The Great Railroad Revolution (7 page)

It was one thing to have such a grand idea, but quite another to see it to fruition in the face of the many financial and technical obstacles. However, a key factor in persuading the local merchants of the need for a railroad
was the fear that Baltimore would be left behind by the other three major eastern seaports, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, as the main conduit between the interior of the United States and the Old World. All four cities were jostling for primacy and realized that communications with the interior were key to their development. Given that the other three cities chose canals or, in the case of Philadelphia, the ill-fated mixed canal and railroad Main Line, Baltimore's decision to opt for a railroad was a farsighted one.

This fierce intercity rivalry was the key stimulus to the demand for better transportation links. A particular concern for the citizens of Baltimore was that the Erie Canal gave New York a huge competitive advantage. Proposals to construct a Chesapeake and Ohio canal that would run parallel with the Potomac River also threatened the viability of Baltimore's port, and consequently the railroad was quickly granted a charter by the Maryland legislature in February 1827. It was a courageous decision: the economics of building such a long railroad line were unknown, and the capital required was the then enormous sum of $5 million. It was courageous, too, from a technological point of view, since it was unclear whether British know-how, which had been developed for a milder climate and shorter distances, could be adapted to the harsher weather of the United States. In the event, the burghers of Baltimore needed little persuasion to be convinced of the need for the railroad. As Sarah H. Gordon, a chronicler of the impact of the development of the US railroads, suggests, “The merchants of Baltimore, anxious to establish a connection between their port city and the Ohio River, organized a railroad company in 1827, before they even knew whether a railroad would accomplish their goal.”
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Ultimately, the Baltimore & Ohio did not achieve its commercial aim, as New York, with its far-superior natural harbor and easy river access, won out, becoming the port of choice for European traffic, but that should not detract from the importance of the pioneering railroad.

Construction of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad began in 1828, but by then another ambitious project was already taking shape in South Carolina. This was the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad,
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which is less well known than the Baltimore & Ohio but has a good claim as the more impressive innovator of the two. Although it did not obtain its charter until
after the Baltimore & Ohio, the Charleston & Hamburg completed its line in 1833, far more quickly than its northern counterpart, which did not reach Wheeling, its planned destination, until 1852—twenty-four years after Carroll had turned the first sod. Moreover, whereas the first trains on the Baltimore & Ohio were horse drawn, the Charleston & Hamburg quickly adopted locomotive technology, and homegrown at that. It was Horatio Allen, the engineer of the Delaware & Hudson, who had moved down south as engineer for the Charleston and commissioned the building of the first American locomotive, the rather quaintly named Best Friend of Charleston. He had persuaded the promoters of the line to adopt steam power, pointing out with great foresight that “there is no reason to expect any material improvement in the breed of horses in the future while, in my judgment, the man is not living who knows what the breed of locomotive is to place at command.” As rail historian Stewart H. Holbrook concludes, “While the Baltimore & Ohio was fooling around with sail cars and with horse-treadmill locomotives, the Charleston & Hamburg . . . had the first American-built steam locomotive.”
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The engine had been built at the West Point Foundry in New York and was delivered by steamer to Charleston, where it was assembled and tested. In December 1830 the Best Friend pulled its first train, carrying some two hundred shareholders and local notables and the following year was in regular use, hauling passengers at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour. The locomotive met an unfortunate end, however, when, as the possibly apocryphal story goes, a fireman,
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annoyed at the sound made by the escape of steam from the safety valve, sat on the offending piece of machinery, which, after a few minutes of quiet, resulted in the boiler exploding, killing him and scalding the engineer.

In Britain there had been worries right from the start that steam locomotives would wreak havoc, turning sheep black, stopping cows milking, and even causing asphyxiation, as their speed would prevent travelers from breathing. In America such fears were compounded by the country's relative unfamiliarity with the new technology. The United States was much less industrialized than Britain and had far fewer factories that employed steam technology: “The steam, the smoke, the sparks emitted from the belly of the monster were quite sufficient to invoke anxiety, if not down-right
terror, in timid souls who drew nigh the early demonstration trains.”
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Explosions, though, had always been the main concern, and to allay these fears, when traffic on the Charleston & Hamburg resumed, the trains ran with a flat “barrier” car loaded with cotton to protect the now understandably nervous passengers from similar mishaps.

The motive for building the Charleston & Hamburg, as with the other pioneering lines, had been narrowly and nakedly commercial. Charleston's foreign exports had gone into decline, and its merchants looked inland to restore their fortune. They hoped to secure the trade of the rich cotton-growing area both in their own state of South Carolina and in Georgia by building the line northwest from Charleston to the bank of the Savannah River at Hamburg,
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just across the water from Augusta, Georgia. By adopting the new technology right away, these southern pioneers proved more farsighted than their peers at the Baltimore & Ohio, who remained unconvinced of the need for the newfangled devices called steam locomotives. This attitude was not unusual at the time. In several European countries, notably Austria, long lines were still being built in the early 1830s with the idea of using horses, rather than locomotives, to haul the trains. Although the Stourbridge Lion had demonstrated the feasibility of locomotive technology, provided the track was sufficiently robust, the promoters of the Baltimore & Ohio insisted on a trial between horses and locomotives to determine the best means of traction, although in truth they probably knew that horses would never be suitable, given the hilly terrain the railroad was intended to cross.

The railroad's construction standards, with their sharp curves and light rails, precluded the use of locomotives imported from Britain. The promoters therefore called upon a notable inventor, Peter Cooper, to build a suitable locomotive. He produced a tiny engine, later nicknamed Tom Thumb, which had just four small wheels and was described by one onlooker as having a boiler “not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a modern mansion.”
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Nevertheless, on a test run along the first thirteen miles of track, the unprepossessing engine reached an exhilarating eighteen miles per hour, impressing the assorted investors and VIPs who had come along for the ride. On the way back, Cooper foolishly agreed to race his locomotive
against a horse to prove that it was superior. The powerful gray initially took the lead, thanks to its faster acceleration, but once the little engine had gained purchase on the track and Cooper opened its safety valve to provide extra power, Tom Thumb glided past the galloping steed. Cooper's machine was a quarter of a mile ahead when disaster struck. Just as the horse rider was ready to give up, the belt that drove the pulley on the locomotive snapped, and the engine eased to a halt. Cooper managed to effect a repair, burning his hands badly in the process, but he finished the course well behind his rival. The equine victory, though, proved Pyrrhic, as the engine had done enough to convince the investors that steam haulage, rather than horsepower, was the only way to make the line viable. Although some horse traction was used early on, locomotives were dominant, and the line was soon operated exclusively with engines.

History is harsh on losers, which is perhaps why, in most accounts of the early railroads, the Charleston & Hamburg gets such scant attention. It was, in fact, initially a far more significant achievement than the Baltimore & Ohio, but as it was in the South and was soon subsumed into another railroad, the South Carolina Railroad Company, its role as a pioneer has been largely forgotten. Nor did it have a charismatic wordsmith like Charles Carroll to inscribe its place in history. Thus, the Baltimore & Ohio, which survived as an independent company until long after the Second World War, was free to promote the myth that it was America's first proper railroad. In fact, Holbrook, like other impartial historians, is unequivocal about which came first: “The Charleston & Hamburg, six miles long, may be said to have been the first American railroad as the term is generally understood.”
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It was soon 136 miles long, the longest in the world for a few short years, as it was completed remarkably quickly and fully operational by 1833. The rapidity of construction was helped by the ability of the railroad to call on slave labor, which, as we will see in the next chapter, was an important factor in southern railroad construction (and may also account for the Charleston & Hamburg being written out of history). Ultimately, the Baltimore & Ohio became more important because the railroads in the North developed in a far more sophisticated way than their southern counterparts. In particular, they were prepared to go over state boundaries to provide long-distance services, unlike in the South, where the railroads largely stayed within individual state borders.

These two railroads were part of a wider spurt of railroad activity, a mini version of the “railroad manias” that characterized future developments not just in the United States but across the world. In addition to the two longer coal railroads in Pennsylvania, New York State's first railroad, the Mohawk & Hudson, which provided a shortcut to a circuitous section of the Erie Canal, had been chartered in 1826. However, financial and political difficulties meant that work did not start until the summer of 1830, and a 16-mile route between Albany and Schenectady opened a year later. Then there was the New York & Harlem, chartered in 1831, which ran initially from the Bowery to Fourteenth Street and within a couple of years along Fourth Avenue to Harlem, making it one of the world's first street railroads. Unlike the steam-hauled Mohawk & Hudson, the New York & Harlem initially used animal power, as did the Chesterfield Railroad in Virginia, a 13-mile mining line that connected the Midlothian coal mines with wharves on the James River. By the early 1830s, numerous other projects, with evocative names such as the Tuscumbia, Courtland & Decatur, the Rensselaer & Saratoga, and the Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad, and Coal Company, received charters and were being built. More significantly in 1832, a seminal year in US railroad history, services began on the Camden & Amboy between Trenton and New Brunswick in New Jersey, a response to the obvious need to improve transportation links between the two biggest cities of the day, New York and Philadelphia. By 1835, remarkably, there were nearly 1,000
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miles of completed railroad on thirty-nine lines in the United States. The railroad age had arrived, and nothing could stop it from transforming America.

These early lines represented an impressive start and marked the beginnings of the love affair between ordinary Americans and the railroads, but it would take a few years before the right conditions were in place to spark a prolonged railroad boom and begin the establishment of a nationwide network.

Although rapid improvements to the technology were being made, it was still primitive and crude, and there were several other respects in which America was still not geared up for railroads. Obtaining the requisite financing, a problem for railroads the world over, was a major obstacle for the nascent industry. Labor, too, was not always available, which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, meant that in the South there was widespread recourse to slaves. The legal status of the railroads was over-dependent on the whim of local state legislators, since, initially, there was no clear understanding of how to treat these new and potentially monopolistic enterprises. During the first two decades of the railroad age, much effort was expended in overcoming these hurdles.

The railroads were a novel concept that would cross state boundaries and require large swaths of land, and there was no real precedent for coping with such an intrusive invention. They needed a sympathetic environment in which to flourish and to overcome any doubt and hostility that they were bound to engender. In Britain, railroad promoters were required to obtain an act passed in Parliament that enabled them to force landowners to cede their land to the company and made provision for all
the other various requirements of the railroad. This was by no means a perfect arrangement, as it made the fate of the railroad dependent on the whims of parliamentarians who not infrequently had their own agendas that were likely to prejudice them either for or against the project. Powerful landowners were able to pressure railroads into paying significantly more for the land than it was worth. However, by and large the British system was sufficiently adaptable to encourage promoters to come forward with schemes and to ensure lines were built.