Changing Trains
For generations it was a familiar memory from just about everyone’s childhood: a slow-moving freight train crawling across the prairie, huffing up a steep grade, or gliding down a valley like a huge metallic snake. Young rail enthusiasts would count how many cars there were between the steam-belching engine and the stubby caboose or search the colorful railroad insignias for ones they hadn’t seen before.
The different types of cars that made up the train gave clues to what was being carried. Black tank cars contained mostly oil, while yellow refrigerator cars might have a load of lettuce or dressed beef. Sometimes the cargo was in plain view: big, rust red flatcars piled high with lumber, or black coal hoppers with their heaps of an- thracite peeking over the top. Interspersed with these were sealed boxcars, which might contain anything from toothbrushes to beer barrels. And sometimes a slat-sided cattle car would add animation to the assemblage. The impressive thing about those passing freights was the variety of cars visible in just about every train—a variety that made it clear that all sorts of goods were being transported, and that the railroad was indeed a common carrier and not the highly specialized bulk carrier it has become today.
Steam railroads dominated American inland transportation for almost a century. During the golden age, between about 1860 and 1950, little freight moved in the country except by rail. Food, clothing, and shelter depended on good railroad service. Heavy industry, with its unquenchable appetite for lumber, ore, and coal, could never have flourished without the endless parade of freight cars. Big rail centers like Chicago normally received six hundred freight trains, or around forty thousand loaded cars, a day. During most of this period the nation’s economic health was measured in car loadings. When car loadings were up, the nation prospered. When they were down, times were bad.
Yet despite their enormous size, the railroads were not too muscle-bound to handle small, fragile shipments like fresh flowers or Aunt Mae’s box of cookies. And when Uncle Ed died unexpectedly in Texas, his coffin was sent north by rail. Everyone, great and small, was touched directly by America’s universal burden carrier, the railroad.
There is something evocative about the humble boxcar, a wanderer that travels endlessly across the parched plains or darts in and out of the forest with its side speckled in sun and shadow. Thomas Wolfe found an abundance of romance in the solemn march of a nighttime freight train, its whistle piercing the still darkness, and a severe beauty in freight cars. Even in its most dilapidated state, a boxcar has a homely dignity, the simple, rugged American beauty to be found in a rocky gorge or a weather-beaten barn.
This aesthetic treat traces its roots to the somewhat less beautiful environment of a coal mine. From American railroading’s earliest days, even before steam power, coal has been the mainstay of freight service. The modern railway originated in the eighteenth-century mines of England. Small, horsedrawn four-wheel hopper cars running on wooden (and later iron) rails provided an efficient way to move coals from mine mouth to seashore for transport by ship. Thus the hopper car was already established when American railroads began in the 182Os. The following decade saw the advent of steampowered trains, and from then on the railroad and coal-mining industries fed on each other.
For railroad owners coal was the perfect cargo. Moving it was rarely urgent, so slow, economical trains were satisfactory. It was not easily damaged or lost, so rough handling was acceptable. It did not mind getting wet, so open-top cars could be used, and shaking did not harm it, so uneven tracks were not a problem. Coal made up about a third of all rail tonnage during the golden age, and today the figure stands at about 40 percent. Few love affairs have been as enduring as the romance between the railroads and coal.
Feeding the nation was also a major job for the rail industry from its beginning. America was predominantly agricultural in the days of Andrew Jackson, and the movement of grain, flour, produce, and animals to market made up a sizable portion of the freight business. At first all cargo was shipped in plain boxcars, and for short trips they served quite well. But as the nation expanded westward and the distances between producer and consumer increased, shippers grew discouraged at the deteriorated state of their goods when they reached market. Sickly cattle and spoiled fruit sold poorly.
These problems with livestock were responsible for one of the earliest types of specialized freight cars. The cattle car was an ordinary boxcar with open or slatted sides and ends to increase the supply of fresh air. Regular stops for feed and water also helped keep the beasts looking perky, and sometimes especially fast trains were devoted exclusively to cattle to keep the time they spent in transit to a minimum. By the 188Os so-called humane stock cars came into favor, with builtin feed and water troughs that allowed the animals to eat and drink en route. On long runs drover cars allowed cattlemen to attend to their herds.
Just as the cattle car was nearing perfection, however, it was superseded by a better system: shipping dressed meat in refrigerated cars. These were usually just insulated boxcars with large ice chests at either end, and by 1880 they enabled meat dealers to send only the edible portions of the cattle to Eastern markets. The hides and other inedible parts were processed locally, thus reducing the number of cars needed to ship a given amount of marketable meat. Refrigerator cars made Chicago “hog butcher for the world,” in Carl Sandburg’s famous phrase. The cars solved the problem of spoilage for all sorts of produce as well, allowing fruits and vegetables to travel not just hundreds but thousands of miles without going bad. Thanks to refrigerator cars, California farmers could tap markets an entire continent away.
But the greatest tonnage in food shipments, and the second great staple of rail traffic besides coal, was grain. It faced few of the difficulties of meat or produce; it was not fragile and did not deteriorate quickly. During a good year four hundred million bushels would go to market. Much of it would travel twothirds of the way across the country in long wheat specials, following one an- other each hour around the clock during harvest time. This was the kind of big tonnage railroads liked and could handle efficiently.
The season began in May, when boxcars were gathered in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to handle the winter wheat harvest. Then the cars were shifted to the Northern states to handle the spring wheat that ripened in July and August. These seasonal rushes required railroads to purchase and store a reserve of extra cars that would be in use for only a few months out of the year. Soon the railroads were developing schemes to shift cars from region to region at different times in order to use them as efficiently as possible.
The borrowing and lending of cars between railroads became a hallmark of the North American rail-freight industry. Under this system cars could move freely from one line to the next across the continent and back. Cars might be away from their home road for months or even years. That’s why a typical freight train contained such a mixture of cars from so many different railroads.
Before the interchange of cars began, in 1865, freight was unloaded from the cars of one railroad into the cars of another at terminal points. This costly and inconvenient arrangement was called breaking of bulk, a term that proved unfortunately appropriate because goods often were broken or lost in the process. Allowing a shipment to make its entire journey in the same car, regardless of how many different railroads it traveled on, not only reduced waste but made goods move much faster and eliminated the need for many porters and transfer agents.
In 1867 the Master Car Builders Association was founded to oversee the exchange, repair, and control of borrowed cars. It also set standards for axles, wheels, couplers, and other basic components and established prices for repairs and a depreciation schedule for lost or demolished cars. At first a mileage fee, generally ¾ cents per mile, was paid to the car owner. Thrifty railroads, particularly those in New England, learned to keep borrowed cars on hand for long stretches and use them only when the need arose. Since they paid nothing unless the cars rolled, this was a cheap way to handle occasional surges in demand.
Starting in 1902, a per diem rate replaced the mileage fee, with payment due for each day a car was borrowed regardless of whether it was in use. In general this cooperation between rail- roads worked well, but occasionally cars were lost, so all major railroads had squads of roving detectives known as car tracers. These men scoured the yards, sidings, and branch lines in search of their lost sheep. More accurate record keeping, with considerable help from computers, has made car tracing largely obsolete.
Computer car tracing is just one of the ways that rail freight has changed radically since 1950. Railroads’ share of intercity freight traffic, determined by ton-miles, has slipped from 68 percent in 1946 to 45 percent in 1960 to about 35 percent today. At the same time, total ton-mileage has soared, as the overall transportation market continues to boom. But railroads no longer carry the broad spectrum of goods they did during the golden age. Today they are specialized carriers of bulk products, such as coal, grain, and crushed stone. Consumer goods are being shipped in smaller lots to more places than they were fifty years ago, so the greater flexibility of transportation by truck has almost completely eliminated railroads from the market. Businesses today are more distributors than manufacturers, and small inventories and fast deliveries are critical to their survival. In these areas, despite their great capacity, railroads cannot compete.
To hold on to what traffic they can retain, railroads have scrambled to increase their efficiency. Dieselization was one important factor in reducing staff (see “The Diesel Revolution,” by Maury Klein, Invention & Technology , Winter 1991). The caboose, which once housed a crew to monitor the train and air-brake pressure, has been superseded by an electronic box. Freight cars have kept getting larger too. In the early days the maximum capacity doubled every decade or so until early in this century the forty- or fifty-ton car was developed. Cars stayed that size until around 1960, when seventy- to one-hundred-ton cars began to be seen. The use of aluminum has made cars lighter, thus saving dead weight and reducing wear and tear on tracks, and has eliminated the need to paint the cars.
Railroads are also working with shippers to organize their operations more efficiently. Single-purpose “unit trains” run back and forth between major producers and their customers. Unit trains work particularly well in the electric-power industry, the largest consumer of coal in the nation. Trains consisting of a hundred or more hopper cars can travel as much as 200,000 miles a year, a very high figure for any freight car, by shuttling between coal mines and power plants.
Containerization, which has revolutionized water transportation, may fit railroads as well. Cargo of virtually any sort is packed into standardized aluminum boxes, which can be transferred in minutes between ocean vessels, river barges, railroad cars, and road vehicles. American railroads used versions of container service as far back as the 184Os and made a serious push in the 1920s to adapt their less-thancarload lots for containerization. But as has happened so often with attempted innovations in the railroad business, restrictive rules doomed the effort. The Interstate Commerce Commission would not allow the railroads to charge a flat rate for containerized cargo but insisted on the complex class-rate structure, with different rates depending on what was being shipped. This negated the potential savings for small shippers, who returned to trucks. Nowadays rail container traffic is growing, and although costs are high and earnings are weak, many industry leaders are hopeful about its future.
And after concentrating increasingly on a few commodities, the railroads of today are rediscovering the ability to design special cars and services for specific cargoes. Covered hoppers are equipped with interior panels that use air pressure to discharge loads of loose clay, cement, and plastic pellets from the bottom. Some have fans and ventilating systems, and even refrigerated covered hopper cars have been built in small numbers. Covered hoppers have largely replaced boxcars for the transportation of grain. Automobiles are another example of a cargo that railroads are regaining from road transport. Instead of using slightly modified boxcars, which by mid-century had proved too unwieldy to compete with trucks for moving autos, railroads began in the 1960s to use opensided, multilevel cars designed specially for the purpose. Today more than half of all automobiles and small trucks are delivered by rail.
Despite all these innovations, or re- discoveries if you wish, railroad freight service keeps getting more remote and impersonal. Its importance in the nation’s economic life continues, but the general public has virtually no contact with the industry anymore. The farmer no longer goes to the local freight depot to pick up a delivery of wire fencing, nor does the city dweller send his Christmas presents via railway express. In 1950 the American railroad industry was a broad-gauge business that took pride in carrying everything. Today it has become a narrow, specialized bulk carrier, strictly a wholesale enterprise. Enthusiasts will always fondly remember the days when a long, motley string of variegated cars could carry furniture, wool, machinery, and dozens of other commodities. But the American railroad’s time as a great common carrier has gone forever.
