RAILROADS

Railroads use flanged wheels rolling over fixed rails for human transportation; the vehicles on these rails are commonly called trains because they are usually composed of a train of cars linked together. Trains have distinct characteristics that have called for specialized legal and policy regulation, and to some extent for the application of ethical principles.

Prior to the development of steam locomotion, early horse-drawn trains ran on tracks serving mines, where the ground was otherwise too uneven for wheeled vehicles. The first horse-drawn trains began operating at English coal mines in the 1630s. In 1758, the British Parliament established the Middleton Railway in Leeds; it began to adopt steam locomotives in 1812. The Middleton Railway claims to be the oldest railway in the world; however, at this time it carried only freight, not passengers. The first public steam-operated passenger railway was the Stockton & Darlington in England, which began operations in 1825. Commenting on railroad developments and aspirations at the time, the English Quarterly Review wrote: "What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospects held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches! We should as soon expect the people ... to suffer themselves to be fired off on ... [a] rocket, as to put themselves at the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate" (Bianculli 2001, vol. I, p. 15).

The Nineteenth Century Experience

Early American railroads competed with canals, packet steamers, stagecoach lines, and turnpike companies for investment. Government did not immediately intervene on the side of the new technology; as late as 1856, the Erie Canal was subsidized by a tax on rail traffic. Local interests did not always want the railroad in the early years. Farmers tended to oppose them because the locomotives set fire to crops, scared livestock, and, most significantly, brought in cheap produce from elsewhere to compete with local products.

In February 1815 the New Jersey legislature passed the first railroad charter in the United States, authorizing a horse-drawn train to connect Trenton and New Brunswick. During the 1820s, almost every state granted railroad charters. John Stevens (1749–1838) built the first successful American steam locomotive in 1825, the same year the Stockton & Darlington began operation in Great Britain.

From the outset, an excitement for the technological possibilities was attached to railroad development that drove an unprecedented rush of development and adoption. Trains were seen as powerful tools and symbols of nation building. Just two years after the opening of the Stockton & Darlington, the Baltimore & Ohio was chartered as the first westward-bound railroad in the United States; and in 1831, President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) in a message to Congress portrayed railroads as the binding force that would hold the most remote parts of the new nation together. A French observer remarked, "The American seems to consider the words democracy, liberalism, and railroads as synonymous terms" (Bianculli 2001, vol. I, p. 17). Jackson later became the first U.S. president to ride a steam-powered train.

In 1830 the Baltimore & Ohio began operations, pulled initially by horses and mules, switching to its steam locomotive, the "Tom Thumb," a few months later. A New York City to Washington line was in place by 1840, and a decade later, the country had 9,000 miles of track in service. Railroads permitted the development of urban centers not on rivers, and most railroad development was east-to-west, connecting rivers to each other instead of running parallel to them. However, most early railroads were short, local, and did not connect to one another.

Railways were the most capital-intensive enterprise the world had ever seen, far exceeding mills. They largely drove the development of the joint-stock company and therefore of modern Wall Street-style finance.

From scarcely twenty-five miles of public railroad worldwide in 1825, the mileage grew to over 160,000 miles in fifty years, with approximately one third of that being in the United States. As American eyes looked to the west, the railroads took on a new importance as the tool by which western lands would be secured to the Union and then controlled. In addition to other financial incentives, the federal government offered railroads ten to twenty square miles of adjoining land for every mile of track built. This resulted in the grant of 338,000 square miles to the railroads, which then realized additional profits developing or selling this land or leasing it out. In some cases, these land grants emboldened the railroads to lay track away from the nearest large towns, confident new towns would develop right alongside. In other cases, the railroads demanded subsidies from towns in order not to bypass them. When San Bernardino refused to pay the Southern Pacific, the railroad created the town of Colton, California, just five miles away.

A race began to finish the transcontinental railroad; the Union Pacific, originating at Omaha, Nebraska, headed west, while the Central Pacific, beginning in Sacramento, laid track east. The two competitors bickered over where the lines would meet; if the Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) administration had not intervened to force both roads to accept a meeting place in Utah, they would have ended up running parallel to one another for some 1,500 miles. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.

From 1870 through about 1890, the railroads played a major role in the settlement of the west. In this twenty-year period, the Denver population increased from 5,000 to 107,000, while Minneapolis went from a town of 13,000 people to one of 164,000. But already by 1871, land grants were a fertile source of political scandal, with accusations that the railroads were charging exorbitant fees and foreclosing on tenants who could not pay.

The nineteenth-century railway was a major tool of nation-building and national identity. Canadian technology and media philosopher Harold Innis saw the railway as a bulwark of centralization, territorial expansion, nationalism, and state authority. Like the United States, Canada also was consolidated by the building of a transcontinental road, which reinforced the new nation's extremely tenuous control west of Ontario. "[T]he drive for railways embodied a sense of divine purpose, a mission to conquer the surrounding wilderness, that made the colonists, rather unexpectedly, less British and more American" (den Otter 1997, p. 12). For cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986), by forcing the creation of time zones to help schedule train traffic and turning journeys across great distances into well-ordered experiences, the railroad brought about the industrialization of time and space.

The Twentieth Century

From 1850 to about 1950, trains were the primary means of inland transport, but in the age of automobiles and airplanes there is some question as to whether trains are still needed. Unlike Europe, where the train has deep aesthetic, environmental, and cultural appeal, the United States flagged in its commitment to a national railway system. They are "of marginal utility and relevance to most people ... more nostalgia than interest" (Perl 2002, p. 1). In the United States, those who defend the perpetuation of rail lines often do so on sentimental and historical grounds, though environmental arguments (that each train obviates the hydrocarbon emissions of a number of automobiles and trucks) are also applicable. Trains were already perceived as a fading technology in the United States as early as the 1940s, as government aggressively supported the automobile by building highways everywhere.

In the face of competition from the car and later from the passenger airline, private American railroads in the 1950s began to close down passenger service while maintaining the more lucrative freight contracts. Although state railroad boards sometimes fought aggressively to preserve passenger service, regulatory responsibility shifted to the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, which agreed that the train was of declining utility. From 1958 to 1971, about 75 percent of passenger train mileage was abandoned by the railroads. But at the same time it became harder for them to compete with trucks and aviation in the freight business, and the railroad share of intercity freight declined from 68 percent in 1944 to 44 percent in 1960.

When automobiles and then airplanes first became prevalent, the railroads struggled to cover their fixed costs (track building and maintenance) out of a declining revenue. By contrast, automobile and aviation interests never became financially responsible for their entire infrastructure: Automobile manufacturers and trucking companies did not own the highways, airlines did not build airports. The infrastructure they require is paid for with public money, while the railroads had long been responsible for their own costs.

The Amtrak Corporation was founded in 1971 with $25.4 billion in federal subsidies and grants, as a response to the frightening bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad, which had been losing $375,000 a day on its passenger service. Amtrak took over passenger lines from twenty participating railroads, which were offered a choice of stock in Amtrak or a tax break. Only one tax-paying railroad chose the stock. At the time, the National Association of Railroad Passengers said that Amtrak was "operated by people who don't want it to succeed." Amtrak was also described as a "policy blocker," preventing more radical legislation (Perl 2002,
p. 99). Amtrak has been a failure as a commercial entity, losing much more money than anyone anticipated. As of early 2005, the George W. Bush administration was proposing that Amtrak receive no further funding from the federal government.

Aesthetic and environmental considerations aside, trains only make sense if they provide speed and convenience equal to or greater than automobiles, at less cost than airplanes. Japan has succeeded in creating high-speed rail lines that connect directly to airports and travel more rapidly than cars. The trend at Amtrak has been the opposite. After debuting the Metroliner, which went from New York to Washington in under three hours, Amtrak has slowed this train down so that it is barely faster than the regular, less expensive service.

Anthony Perl (2002) notes that passenger railroads suffer from the perception that they should be profit-making entities rather than a national service. No one complains that New York subway fares only cover 71 percent of the cost of operating the system, while Amtrak is considered a failure for recouping 78 percent of its costs.

Public Service or Private Enterprise?

The question of whether trains should be a public service or private enterprise has played out most dramatically in Great Britain, where the nationalization of British Rail during the Thatcher era was based on the premise that "private = good, public = bad" (Murray 2001, p. 2). Andrew Murray describes the nationalization of British Rail as privatization run amok, a solution without a problem, since the entity that was replaced had a very high record of safety and reliability. It has been supplanted by a strange patchwork of several principal players and hundreds of subsidiary ones, with the tracks all owned by one entity, Railtrack, the rolling stock placed in separate leasing companies and leased back to franchisees, and maintenance and repair services sold to thirteen other companies that subcontract much of the work. The piece most visible to the public—the franchisee train operators, which include several of Britain's major bus companies and also Virgin Airways—own nothing except their trademarks.

The result has been a substantial increase in bureaucracy, decline in decisiveness and speed of decision-making, and a general lack of cooperation among the various entities. Examples include the fact that operators will no longer wait for connecting trains to arrive (they pay a fine if they start late, regardless of the reason); tickets on one line are not accepted on competing lines rolling over the same tracks, so if you miss your connection to London you often cannot go out on the next train without buying another ticket; substantial increases in overtime, and therefore in exhausted workers driving trains, as the lines make their declining base of experienced employees work harder, rather than hiring and training additional ones; and a terrible lack of interest in safety measures unless mandated by government. Some train crashes have resulted, with substantial loss of life and stories of safety systems switched off or malfunctioning. Murray is skeptical that these problems can be solved without re-nationalizing the railroads.

The history of trains, like that of dams and other nineteenth-century technologies, describes an arc from symbol of political and economic power to a nostalgia-supported technology left behind in a strictly technological competition with other interests and solutions. The future of trains will depend very much on the practicality of new technological innovations to make them compete effectively with automobiles, at prices that make sense. Without massive federal subsidies and a major change in governmental thinking, trains may not prevail for environmental or sentimental reasons alone.

JONATHAN WALLACE

SEE ALSO Bay Area Rapid Transit Case;Roads and Highways;Ships.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bianculli, Anthony J. (2001). Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press. A detailed technological history of nineteenth century steam locomotion.

den Otter, A.A. (1997). The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Describes the social impact of Canadian railway building.

Innis, Harold Adams. (1971). A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Technology philosopher Harold Innis, a predecessor of Marshall McLuhan, analyzes the impact of the railroad on conceptions of nationhood, distance and time.

Murray, Andrew. (2001). Off the Rails: Britain's Great Rail Crisis—Cause, Consequences, and Cure. London: Verso. A sarcastic and lively analysis of the effects of railway privatization in Great Britain.

Perl, Anthony. (2002). New Departures: Rethinking Rail Passenger Policy in the Twenty-first Century. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. An analysis of the results of the nationalization of U.S. passenger service via creation of the Amtrak Corporation.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. (1986). The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Original German publication, 1977.