Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads, by Dee Brown

As has been established time and again on this blog, I like trains, so it'll come as absolutely no surprise to anybody that I'm talking about them yet again. And don't worry! They'll come back! I've got at least two more books to read just about trains!

This book deals specifically with the history of the transcontinental railroads built during the later half of the nineteenth century. I actually read another book about this very topic called Railroaded which goes far more in depth about the railroads than Brown does in this book. This is definitely far more of a general overview of the transcontinental railroads as a historical subject so it's good if you're unfamiliar with material and doesn't get too bogged down in technical details. If you're looking for something a little more substantial or in-depth then Railroaded is definitely superior in that regard.

The transcontinental railroads of the United States are an interesting topic because there was no real financial reason for them to exist. Railroads in the eastern parts of the United States were often built to connect existing settlements and ease transportation issues that had been partly but not completely solved by a combination of river and canal transportation. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad in the United States and so solid it did not collapse into bankruptcy during the Great Depression, is the ultimate example of the eastern railroad. The western railroads, however, were going into vast territories inhabited only by the numerous Indian nations who had no interest or more frequently were opposed to the introduction of railroads into their lands. Perhaps a line of communication between east and west would be strategically necessary, but there was little economic incentive for a railroad of continent-spanning size.

As a result, the railroads crossing the western United States were largely subsidized through the federal government in a variety of ways. The Central Pacific and Union Pacific got cash for every mile of usable track laid, as well as extensive land grants, and their bonds backed by the federal government. Other railroads such as the Santa Fe eschewed cash payments in exchange for significantly greater land grants, providing the railroads with extensive opportunities for profit entirely divorced from actually running a profitable railroad. The bountiful opportunities for corruption, graft, and financial manipulation brought dozens of robber barons to exploit and gut the transcontinental railroads, leaving the United States with five barely-functioning railroad networks crossing the west.

Brown does a pretty good job covering the major points of the story of the transcontinental railroads, which weren't exactly the heroic nation-building exercises they sometimes get portrayed as in popular history. That being said, I do have a couple of issues with Brown's book at least one of which is because of when it was written. This book actually dates from the 1970's, which were a dark, dark decade for railroads in the United States. Penn Central, the poorly-planned merger between the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, had gone bankrupt and the issues of numerous other railroads led to the government takeover of all passenger operations with Amtrak and reforms to railroad regulation. An industry that even fifty years prior was central to America had become an obsolete relic. Many historians of railroads at this time had bitter and angry things to say about the railroad companies, and Brown is no exception.

While this is fair for the time period, and Amtrak service hasn't improved greatly either, at least where I live, it definitely dates the book. And considering how many emotions are tied up to the collapse of the railroads in the 1970s, it's hard for me to really make an objective assessment of the period because of the number of emotions involved. It's truly a curious phenomenon and I wonder if there will be history on it at a later point.

The other thing that bothered me was the disparity in Brown's coverage of Indian experiences and black and Chinese experiences with the railroads. Brown goes into great detail about the experiences of the Indians, as their titles to land supposedly guaranteed by treaty are rapidly extinguished to make way for railroads and the associated land grants. And of course there is much to be said about how the railroad, by splitting the buffalo herds and making them even easier for white hunters to exterminate, hastened the demise of the traditional way of life for many plains Indians. And Brown has every right to be furious as she is about the treatment of Indians.

But by comparison her coverage of the Chinese and black experiences with the railroads go far less in-depth. What I most remembered was her briefly mentioning the usage of black convict labor and Pullman Porters. Now, there is a whole in-depth exploration of the peonage system created in the United States after the Civil War that made it incredibly easy for black men to be convicted for trivial offenses and then leased as convict labor to farms, mines, and railroads as basically slaves. If you're ever interested in learning more about peonage, I highly recommend the PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name. Suffice to say that in the south, including Texas, black convict labor was often employed to build railroads. And even where free black men were employed, they faced lower wages, discrimination, and violence from white railroad workers. And of course Chinese railroad workers faced the same issues as their black counterparts. These are huge issues that just sort of get glossed over in this book and feels like a missed opportunity.

Brown also mentions Pullman Porters, one of the best jobs available to black men in the United States, but fairly low-paying compared to other railroad workers and working as a servant for the benefit of the passengers. Pullman Porters, and by extension many railroad porters, have been referred to as ''George'' regardless of their actual name. Brown mentions this as in honor of their employer, George Pullman, owner of the Pullman company. The problem is that this was hardly an honor for the porters. It has been conjectured, although I have not found any strong evidence for this so far, that the Pullman Porters were called George because that was the name of their employer or ''master''. Even the simple fact that white passengers couldn't be bothered to learn the names of their porters reflects the second class status Pullman Porters were relegated to as black men. I think it is grossly misinformed to call this behavior an honor.

Issues aside, this is pretty good for a general history. As I said, it doesn't go terribly in-depth but covers the major highlights of the history of transcontinental railroads in the late nineteenth century in the United States. If you're looking for basic information this is a good start, but there are other sources that go far more in-depth.

- Kalpar

All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life, by George H. Douglas

Today in a move that should surprise exactly nobody, I am reviewing yet another book about railroad history, something I've done from time to time here on the blog because of my ongoing obsession with trains which I can honestly say has existed since before I can remember. Today I'm looking at an amateur history, All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life, by George H. Douglas. I say amateur history because Douglas is an English and creative writing professor who has written a few histories about railroads, a topic he is interested in, rather than being a professional historian. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I have to admit that it shows through in a couple places in this book and being someone with an education in history I found myself wishing for more in this book, such as more evidence of research.

All Aboard! is an attempt to very briefly cover the history of railroading in the United States from its infancy in the 1820's to about the 1980's. This is an audacious task and would be difficult for anyone to cover in a four hundred page book. There are whole books written about one single railroad, or one specific location, or one specific time period in the history of railroading in the United States. Obviously there is a great amount of detail left out, simply because Douglas just doesn't have the space to talk about it. However, it still feels rather limited in scope for a history of railroads in the United States.

A good example is Douglas's use of anecdotes from the history of railroads to provide vignettes of life related to the railroad. Although the story of Augustus S. Messer, a conductor on the New Haven Railroad, adds a definite human element to the story, Douglas doesn't do a terribly good job of working it into the larger narrative of railroad history. Looking back too, I think that a casual reader might be a little confused. As an avid reader of railroad history I had some of the necessary context to understand what Douglas was talking about, but I think less experienced readers could easily get confused by the use of terminology without explanation.

There are also some comments that just seem terribly outdated for the time when this book was published in 1991. Douglas takes a fairly anti-labor stance in his historical narrative, siding with railroad executives, which is odd considering most historians consider the complaints of labor such as the incredibly dangerous working conditions on railroads as legitimate concerns. I also remember a comment about slave labor in the south used before the Civil War to build railroad lines as being ''fairly well treated'' which bothers me for a variety of reasons, mostly it seems an almost backhanded attempt to justify slavery as not that bad. Which of course is a whole other issue which I've talked about in books that deal more directly with slavery elsewhere.

Another thing that was kind of disappointing was Douglas's inclusion of works of literature, film, and music which included trains and railroads. Sometimes Douglas goes into depth with analyses of a specific work and its use of railroads within the story. Most of the time, though, Douglas just provides a long list of works that include railroads, perhaps in only a minor capacity, and talks about how railroads affect the American psyche in a variety of ways. As an English professor I would expect this to be the most-developed part of his work, looking at how the railroad is portrayed in various mediums. Unfortunately it comes across more as a list of books and movies that have trains in them more than anything else.

The problem with this book seems to be it starts off with a very audacious goal and doesn't quite get where it needs to be. I feel like Douglas would have benefited from more research to give a lot more meat to his text which feels pretty fanciful at times. Ultimately this feels like a book written by a railfan for the enjoyment of other railfans, so if you're already well into the train fandom this book might have some gems you'd enjoy. But if you're a relative newcomer or looking for more nitty-gritty analysis of railroads in the United States, there are better resources out there.

- Kalpar

Battle For the North: The Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th Century Railway Wars, by Charles McKean

So as I've already said numerous times on this site and will probably say again, I'm a little bit obsessed with trains. The result is that I ultimate spend an inordinate amount of time reading books about trains and then blogging about them here. Anyway, this week I'm looking at another railroad history book, in this case Battle For the North, which specifically talks about the railroad rivalry between the Caledonian and North British Railways in Scotland in the mid to late nineteenth century. At the center of this narrative, however, is the Tay Bridge Disaster, which McKean focuses a lot of his resources upon. In a way, it feels almost like two books that have been welded together rather than one.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the history, the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 was a horrible accident where the bridge across the Tay Estuary in Scotland collapsed on a windy December night while a train was crossing it. Somewhere around seventy people died as the train plunged into the icy water below and it became sensational news at the time, seen as Victorian engineering being brought down for its hubris. There has been significant debate afterwards, of course, as to what exactly caused the bridge to collapse. The engineer who designed the bridge, Thomas Bouch, was condemned by a minority report from the Board of Trade Inquiry, which became the popular explanation. In this book, McKean seeks to explain why the bridge collapsed and rehabilitate Bouch.

The biggest problem I had with this book was that McKean tries to place the Tay Bridge's construction, collapse, demolition, and reconstruction, into the larger context of the fierce competition between the Caledonian and North British Railways, who sought to become the railway operating in Scotland. Although the competition between the lines explains why the North British decided to bridge not only the Tay but eventually also the Forth Estuaries, no small feats in and of themselves, I feel like the Tay narrative is almost a story apart from the competitive story between the North British and the Caledonian. I respect and appreciate McKean's efforts to place the entire story into context, but the preceding and following chapters feel somewhat unconnected.

The Tay Bridge gets the most focus in the book, with chapters on its construction, its fall, the inquiry into its collapse, and the eventual reconstruction. McKean's main effort, as I said, is to rehabilitate Bouch who has been castigated for the bridge collapse and provide alternate explanations for the disaster. McKean does bring up a good point that if the bridge design and construction had been completely inadequate, why did only the thirteen High Girders, the central part of the bridge, collapse when the rest of the bridge remained intact through the gale? If Bouch's design had been entirely inadequate for wind resistance, or the materials used inferior, shouldn't the entire bridge have collapsed? These are excellent points, but McKean fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for the facts. It cannot be refuted that the materials utilized for the bridge were inferior, with numerous severe problems recorded at the foundry where the cast iron parts were produced, which reflects badly on Bouch as he at least failed to place competent administrators in charge of the foundry work. Inadequate and improper maintenance was perhaps partially to blame, but that's more the fault of the North British administration who oversaw the maintenance of the bridge. But what caused the collapse?

McKean advances the theory, which Bouch himself supported, that the second class passenger carriage of the train jumped the track and with the guard van jumped the track and slammed into the girders, causing the structure to topple over. McKean argues that one of the high girder piers, which had actually collapsed in a storm during construction and had been re-erected, had been fatally weakened and warped, allowing the second class carriage to jump the track in the first place. Although this is possible, the evidence that McKean is able to marshal for this hypothesis is circumstantial at best, perhaps most critically pieces of wood with tell-tale grooves left by the wheels of the passenger carriage which are reported by eyewitnesses, but were burned as fuel within hours of being recovered from the ocean leaving no solid evidence. As I'm not an engineer I'm not really able to provide my own hypothesis. I have a vague idea that maybe the High Girders, which had their girder truss on top of the bridge rather than below to provide more clearance for ships, were too top heavy, but I have no evidence or skill to prove this beyond a vague supposition. Ultimately because the evidence was recovered hastily with a view towards reopening the shipping channel rather than forensic investigation, the answer will probably remain unknown.

By contrast, the construction of the Forth Bridge, a massive truss and cantilever edifice which still stands to this day, receives only one chapter. It certainly seemed to be plagued by less problems than the original Tay Bridge construction and as it has withstood the elements for over a century there has been no scandal of its collapse. The book ends with a strange chapter on races between London and Aberdeen taken between the Caledonian and North British Railways, but it's an event that occurred over a few summer months and ended just as abruptly. McKean condemns the competition as ultimately wasteful because it resulted in little more than a tie.

Overall this book is...okay at best. It's an interesting look into railway practices in the nineteenth century and I rather enjoyed the revelation that British railways weren't necessarily run any better than their American counterparts. However in trying to talk about railroad competition and the Tay Bridge, it feels like McKean pushed two potentially separate books together into one. Finally I find McKean's efforts to excuse Bouch of any and all wrongdoing is protesting a little too much and I think we may never know for certain why exactly the bridge collapsed.

- Kalpar

The Baldwin Locomotive Works 1831-1915: A Study in American Industrial Practice, by John K. Brown

As I've mentioned several times before here on this blog, I'm a bit of a maniac when it comes to trains so it should be absolutely no surprise to anyone that I picked up a history book which talks about locomotive construction. And if you needed further evidence that this one's going to be a dry read, you merely need look at the title: The Baldwin Locomotive Works 1831-1915 A Study in American Industrial Practice. A title that simple and yet also long can only belong to an incredibly thorough and well-researched monograph and in that respect I was not disappointed. I will warn everyone right away this book will probably be best survived by people who have a strong interest in nineteenth century industrialization, or the most ardent of railroad fanatics.

To provide a summary for my readers who probably aren't as train-obsessed as I am: Baldwin Locomotive Works was a Philadelphia-based company and one of the first American builders of locomotives. Over the years it would become the most successful American builder, controlling over a third of the total market, and by the time it ceased locomotive production in 1956 it had produced over 70,000 locomotives. Throughout this time Baldwin grew from a fairly small plant to an absolutely enormous facility, and yet as Brown illustrates many of its structures remained largely unchanged from the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite its size, Baldwin didn't incorporate until 1909, remaining for much of its history a partnership which required reorganization as partners joined or departed the firm. However for much of its history, Brown argues effectively that these were critical strengths for Baldwin rather than weaknesses, at least until dramatic changes almost no one in the railroad industry predicted occurred in the 1920's.

As Brown points out very on, Baldwin and other locomotive builders are rather different from the famous American System businesses and corporations which have been the focus of so much historiographic effort. Much of the focus has been placed on producers of raw materials, such as steel mills, or producers of consumer goods such as sewing machines. These industries benefitted from automation, standardization, and economies of scale. And, perhaps more importantly, they were far more resilient in the frequent economic shocks that punctuated American history through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Baldwin Locomotive Works, by contrast, was a constructor of capital goods: large, expensive, and extremely complicated devices which were major purchases for railroads. When times were good, Baldwin was flushed with orders, as railroads scrambled to obtain more motive power for the increased traffic. When times were bad, railroads forgoed capital purchases, reducing Baldwin's workload to a trickle. This resulted in Baldwin relying on a number of strategies, such as laying off significant portions of its workforce and cultivating export markets, to weather these dry spells before demand returned once again.

Further complicating this is the sheer difficulty of producing a steam locomotive. One of the main contributions America gave the nineteenth century was the development of interchangeable parts. First developed in Federal Armories to make parts from one rifle capable of repairing another rifle, the idea of standard and interchangeable parts made repairs incredibly simple and drove down the costs of numerous consumer and industrial goods. As much as interchangeable parts would be a boon to locomotives, and no matter how much locomotive builders attempted to incorporate the idea, steam locomotives would consistently defy such attempts due to their very nature, which I thought was a really interesting part of this book.

As Brown explains, although locomotive builders such as Baldwin tried to design and sell ''standard'' products, ultimately it was the railroads that decided when and what sort of locomotives would be built based upon the needs of their railroad and all too often the builders had to either meet these needs or go without business. As such the majority of locomotives were custom-built for railroads depending on their specifications and suggestions. Builders such as Baldwin would try to incorporate standard parts such as valves and fittings as much as possible, with some degree of success, but the sheer plethora of locomotive designs made this a difficult task. In addition to the varieties of locomotive to build, there was also a great amount of variety within types, ranging from narrow gauge to broad gauge and everywhere inbetween.

On top of this, locomotives were constantly evolving over time as well. Although the 4-4-0 American type locomotive would be dominant for the latter half of the nineteenth century, from 1850 to 1880 it would grow in size and strength, with larger and heavier boilers, cylinders, and driver wheels increasing its tractive force. However in a quest for bigger and better locomotives, the 4-4-0 would eventually be supplanted by the 4-4-2 Atlantic. Which of course would then in turn be replaced by the 4-6-2 Pacific. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the dozens of other wheel arrangements experimented with or developed during this time period. Steam locomotive design and development was a constant process, which ultimately reached a fevered pitch in the glory days of the early twentieth century, before economic troubles and the arrival of practical diesel power heralded the end of steam power. Baldwin and many other locomotive builders were so wrapped up in the struggle to produce bigger and better steam locomotives that they were completely unable to adapt to the rapid changes diesel power brought.

Overall I found this book a fascinating read, although that's probably because of my great interest in railroad history more than anything else. If it's about trains you've got me hooked. Even as an avid rail enthusiast I found this book very dry and technical and I think only the most interested of audiences will get something approaching enjoyment out of it. However, it's very well researched and Brown does a good job of exploring an area of history that hasn't garnered much attention and detailing how locomotive construction is inherently different from so many other industries. Even if he gets a little opinionated in some areas, which is something I'm noticing in railroad historians.

- Kalpar