The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

Author:Christian Wolmar [Wolmar, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610391801
Publisher: PublicAffairs

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THE END OF THE AFFAIR

By the end of the century, the railroads were by far the biggest business enterprise in the United States. Their mileage had increased to two hundred thousand, as the tentacles of the ever-expanding iron road crept relentlessly across the country, connecting every sizable community and many small ones. By then, almost every American lived within easy access of a railroad station, and the railroads carried everything from livestock to lobsters, ice to rice. The tracks went everywhere, to the mountaintops or down into the valleys, to the hotel door or the dock beside the oceangoing liner. They were quite simply ubiquitous, and their impact on both the development of the economy and the American way of life was universal. Given the sheer breadth and scale of their achievements, the railroads should have enjoyed a golden age, feted by a grateful populace, rather like the car is loved by so many today. It should, indeed, have been the height of the love affair between the people and their railroads. For a time, but only a very short one, it was. Richard White, the author of a book on the trans continentals, suggests rightly that Americans appreciated their railroads despite their failings: “Nineteenth-century North Americans became quite aware of what transcontinental railroads failed to do, but initially they embraced them, as they embraced all railroads, as the epitome of modernity. They were in love with the railroads because railroads defined the age.” As White points out, the claims made for the railroads were akin to those lavished on the Internet before the collapse of the dot-com boom. This age of unbridled optimism could not last, and it took barely a generation for the climate to change. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the railroads became, first, disliked and, then, widely resented. It was partly a natural cycle. At first the railroads had been the plucky innovator, the new kid on the block bringing prosperity and opening new horizons, then they became an established but respected business, and eventually they turned into the rapacious monopolist, reviled by almost everyone: “As the rail industry grew in size and became more distant from the public’s everyday concerns, it lost that sense of being the underdog that had long endeared it to the American public. Americans could readily identify with the idea of a courageous David fighting vast odds, and such an image enabled them to champion the tiny locomotives struggling against nature’s worst elements.”1

As the railroads became bigger, they lost the public support they had enjoyed in the early days. Sure, the man at the depot was still old Fred whose kids went to the local school, but he now worked for an organization that was remote and disconnected from the local community. But it was not just the growth that changed people’s perceptions. The railroads had indeed misbehaved and were guilty of all sorts of calumnies, but the level of antagonism they engendered was undoubtedly way beyond what

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