causey Arch, the world's oldest stone railroad bridge.

As loads became heavier, the simple wooden timbers laid on earth were quickly worn away. To counter this problem, the wood was covered with a layer of iron to protect the rails, a practice that was first recorded as early as 1738. This innovation led to a rapid spread in wagonways. Until the introduction of iron-covered rails, the total extent of the network was limited to a few hundred miles, with the longest wagonway stretching about a dozen miles, but the greater durability of the new rails encouraged the building of thousands of miles of iron ways. By the middle of the eighteenth century, some longer tracks had been built to connect different mines, although sometimes less cooperative mine owners would ban their neighbors and rivals from transporting coal across their land, thus blocking the easiest access to waterways.

The next requirement was to stop the wagons from slipping off the rails. Various ideas were tried, such as sinking the rails into the ground, as with some streetcar lines today, and L-shaped rails to keep the wheels aligned, but the crucial idea of putting a flange all around the wheel began to be developed only in the late eighteenth century. There were two ways of ensuring the wheels stayed on the track: either the edge of the rails could be turned up, making an L shape to guide the wheel along the track, or the wheel could be fitted with a flange—a projecting rim—with similar results. The L-shaped rail was first tried out in 1776 at the Duke of Norfolk's colliery in Yorkshire.

Not for the first or last time, a technological development proved unpopular with those affected by its introduction. In this instance, it was the colliers, who, on finding that the new type of rail required the use of fewer horses and men to haul the coal, broke up the rails—called plates—and chased the terrified plate layer, one John Curr, into the forest, where he hid for three days. L-shaped rails, though, proved cumbersome and inefficient, and various inventors tried putting the guiding flange on the wheel instead
of the track. The pioneer of this method seems
⁴
to have been William Jessop, who used flanged wheels on a wagonway in Loughborough, in the English Midlands, in 1789, a design that, of course, became the norm on all railroads. Jessop is also credited with another crucial improvement: the laying of transverse ties (or sleepers, as they are known in Britain) on which to lay and fix the rails, greatly improving the stability of the track.

There was fun to be had with these innovations, too. A century before Jessop, the idea of coaches running on tracks had appealed to King Louis XIV of France. The Sun King used to entertain his guests by giving them rides on the Roulette, a kind of roller coaster built in the gardens of his château at Marly, near Versailles, in 1691. It was a carved and gilded carriage on wheels that thundered down an eight-hundred-foot wooden track into a valley and, thanks to its momentum, up the other side—much to the amusement of the king's bewigged guests.

None of these early lines, whether for hauling coal or entertaining French aristocrats, which were operated by human or animal power supplemented at times by gravity, could truly be said to resemble a “railroad” in the modern sense of the word. A convenient definition for a true railroad might be a trackborne transportation system powered by mechanical means—though horses were used in some early systems—able to carry freight or passengers in both directions and intended for public use. This latter point was a crucial step forward. Railroads would not have had their transformative effect if their use had been confined to the owner's personal needs or to a single purpose such as hauling minerals. The next logical stage in their development was to become common carriers—that is, not just to provide the facility for the owner, but to make it available to all comers. These new lines tended to be run by canal companies, using the railroads as feeders for their own networks. In July 1803, however, the nine-mile Surrey Iron Railway—in what is now suburban South London—was completed and was the first public railroad open to anyone prepared to pay the toll. Numerous similar enterprises followed, connecting mines and waterways within their localities and allowing a wider range of potential customers, including mills and factories, to transport their goods along the tracks.

With long-lasting track now available, the other requirement for a railroad was the development of a power source other than the wretched animals
that would never be suitable for anything beyond hauling relatively light loads for short distances. Steam power was the obvious answer, but, again, there were numerous technical and practical obstacles to overcome. The first engines driven by steam were probably devised by Thomas Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon, early in the eighteenth century. His work was based on the pioneering efforts of a seventeenth-century French scientist, Denis Papin, who had recognized that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam. Newcomen, using a recently improved version of smelting iron, developed the idea into working engines that could be used to pump water from mines. His invention proved to be crucial in keeping the tin and copper-ore industry viable in Cornwall, since all the mines had reached a depth where they were permanently flooded and existing waterpower pumps were insufficient to drain them. By 1733, when Newcomen's patents ran out, around sixty of his engines had been produced.

Working in the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish inventor and engineer James Watt made steam commercially viable by improving the efficiency of engines and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. Boulton & Watt, his partnership with Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, became the most important builder of steam engines in the world, cornering the market by registering a patent that effectively gave them a monopoly on all steam-engine development in the UK until the end of the eighteenth century. Steam power quickly became commonplace in the early nineteenth century, and it was Boulton & Watt that provided the engine for the world's first “practical” steamboat, the
Charlotte Dundas
, which made its short maiden voyage on a Glasgow canal in 1803. Various attempts to propel boats by steam power had been made in both Europe and America since the mid-eighteenth century, but they had proved short-lived as a result of technical failure or other factors, notably fear of explosions. The most successful experiment had been the steamboat built by the US inventor John Fitch, who in 1788 operated a regular commercial service on the Delaware River between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, New Jersey, carrying up to thirty passengers. Fitch's steamboat traveled more than two thousand miles during its short period of service, but competition from the roads meant that it was not a commercial success.

Boulton & Watt's much-improved engines led to the construction of numerous steamboats that were to prove particularly useful in America, with its vast distances and long stretches of navigable waterways. Steam power, therefore, was to be the catalyst for the early opening up of America—but on water rather than on rails. As George Rogers Taylor, author of the standard work on early transportation systems in the United States, suggests, right from its birth as a nation, the United States was “peculiarly dependent upon river transportation.”
⁵
River courses determined the location and size of settlements, as, for a generation and more, waterways were the only way to reach much of the huge landmass eventually occupied by the United States.

The rivers, however, were obstacles as well as pathways, and navigating up them was an arduous and perilous task. On the lower reaches of the bigger rivers like the Mississippi or the Hudson, it was possible for seagoing sailing ships to tack upriver for a few miles, but elsewhere swift currents and shallow waters made even such limited progress impossible. Produce from inland was, therefore, floated down on crude rafts and flat-boats that were too unwieldy to make the return journey and were broken up for lumber. According to Taylor, “Transportation up the rivers proved extremely time consuming and costly.” Labor costs to operate the narrow keelboats that were able to travel upriver were so high that these boats carried only the most essential items. The farther west, the greater the difficulty of river transportation. Pittsburgh could be reached from New Orleans only by a journey of nearly two thousand miles that took four months “and required a crew of strong men prepared to utilize every known method in overcoming the difficulties of upriver navigation.”
⁶
Sometimes these tireless men rowed or towed, or even, occasionally, “bushwhacked,” pulling themselves along with whatever overhanging vegetation might be available.