"By a singular coincidence, the ladies at every one of the more than sixty stations between Piermont and Dunkirk had conceived the idea that it would be as original as it was appropriate to present a flag wrought by their own fair hands to the railroad company when the first train passed through to Lake Erie. As it would have consumed altogether too much time to make a stop for each of these flag presentations, the engineer merely slowed down at three-fourths of the stations long enough to permit the man on the flat-car to scoop up the banners in his arms, much like the hands on the old-fashioned Marsh harvesters gathered up armfuls of grain for binding. At the end of the journey the Erie Railroad had a collection of flags that would have done credit to a victorious army."
Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line, built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days.
It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his message like a letter, beginning with "Dear sir" and ending with "Yours truly." The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward "under flag." That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily proceeded at snail's pace.
It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie's superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound express at Turner's. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent's orders.
So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.
It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early railroads.
At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, "some two hundred thousand dollars in a year," and his neighbors laughed at him for his extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months' operation of the road the receipts--mostly from freight--were $1,755,285.
To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property--a property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods, rather than of through passengers.
The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the beginning, the different roads--such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, and New York Central--were being pushed west over the Alleghany Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the _Sandusky_, was the first locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.
The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad--now a part of the Wabash--extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N.
J.,--the founders of a famous locomotive works--was landed from a packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:
"The little locomotive had no whistle, no spark-arrester, no cow-catcher, and the cab was open to the sky. Its speed was about six miles an hour, and where the railroad and the highway lay parallel to each other there was frequently a trial of speed between the locomotive with its 'pleasure cars' and the stage-coaches. Sometimes the stage-coaches came in ahead. Six inches of snow were sufficient to blockade the trains drawn by this American engine."
In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,--afterwards a part of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the extended New York Central system--was also pushing toward Chicago as a goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted beside the "fly-by-night" schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing completion.
Chicago's first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des Plaines; and its first locomotive, the _Pioneer_, had been bought second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it was a railroad, and it was with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.
The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears, construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to effect their escape to the North.
Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States, that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the People's Pacific Railroad,--and a part of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan.
There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas City by 1856. That particular railroad--the Missouri Pacific--through its western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the coast within the past year.
When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer.
The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham, who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war, into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he believed so earnestly. He found it--making a route that would save 148 miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities.
When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends, Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento--the Crocker brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.
How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys.
"Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a bank swallow's hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight half the battles of the Revolution."
While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began that has never been approached in the history of railroad building.
Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford, who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.
After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific, and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific--the westernmost of the chain of Gould roads--has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a number of years to come. Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city--Prince Rupert--at its western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next three years.
This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading--an eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of the so-called "pooling agreements," and it has cut its own strong arms by building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line, large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all but passed into history.
CHAPTER III
THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD
COST OF A SINGLE-TRACK ROAD--FINANCING--SECURING A CHARTER--SURVEY-WORK AND ITS DANGERS--GRADES--CONSTRUCTION--TRACK-LAYING.
The railroad has its beginning in the inspiration and in the imagination of men. Perchance a great tract of country, rich in possibilities, stands undeveloped for lack of transportation facilities. The living arm of the railroad will bring to it both strength and growth. It will bring to it the materials, the men, and the machinery needed for its development. It will take from it its products seeking markets in communities already established.
In that way the first railroads began, reaching their arms carefully in from the Atlantic and the navigable rivers and bays that emptied into it.
In the beginning there was hardly any inland country. All the important towns were spread along the sea-coast or along those same navigable tributaries, and it was sorry shrift for any community that did not possess a wharf to which vessels of considerable tonnage might attain.
Where such communities did not possess natural water-ways, they sought to obtain artificial ones; and the result was the extraordinary impetus that was given to the building of canals during the first half of the nineteenth century--a page of American industrial history that has been told in another chapter.
It was found quite impossible to handle bulky freight economically by wagon, no matter how romantic the turnpike might be for passenger traffic in the old-time coaches. The canal was so much better as a carrier that it was hailed with acclaim, and waxed powerful. In the height of its power it laughed at the puny efforts of the railroad, and then, as you have seen, sought by every possible means to throttle the growth of the steel highway. Within eighty years it was powerless, and the railroad was conqueror. There were hundreds of miles of abandoned canal within the country, many of them being converted into roadbeds of railroads; and the water-highway, with its slow transit and its utter helplessness during the frozen months of the year, was not able to exist except where quantities of the coarsest sort of freight were to be moved.
Without railroads, the United States to-day would, in all probability, not be radically different from the United States of a hundred years ago. All the large towns and cities would still be clustered upon the coast and waterways, and back of them would still rest many, many square miles of undeveloped country; the nation would have remained a sprawling, helpless thing, weakened by its very size, and subject both to internal conflict and to attacks of foreign invaders. It has been repeatedly said that if there had been a through railroad development in the South during the fifties, there would have been no Civil War. France for five hundred years before the signing of our Declaration, was a civilized and progressive nation. Yet century after century passed without her inland towns showing material change; and her seaports, lacking the impetus of interior growth, remained quiescent. Such a metropolis as Marseilles is to-day, became possible only when the railroad made this seaport the south gate of a mightily developing nation.
Let us assume that we are about to build a railroad. If we are going to strike our road in from some existing line or some accessible port into virgin country, we may hope for land or money grants from the State, county, town, or city Government. That is a faint hope, however, in these piping days of the twentieth century. So much scandal once attached itself to these grants that they have become all but obsolete. We shall have to fall back upon the individual enterprise and help of the persons who are to benefit by the coming of the railroad. They may be folk who simply regard our project as a good investment, and place their money in it with hopes of a fair return.
Even if we are not going into virgin territory to give whole townships and counties their first sight of the locomotive, but are going to strike into a community already provided with railroad facilities but seemingly offering fair opportunity for profit in a competitive traffic, we shall find capital ready to stand back of us. A railroad will cost much money, the mere cost of single-track construction generally running far in excess of $35,000 a mile; and it should have resources, particularly in a highly competitive territory, to enable it to carry on a losing fight at the first.
For the money it receives it will issue securities, upon incorporation and legal organization, almost invariably in the form of capital stock and of mortgage-bonds. The stock will probably be held by the men who wish to control the construction and the operation of the line; the bonds will be issued to those persons who invest their money in it, either for profit or as an aid to the community it seeks to enter. The bonds are, in almost all cases, the preferable security. They pay a guaranteed interest at a certain rate, and at the end of a designated term of years they are redeemable at face value, in cash or in the capital stock of the company.
There are other forms of loan obligations which the railroad issues--debenture bonds, second-mortgage bonds, short-term notes, and the like. To enter upon a description of these would mean a detour into the devious highways and byways of railroad finance--an excursion which we have no desire to make in this book.
In building our line we will issue as few bonds in proportion to our stock as will make our company fairly stable in organization, and its proposition attractive to investors. For we shall have to pay our interest coupons upon the bonds from the beginning. We can begin even moderate dividends upon our stock after our enterprise has entered upon fair sailing. The all-important initial problem of financing having been at least partly settled, we will go before the Legislature and secure a charter for our road. In these modern days we shall probably have also to make application to some State railroad or public utility commission. It will consider our case with great care, granting hearings so that we may state our plans, and that folk living in the territory which we are about to tap may urge the necessity of our coming, and that rival railroads or other opponents may state their objections. After the entire evidence has been sifted down and weighed in truly judicial fashion, we may hope for word to "go ahead," from the official commission, which, though it assumes none of our risk of loss in projecting the line, will gratuitously assume many of the details of its management.
Perhaps the politicians will poke their noses into our plan; they sometimes do. If we have plenty of capital behind us; if it becomes rumored that the P---- or the N---- or the X----, one of the big existing properties, is back of us, or some "big Wall Street fellow" is guiding our bonds, we can almost confidently expect their interference. After that it becomes a matter of diplomacy--and may the best man win!
Let us assume that some of these big obstacles have already been passed, that the politicians have been placed at arm's length, that the money needed is in sight--we are ready to begin the construction of our line.
The location is the thing that next vexes us. A few errors in the placing of our line may spell failure for the whole enterprise. Obviously, these errors will be of the sort that admit of no easy correction.
If our line is to link two important traffic centres and is to make a specialty of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that will bend the straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line is to pick up its traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to neglect no place of possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we make many twists and turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to pass business by. Perhaps we may even have to worm our way into the hearts of towns already grown and closely built, and this will be expensive work.
But it will be worth every cent of that expense to go after competitive business.
We roughly outline our route, and the engineers get their camping duds ready, particularly in these days when new railroads almost invariably go into a new country. Their first trip over the route will be known as the reconnaissance. On it they will make rough plotting of the territory through which the new line is to place its rails. Our engineers are experienced. They survey the country with practised eyes. The line must go on this side of that ridge, because of the prevailing winds and their influence upon snowdrifts (it costs a mint of money to run ploughs through a long winter), and on the other side of the next ridge, because the other side has easily worked loam, and this side heavy rock. There must be passes through hills and through mountains to be selected now and then, and all the while the engineer must bear in mind that the amount of his excavation should very nearly balance the amount of embankment-fill.
Bridges are to be avoided and tunnels must come only in case of absolute necessity.
There will be several of these reconnaissances and from them the engineers who are to build the line, and the men who are to own and operate it, will finally pick a route close to what will be the permanent way.
[Illustration: CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERS BLAZE THEIR WAY ACROSS THE FACE OF NEW COUNTRY]