Tài liệu THE RAILROAD BUILDERS pdf

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greater speed. After all, it took a towboat three or four days to go from Albany to
Buffalo, and the time was not far distant, they argued, when a railroad would make the
same trip in less than a day. Indeed, our forefathers made one curious mistake: they
predicted a speed for the railroad a hundred miles an hour—which it has never attained
consistently with safety.
If the American of today could transport himself to one of the first railroad lines
built in the United States it is not unlikely that he would side with the canal enthusiast
in his argument. The rough pictures which accompany most accounts of early railroad
days, showing a train of omnibus-like carriages pulled by a locomotive with upright
boiler, really represent a somewhat advanced stage of development. Though
Stephenson had demonstrated the practicability of the locomotive in 1814 and
although the American, John Stevens, had constructed one in 1826 which had
demonstrated its ability to take a curve, local prejudice against this innovation
continued strong. The farmers asserted that the sparks set fire to their hayricks and
barns and that the noise frightened their hens so that they would not lay and their cows
so that they could not give milk. On the earliest railroads, therefore, almost any other
method of propulsion was preferred. Horses and dogs were used, winches turned by
men were occasionally installed, and in some cases cars were even fitted with sails. Of
all these methods, the horse was the most popular: he sent out no sparks, he carried his
own fuel, he made little noise, and he would not explode. His only failing was that he
would leave the track; and to remedy this defect the early railroad builders hit upon a
happy device. Sometimes they would fix a treadmill inside the car; two horses would
patiently propel the caravan, the seats for passengers being arranged on either side. So
unformed was the prevalent conception of the ultimate function of the railroad, and so
pronounced was the fear of monopoly that, on certain lines, the roadbed was laid as a
state enterprise and the users furnished their own cars, just as the individual owners of
towboats did on the canals. The drivers, however, were an exceedingly rough lot; no
schedules were observed and as the first lines had only single tracks and infrequent
turnouts, when the opposing sides would meet each other coming and going,
precedence was usually awarded to the side which had the stronger arm. The roadbed
showed little improvement over the mine tramways of the eighteenth century, and the
rails were only long wooden stringers with strap iron nailed on top. So undeveloped
were the resources of the country that the builders of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
in 1828 petitioned Congress to remit the duty on the iron which it was compelled to
import from England. The trains consisted of a string of little cars, with the baggage
piled on the roof, and when they reached a hill they sometimes had to be pulled up the
inclined plane by a rope. Yet the traveling in these earliest days was probably more
comfortable than in those which immediately followed the general adoption of
locomotives. When, five or ten years later, the advantages of mechanical as opposed to
animal traction caused engines to be introduced extensively, the passengers behind
them rode through constant smoke and hot cinders that made railway travel an
incessant torture.
Yet the railroad speedily demonstrated its practical value; many of the first lines
were extremely profitable, and the hostility with which they had been first received
soon changed to an enthusiasm which was just as unreasoning. The speculative craze
which invariably follows a new discovery swept over the country in the thirties and the
forties and manifested itself most unfortunately in the new Western States—Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Here bonfires and public meetings whipped up the
zeal; people believed that railroads would not only immediately open the wilderness
and pay the interest on the bonds issued to construct them, but that they would become
a source Of revenue to sadly depleted state treasuries. Much has been heard of
government ownership in recent years; yet it is nothing particularly new, for many of
the early railroads in these new Western States were built as government enterprises,
with results which were frequently disastrous. This mania, with the land speculation
accompanying it, was largely responsible for the panic of 1837 and led to that
repudiation of debts in certain States which for so many years gave American
investments an evil reputation abroad.
In the more settled parts of the country, however, railroad building had
comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of the forties indicates
that railroad building in this early period was incoherent and haphazard. Practically
everywhere the railroad was an individual enterprise; the builders had no further
conception of it than as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance
apart. The roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A few
miles of iron rail connected Albany and Schenectady. There was a road from Hartford
to New Haven, but there was none from New Haven to New York. A line connected
Philadelphia with Columbia; Baltimore had a road to Washington; Charleston, South
Carolina, had a similar contact with Hamburg in the same State. By 1842, New York
State, from Albany to Buffalo, possessed several disconnected stretches of railroad. It
was not until 1836, when work was begun on the Erie Railroad, that a plan was
adopted for a single line reaching several hundred miles from an obvious point, such
as New York, to an obvious destination, such as Lake Erie. Even then a few farsighted
men could foresee the day when the railroad train would cross the plains and the
Rockies and link the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in
the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they
were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately
managed.
Successful as many of the railroads were, they had hardly yet established themselves
as the one preeminent means of transportation. The canal had lost in the struggle for
supremacy, but certain of these constructed waterways, particularly the Erie, were
flourishing with little diminished vigor. The river steamboat had enjoyed a
development in the first few decades of the nineteenth century almost as great as that
of the railroad itself. The Mississippi River was the great natural highway for the
products and the passenger traffic of the South Central States; it had made New
Orleans one of the largest and most flourishing cities in the country; and certainly the
rich cotton planter of the fifties would have smiled at any suggestion that the "floating
palaces" which plied this mighty stream would ever surrender their preeminence to the
rusty and struggling railroads which wound along its banks.
This period, which may be taken as the first in American railroad development,
ended about the middle of the century. It was an age of great progress but not of
absolutely assured success. A few lines earned handsome profits, but in the main the
railroad business was not favorably regarded and railroad investments everywhere
were held in suspicion. The condition that prevailed in many railroads is illustrated by
the fact that the directors of the Michigan and Southern, when they held their annual
meeting in 1853, had to borrow chairs from an adjoining office as the sheriff had
walked away with their own for debt. Even a railroad with such a territory as the
Hudson River Valley, and extending from New York to Albany existed in a state of
chronic dilapidation; and the New York and Harlem, which had an entrance into New
York City as an asset of incalculable value, was looked upon merely as a vehicle for
Wall Street speculation.
Meanwhile the increasing traffic in farm products, mules, and cattle from the
Northwest to the plantations of the South created a demand for more ample
transportation facilities. In the decade before the Civil War various north and south
lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from
the Federal Government. The first of these, the Illinois Central, received a huge land-
grant in 1850 and ultimately reached the Gulf at Mobile by connecting with the Mobile
and Ohio Railroad which had also been assisted by Federal grants. But the panic of
1857, followed by the Civil War, halted all railroad enterprises. In the year 1856 some
3600 miles of railroad had been constructed; in 1865 only 700 were laid down. The
Southern railroads were prostrated by the war and north and south lines lost all but
local traffic.
After the war a brisk recovery began and brought to the fore the first of the great
railroad magnates and the shrewdest business genius of the day, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Though he had spent his early life and had laid the basis of his fortune in steamboats,
he was the first man to appreciate the fact that these two methods of transportation
were about to change places—that water transportation was to decline and that rail
transportation was to gain the ascendancy. It was about 1865 that Vanderbilt acted on
this farsighted conviction, promptly sold out his steamboats for what they would bring,
and began buying railroads despite the fact that his friends warned him that, in his old
age, he was wrecking the fruits of a hard and thrifty life. But Vanderbilt perceived
what most American business men of the time failed to see, that a change had come
over the railroad situation as a result of the Civil War.
The time extending from 1860 to about 1875 marks the second stage in the railroad
activity of the United States. The characteristic of this period is the development of the
great trunk lines and the construction of a transcontinental route to the Pacific. The
Civil War ended the supremacy of the Mississippi River as the great transportation
route of the West. The fact that this river ran through hostile territory—Vicksburg did
not fall until July 4, 1863—forced the farmers of the West to find another outlet for
their products. By this time the country from Chicago and St. Louis eastward to the
Atlantic ports was fairly completely connected by railroads. The necessities of war led
to great improvements in construction and equipment. Business which had hitherto
gone South now began to go East; New Orleans ceased to be the great industrial
entrepot of this region and gave place to St. Louis and Chicago.
Yet, though this great change in traffic routes took place in the course of the war, the
actual consolidations of the various small railroads into great trunk lines did not begin
until after peace had been assured. The establishment of five great railroads extending
continuously from the Atlantic seaboard to Chicago and the West was perhaps the
most remarkable economic development of the ten or fifteen years succeeding the war.
By 1875 these five great trunk lines, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie,
the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Grand Trunk, had connected their scattered units and
established complete through systems.
All the vexations that had necessarily accompanied railroad traffic in the days when
each one these systems had been a series of disconnected roads had disappeared. The
grain and meat products of the West, accumulating for the most part at Chicago and St.
Louis, now came rapidly and uninterruptedly to the Atlantic seaboard, and railroad
passengers, no longer submitted to the inconveniences of the Civil War period, now
began to experience for the first time the pleasures of railroad travel. Together with the
articulation of the routes, important mechanical changes and reconstruction
programmes completely transformed the American railroad system. The former
haphazard character of each road is evidenced by the fact that in Civil War days there
were eight different gages, with the result that it was almost impossible for the rolling
stock of one line to use another. A few years after the Civil War, however, the present
standard gage of four feet eight and one-half inches had become uniform all over the
United States. The malodorous "eating cribs" of the fifties and the sixties—little
station restaurants located at selected spots along the line—now began to disappear,
and the modern dining car made its appearance. The old rough and ready sleeping cars
began to give place to the modern Pullman. One of the greatest drawbacks to ante-
bellum travel had been the absence of bridges across great rivers, such as the Hudson
and the Susquehanna. At Albany, for example, the passengers in the summer time
were ferried across, and in winter they were driven in sleighs or were sometimes
obliged to walk across the ice. It was not until after the Civil War that a great iron
bridge, two thousand feet long, was constructed across the Hudson at this point. On the
trains the little flickering oil lamps now gave place to gas, and the wood burning
stoves—frequently in those primitive days smeared with tobacco juice—in a few years
were displaced by the new method of heating by steam.
The accidents which had been almost the prevailing rule in the fifties and sixties
were greatly reduced by the Westinghouse air-brake, invented in 1868, and the block
signaling system, introduced somewhat later. In the ten years succeeding the Civil
War, the physical appearance of the railroads entirely changed; new and larger
locomotives were made, the freight cars, which during the period of the Civil War had
a capacity of about eight tons, were now built to carry fifteen or twenty. The former
little flimsy iron rails were taken up and were relaid with steel. In the early seventies
when Cornelius Vanderbilt substituted steel for iron on the New York Central, he had
to import the new material from England. In the Civil War period, practically all
American railroads were single track fines—and this alone prevented any extensive
traffic. Vanderbilt laid two tracks along the Hudson River from New York to Albany,
and four from Albany to Buffalo, two exclusively for freight and two for passengers.
By 1880 the American railroad, in all its essential details, had definitely arrived.
But in this same period even more sensational developments had taken place. Soon
after 1865 the imagination of the American railroad builder began to reach far beyond
the old horizon. Up to that time the Mississippi River had marked the Western railroad
terminus. Now and then a road straggled beyond this barrier for a few miles into
eastern Iowa and Missouri; but in the main the enormous territory reaching from the
Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean was crossed only by the old trails. The one thing
which perhaps did most to place the transcontinental road on a practical basis was the
annexation of California in 1848; and the wild rush that took place on the discovery of
the gold fields one year later had led Americans to realize that on the Pacific coast they
had an empire which was great and incalculably rich but almost inaccessible. The
loyalty of California to the Northern cause in the war naturally stimulated a desire for
closer contact. In the ten years preceding 1860 the importance of a transcontinental
line had constantly been brought to the attention of Congress and the project had
caused much jealousy between the North and the South, for each region desired to
control its Eastern terminus. This impediment no longer stood in the way; early in his
term, therefore, President Lincoln signed the bill authorizing the construction of the
Union Pacific—a name doubly significant, as marking the union of the East and the
West and also recognizing the sentiment of loyalty or union that this great enterprise
was intended to promote. The building of this railroad, as well as that of the others
which ultimately made the Pacific and the Atlantic coast near neighbors—the Santa
Fe, the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern—is described in
the pages that follow. Here it is sufficient to emphasize the fact that they achieved the
concluding triumph in what is certainly the most extensive system of railroads in the
world. These transcontinental roads really completed the work of Columbus. He sailed
to discover the western route to Cathay and found that his path was blocked by a
mighty continent. But the first train that crossed the plains and ascended the Rockies
and reached the Golden Gate assured thenceforth a rapid and uninterrupted transit
westward from Europe to Asia.

CHAPTER II. THE COMMODORE AND THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
A story was told many years ago of Commodore Vanderbilt which, while perhaps
not strictly true, was pointed enough to warrant its constant repetition for more than
two generations. Back in the sixties, when this grizzled railroad chieftain was the chief
factor in the rapidly growing New York Central Railroad system, whose backbone
then consisted of a continuous one-track line connecting Albany with the Great Lakes,
the president of a small cross-country road approached him one day and requested an
exchange of annual passes.
"Why, my dear sir," exclaimed the Commodore, "my railroad is more than three
hundred miles long, while yours is only seventeen miles."
"That may all be so," replied the other, "but my railroad is just as wide as yours."
This statement was true. Practically no railroad, even as late as the sixties, was wider
than another. They were all single-tracked lines. Even the New York Central system in
1866 was practically a single-track road; and the Commodore could not claim to any
particular superiority over his neighbors and rivals in this particular. Instead of
sneering at his "seventeen-mile" colleague, Vanderbilt might have remembered that his
own fine system had grown up in less than two generations from a modest narrow-
gage track running from "nothing to nowhere." The Vanderbilt lines, which today with
their controlled and affiliated systems comprise more than 13,000 miles of railroad—a
large portion of which is double-tracked, no mean amount being laid with third and
fourth tracks is the outgrowth of a little seventeen-mile line, first chartered in 1826,
and finished for traffic in 1831. This little railroad was known as the Mohawk and
Hudson, and it extended from Albany to Schenectady. It was the second continuous
section of railroad line operated by steam in the United States, and on it the third
locomotive built in America, the De Witt Clinton, made a satisfactory trial trip in
August, 1831.
The success of this experiment created a sensation far and wide and led to rapid
railroad building in other parts of the country in the years immediately following. The
experiences of a participant in this trial trip are described about forty years later in a
letter written by Judge J.L. Gillis of Philadelphia:
"In the early part of the month of August of that year 1831, I left Philadelphia for
Canandaigua, New York, traveling by stages and steamboats to Albany and stopping at
the latter place. I learned that a locomotive had arrived there and that it would make its
first trip over the road to Schenectady the next day. I concluded to lie over and gratify
my curiosity with a first ride after a locomotive.
"That locomotive, the train of cars, together with the incidents of the day, made a
very vivid impression on my mind. I can now look back from one of Pullman's Palace
cars, over a period of forty years, and see that train together with all the improvements
that have been made in railroad travel since that time I am not machinist enough to
give a description of the locomotive that drew us over the road that day, but I recollect
distinctly the general make-up of the train. The train was composed of coach bodies,
mostly from Thorpe and Sprague's stage coaches, placed upon trucks. The trucks were
coupled together with chains, leaving from two to three feet slack, and when the
locomotive started it took up the slack by jerks, with sufficient force to jerk the
passengers who sat on seats across the tops of the coaches, out from under their hats,
and in stopping, came together with such force as to send them flying from the seats.
"They used dry pitch for fuel, and there being no smoke or spark catcher to the
chimney or smoke-stack, a volume of black smoke, strongly impregnated with sparks,
coals, and cinders, came pouring back the whole length of the train. Each of the tossed
passengers who had an umbrella raised it as a protection against the smoke and fire.
They were found to be but a momentary protection, for I think in the first mile the last
umbrella went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a
general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbor to
put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first
station. Then rails were secured and lashed between the trucks, taking the slack out of
the coupling chains, thereby affording us a more steady run to the top of the inclined
plane at Schenectady.
"The incidents off the train were quite as striking as those on the train. A general
notice of the contemplated trip had excited not only the curiosity of those living along
the line of the road, but those living remote from it, causing a large collection of
people at all the intersecting roads along the route. Everybody, together with his wife
and all his children, came from a distance with all kinds of conveyances, being as
ignorant of what was coming as their horses, and drove up to the road as near as they
could get, only looking for the best position to get a view of the train. As it approached
a the horses took fright and wheeled, upsetting buggies, carriages, and wagons, and
leaving for parts unknown to the passengers if not to their owners, and it is not now
positively known if some of them have stopped yet. Such is a hasty sketch of my
recollection of my first ride after a locomotive."
The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was originally constructed with inclined planes
worked by stationary engines near each terminus, the inclinations being one foot in
eighteen. The rail used was a flat bar laid upon longitudinal sills. This type of rail
came into general use at this period and continued in use in parts of the country even
as late as the Civil War.
The roads that now make up the New York Central were built piecemeal from 1831
to 1853; and the organization of this company in the latter year, to consolidate eleven
independent roads extending from Albany to Buffalo, finally put an end to the long
debate between canals and railroads. The founding of this company definitely meant
that transportation in the United States henceforth would follow the steel route and not
the water ditch and the towpath. Canals might indeed linger for a time as feeders, even,
as in the case of the Erie and a few others, as more or less important transportation
routes, but every one now realized that the railroad was to be the great agency which
would give plausibility to the industrial organization of the United States and develop
its great territory.
Besides the pioneer Mohawk and Hudson, this consolidation included the Utica and
Schenectady, which had been opened in 1836 and which had operated profitably for
many years, always paying large dividends. The Tonawanda Railroad, opened in 1837,
and the Buffalo and Niagara Falls, also finished in the same year, were operated with
profit until they were absorbed by the new system. In 1838 the Auburn and Syracuse
and the Hudson and Berkshire Railroads were opened. The former after being merged
in 1850 with the Rochester and Syracuse Railway, became a part of the consolidation.
The Syracuse and Attica Railroad, opened in 1839, the Attica and Buffalo, opened in
1842, the Schenectady and Troy, opened in the same year, and several other small
lines, some of which had undergone various changes in name and ownership, were all