The Great Railroad Revolution (16 page)

American informality was clearly not to his liking, either, and worse was Americans' habit, mentioned in the previous chapter, of chewing tobacco and spitting the remnants on the floor. Another, more sympathetic, English writer, Fanny Kemble, an actress who loved the nascent railroads—she was taken on a train by George Stephenson before the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester in 1830—found “a whole tribe of itinerant fruit and cake-sellers” offering their wares at every major station, as well as water boys who passed through the train with a long-spout can and glasses for the benefit of thirsty travelers, unconcerned with the lack of hygiene;
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such a service can still be found on some trains in India today. Journeys were enlivened, too, by the news agent, often fondly referred to as the “news butcher” or even “news butch.” In the early days, these were self-employed young men who had realized that passengers on long train journeys would welcome reading material, as well as drinks and snacks. They would pass through the trains offering the day's paper, magazines, sweets, soda pop, and cigarettes. Later, the individual entrepreneurs were subsumed into the gigantic Union News Company, which was given a monopoly by many train companies in an effort to deter peddlers on the trains. The “butchers”—invariably enthusiastic young men, dressed in the smart blue uniform with brass buttons of the company—would, in a falsetto voice, scramble their various wares into one
word:
candycigarettescigars
or
newspapermagazines.
As time went on, they expanded their offerings. Whereas officially they were allowed to sell only respectable magazines such as
Harper's
and
Scribner's
, many privately supplied penny dreadfuls or even slightly titillating magazines that would have passed as the
Playboy
of the day. Traveling much later through America by train, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson was impressed by the young men providing the service and amazed that one could buy “soap, towels, tin washing basins, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon.”
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The butchers were not always benign, however. Short-changing drunks and elderly passengers and selling bogus goods were frequent rackets, as was the scam of offering cheaply bound novels for twice the normal price of twenty-five cents on the basis that one of them supposedly had a ten-dollar note inside.

In the winter, heating was a universal problem on the early trains. Dickens found that most cars were provided with a stove in the middle. This not only filled the air with what he called “the ghost of smoke” but also meant that those sitting near it became overheated, while those at the far ends of the car simultaneously froze. The stoves were a hazard, too, in the event of accidents, becoming “the cause of cremation” in later years when derailments and other disasters became ever more frequent.
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In the heat of summer, the dilemma for passengers was that opening the windows, if they afforded such a facility, risked the perils of sparks from the chimney setting clothes on fire, while keeping them closed meant virtual asphyxiation in the hotter parts of the nation. Indeed, cinders from the soft coal used in the United States not infrequently wrecked the clothes of passengers in uncovered wagons or those unwise enough to open the windows in more modern ones. One prominent and infuriated victim was the visiting English social reformer and abolitionist Harriet Martineau, who reported that sparks had burned no fewer than thirteen holes in her gown during a short journey in the South.

In glorious overwritten prose, Dickens bemoans the lack of views, the discomforts, the noise, the smells, and the bumpy ride caused by the primitive couplings between cars:

There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell. . . . Except
when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours. . . . Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and schoolhouse; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water.

He was flabbergasted by the scarcity of people at the intermediate stations, even on a journey close to a major city like Boston, and the fact that the train ran down several main streets, which was rarely the case in Britain apart from on small branch lines:

The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted “When The Bell Rings, Look Out For The Locomotive.” On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on hap-hazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road . . . on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.

While Dickens's description does not suggest it, the Boston & Lowell was, in fact, one of America's better-appointed railroads at the time. Other lines were far more primitive. The empty woodland stations Dickens describes were better than the halts found on many other lines that had no facilities whatsoever and where, to stop the train, the local farmer would have to wave his shirt at the approaching locomotive. In towns, trains would stop on a particular corner, or the railroad company might have rented a small shop to sell tickets and provide a few lucky waiting passengers with some shelter from the elements. Even more so than on European railroads, stations were an afterthought for the parsimonious rail companies, who found it tough enough dealing with all the engineering problems such as track, tunnels, and ties without having to consider providing for the wretched passengers. So American stations were termed
depots
, based on the French word
dépôt
, a place not so much to offer services to the passenger but, rather, to deposit goods or people with a minimum of fuss. These depots were modest, and the most common structure was a wooden barn through which the train passed as if in a tunnel. Not surprisingly, since they were made of wood, destruction by fire was an all too frequent hazard, a fate suffered by the East Boston depot of Massachusetts's Eastern Railroad on the very day the railroad opened in 1836. A few depots were fitted with doors at either end of the tracks to retain a measure of warmth in the adjoining waiting rooms, but this created an additional hazard, as locomotives occasionally crashed through them to the horror of the waiting passengers. Right from the beginning, depots began to provide food for passengers (a necessity given the increasing length of the journeys being undertaken), but it was rarely wholesome. Hapless travelers who consumed these prepared meals during a lunchtime stop at a depot often complained of indigestion, possibly caused by having to bolt down their food to ensure they could regain their seats, which generally could not be reserved. Station facilities taken for granted by rail travelers today, such as signs displaying the name of the station and warnings to advise passengers of an imminent departure, took many years to be introduced. Indeed, many railroad companies seemed reluctant to stop for passengers or provide them with even the most basic facilities. In New Hampshire, for example, the state had to legislate in 1850 to compel the railroad companies to provide depots for passengers at
every stop. Other states tried to ensure that passengers were provided with information about services—timetables—so that they did not have to wait interminably at stations. As historian Sarah H. Gordon comments, “That the state had to require railroads to arrive and depart on schedule, to provide reasonable accommodation, and to build passenger depots implies a notably lackadaisical approach by railroad corporations to the social aspects of rail service.”
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In charge of the depot was the station agent, a ubiquitous and increasingly important figure in the railroads, who, in European terms, was a combination of stationmaster, ticket clerk, and train dispatcher. He was the public face of the railroad company, and, not surprisingly, he did not always manage to juggle his many tasks to the satisfaction of passengers. His first problem was that, until the advent of the telegraph, he had no information about when a train was likely to arrive. Timetables were vague or nonexistent, and given the frequency of breakdowns, his only means of finding out if a train was approaching was to climb up to his lookout point. The agent was also in charge of selling tickets, but from the outset American railroads departed from the European practice of booking passengers in advance and only allowing people with tickets to board trains. Given the number of small, remote stations described by Dickens, that would have been utterly impractical. Instead, some passengers bought tickets from the station agents, whereas others paid the conductor, and it took some time for the railroads to work out ways of preventing fraud by both passengers and employees, which was prevalent. Early tickets came in various forms, ranging from metal discs to glazed colored pieces of cardboard. Numbered tickets were the obvious solution, but they did not become widely used until the mid-1850s and still did not prevent the conductor from simply pocketing the cash without issuing any kind of receipt, perhaps sharing the profit with the traveler, a scam known as “knocking off” that the companies attempted, often in vain, to stymie throughout the history of passenger rail in the United States.

The conductor, called the captain in early days, also had a variety of jobs to do, as nicely described by George Douglas: “The conductor took tickets, sold passage to those who boarded the train without tickets, supervised the other trainmen, settled arguments, disciplined unruly children
and admonished inebriated passengers.” The task of keeping passengers in check was not always straightforward. Trains were the first form of mass transportation, other than shipping, and people did not necessarily know how to behave. In the words of Sarah H. Gordon, “Passenger behavior ranged far from the traditional image of waiting quietly at the station, boarding the train when it stopped, and remaining seated throughout the journey.”
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Indeed. During the first two decades of the railroad age, when trains ran slowly—and infrequently—people would hop on freight wagons, ride in the caboose (the brake van) and the locomotive, or—tunnels being infrequent—sit on top of the cars. Passengers jumped on and off the trains at any point that took their fancy. During the numerous stops for breakdowns or to replenish the supply of wood or water, they wandered off into the countryside, either for the hell of it or to satisfy their bodily functions, since there were no toilets on board, sometimes finding themselves stranded when the train resumed its journey. Many careless souls perished, too, not understanding the unforgiving nature of tens of tons of rapidly moving metal.

Inside, they would sit with legs or arms dangling out of the windows, spit (as Dickens noted), get drunk, abuse the conductor, and try to travel without paying. It took some time for the railroad companies to obtain the legal powers to be able to deal with misbehaving passengers. The states had to pass specific laws to allow railroad companies to throw passengers off the train for not paying the fare and even to give conductors the legal right to collect tickets.

Conductors were seen by the railroads as representing the public face of the company to their customers. The cannier companies, therefore, recruited men with strong personalities, but who were also able to empathize with the passengers and help them cope with the inconveniences of rail travel. Conductors would often work the same trains week in and week out, thereby establishing relationships with the regular travelers and becoming well known throughout their route. At first, the driver took responsibility for the train and the welfare of the passengers, but it soon became obvious that the conductor was better placed to do so. According to railroad legend, it was the doyen of the early conductors, Henry—or “Poppy” as he was generally known—Ayres who changed this practice. Ayres, a “huge, genial
teddy bear of a man, weighing nearly three hundred pounds . . . [who] hovered over his passengers with benevolent menace,” joined the uncompleted Erie in 1841.
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Shortly after he started working for the Erie, Ayres had a row with an engineer (driver), a German named Hamel, which is said to have established the future hierarchy on the trains. As there was no way of communicating with the driver, Ayres had rigged up a crude rope device, a kind of primitive forerunner of the emergency cord that would later become standard, to alert the driver if he wanted the train to stop. Hamel, a cussed character, refused to play ball and kept on cutting the rope. On the second occasion, Ayres threatened to beat up his hapless colleague unless he acquiesced in the arrangement, thereby ensuring that in the future, the conductor would be in charge of the train. To his passengers, however, Ayres was politeness personified. He remained with the Erie for thirty years, achieving fame and public recognition for the excellence of the service he gave to both his passengers and his employers. Ayres once persuaded an old lady who had left her umbrella, a precious family heirloom, on a connecting ferryboat that he had arranged for it to be sent via the telegraph system— an invention of mystery in the 1850s—to the next station. He knew, in fact, that lost items were generally dumped in the baggage car, but he was nonetheless rewarded for his pains with a rather undeserved kiss.