The Great Railroad Revolution (59 page)

The railroads might have been profitable for the first time in more than a decade, but their safety standards, which, as we have seen, had improved greatly in the interwar period, slipped badly. The heavy use of the railroads for both military and civilian purposes, combined with the lack of investment, inevitably meant that they were being run down, and both punctuality and safety standards were compromised. On a mundane level, the trains were often delayed. This was noticed by the acerbic writer and critic H. L. Mencken, who traveled a couple of times a week between his home in Baltimore and New York and noticed that, for the first time, the trains were not always on time. Nor was the journey as comfortable. The Southern Pacific's timetable warned, “In our dining cars, we are rationed much as you are at home and we can't always get the supplies in our allotment.” That meant just two meals a day were served, breakfast and then dinner, which could be taken anytime after 3:00 p.m., but diners were restricted to just one cup of coffee with their meal. And, of course, they were told “not to discuss what you see on passing trains,” since, as the wartime propaganda posters stressed, careless talk might be overheard by enemy spies.
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Safety, though, was a more serious matter. The most tragic illustration of lax standards was an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad at Frankford Junction, near Philadelphia, on September 6, 1943, when a train bound for New York's Penn Station derailed and hit a signaling gantry, killing seventy-nine passengers. Rumors that the wreck was the result of German sabotage were quickly proved to be groundless as the more believable but embarrassing truth emerged: the accident had been caused by poor maintenance, resulting in an axle-bearing failure. The list of survivors, who included a
newspaper magnate and Lin Yutang, a famous Chinese writer, showed that the railroads were once again the transportation method of preference, indeed necessity, for all classes, since car use was so restricted.

Such disasters notwithstanding, it was, as Richard Saunders Jr. suggests, “the railroads' finest hour.” The railroads regained their place at the heart of the nation's psyche. The most emotional memories of the war for many Americans involved the departure or arrival of trains filled with waving men and long waits in station cafés and on windswept platforms during which they experienced moments of hope and sometimes despair as, all too often, a loved one returned home maimed or, worse, in a wooden box. It was at railroad stations that “people said goodbyes to husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters, trying to be brave but hugging them harder than they ever hugged them before.” The Second World War marked the last time that the railroads could truly be said to be at the heart of American life. As George Douglas puts it, “World War Two was a last hurrah for the railways.”
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The decline of the US railroads after 1945 was at first so gradual that it was almost imperceptible. Instead of the expected postwar downturn in the economy, there was a boom, and railroads always do well when the economy is flourishing. The successful economy, however, only served to offset the underlying difficulties of the railroads and, in a way, by enabling more people to buy cars, exacerbated them. It was the passenger business that suffered worst initially, but later whole categories of freight also began to leach away at a frightening rate. The railroads had come out of the Second World War imbued with a sense of optimism. Not only had they regained the respect of the public, but they thought they would retain a vital role in the provision of passenger travel in the postwar period. They looked back on the success of the prestige diesel trains of the 1930s and thought that by just continuing to improve the service and speed up the timetable, they would retain a sizable proportion of the market.

The widespread conversion to diesel locomotives did indeed give the railroads a new lease on life, both by making the operation of services cheaper and by making journeys quicker and more pleasant. Diesel proved more popular than electrification, since it did not require massive new investment in the infrastructure. Once the higher price of the engines was
covered—around twice the cost per horsepower—the savings in operating costs were considerable, since the diesels' greater efficiency meant they provided at least three times as much mileage from the same amount of fuel. Diesel locomotives, too, could be operated in twos or threes with just one engineer. Given that there was nothing left for the “fireman” to do, the savings would have been even greater had the railroad companies' management tackled the unions' insistence on retaining double manning of the locomotives. In fact, when the early Burlington Zephyrs had started running, there was only one driver in the cab, but in 1937 the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen decided to oppose this change strenuously. At the time, against the background of the Depression and the need for jobs, the public sided with the firemen, but according to Saunders, this was a crucial missed opportunity for the railroads: “The railroads themselves had little idea how important diesel was going to be. Steam men, who dominated railroad mechanical departments, assumed that the diesel's use would be limited to certain kinds of passenger trains and gimmicky ones at that.”
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Although trying to retain firemen on diesels was ultimately indefensible, the unions had a good case in respect to their overall working conditions. The engineers were still expected to be on call at all times, with no extra pay, and be ready to drive a train safely for up to sixteen hours at a moment's notice. However, it was the issue of the firemen that came to a head in the late 1950s. North of the border, the Canadian Pacific had challenged the unions over double manning, and, after a brief strike, a royal commission was established that found in favor of the railroads. The two main railroads, the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National, were allowed to stop hiring firemen, and several American companies wanted to follow suit. The unions were having none of it, however, and, as in Canada, a commission was established by the federal government to decide on the issue. It was headed by federal judge Simon Rifkind who, in his five-hundred-page report, produced “a reasoned set of recommendations that actually would have meant higher wages for most rail employees but at honest jobs of productive work.” No new firemen would be hired, and, in part, the rigid structure of demarcations would have been broken. For the unions, though, these proposed measures were unpalatable, and they
took the issue to court. Eventually, in April 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened and managed to convince the unions to postpone a threatened strike for two weeks. Johnson then summoned all the parties to the White House and showed them to the Cabinet Room, where they embarked on a marathon negotiating session—the equivalent of beer and sandwiches at No. 10 Downing Street, which in the 1960s and 1970s was the method of dealing with the unions preferred by the British prime minister, Harold Wilson. Eventually, the unions agreed to an end to the hiring of firemen, provided the existing ones would be allowed to continue working until they retired or left the industry. Nothing better illustrates the continued importance of the railroads as late as 1964 than the fact that the results of the successful negotiation were announced by a jubilant President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was so eager to inform the nation that he rushed to CBS's studios in a motorcade rather than wait for the cameras to come to the White House: “This settlement ends four and a half years of controversy. I tell you quite frankly there are few events that give me more faith in my country and more pride in the free collective bargaining process.”
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The fact that this statement came from a president from Texas shows the extent to which it is not only the role of the railroads that has changed in the intervening half century, as one could hardly imagine that more recent Texas president, George W. Bush, sorting out either the railroads or the unions.

The double-manning issue had, in fact, not really been resolved and would continue to burden the railroads with unnecessary expense for many years, since the deal announced by Johnson covered only three years and the unions were soon, once again, pressing for firemen to be retained. They were eventually phased out completely, though even today there is still an engineer and a conductor, who without a caboose now rides in the front, on every freight train. The conductor, in fact, still has a role, as there are many points in remote places that need to be operated manually or occasions where reversing movements are required. Even while firemen were retained, however, converting to diesel was still worthwhile for the railroads, since the plethora of cleaners and maintenance staff required to repair and run steam locomotives was no longer needed. Moreover, diesels could be used constantly, running 1,000 miles or more without needing
any attention, whereas steam locomotives not only needed to be cleaned after every long trip, but also required hours to be fired up. Whereas a steam locomotive could be in productive use for around 150,000 miles a year at most, the best diesels could be used for almost double that mileage. One small detail encapsulates the extent of the savings from the shift to diesel: steam engines, as their name implies, need vast quantities of water, and when they were finally phased out, the railroads were able to dispense with the staggering amount of $50 million worth of water-supply equipment.

Nevertheless, the steam locomotive manufacturers tried to resist the inevitable. Even into the 1950s, bigger and better steam locomotives were being produced by the major manufacturers like Baldwin, but by 1960, all the main railroads had abandoned steam.
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Once under way, the dieselization process was remarkably fast. Whereas at the end of the war, three-quarters of freight was still hauled by steam, by 1959 it was less than 1 percent. Diesel locomotives saved, at least temporarily, countless branch lines from closure, not only because they were cheaper to operate but also because, as they were lighter than steam engines, the track required less maintenance. The heavier and more powerful steam locomotives that had become standard on the main lines could not venture onto smaller branches as railroads cut back on maintenance to save money, and therefore it was the use of lighter diesel engines that extended the life of services on these lines. The introduction of diesel locomotives, therefore, together with other money-saving measures, notably cutbacks in passenger services, gave the railroad companies a final bit of breathing space, enabling productivity per employee to double between 1940 and 1960.

On the passenger side, improvements were still being made to the prestige passenger services in the immediate postwar period. Now “vista-domes” were added to the streamliners, special coaches with a glass-roofed upper deck that gave passengers an unparalleled panoramic view of the passing scenery. The ultimate development came in the early 1950s with “super-domes,” with bigger and better viewing points, used by several railroads, principally on the long scenic trips through the Rockies and the western deserts. In order to attract leisure passengers, timetables were adjusted so that the train went through the most picturesque areas in daylight. The Baltimore & Ohio experimented with flashing a spotlight into the
wilderness during nighttime hours to give the passengers in the upper deck something to see, but this daft idea was soon abandoned. A stranger—even rather surreal—experience could be had on the California Zephyr, where the coaches with their passengers on board were routinely put through a car washer to ensure that the windows were clean so that passengers could enjoy the view unrestricted by dirt.

These domeliners represented the apogee of train travel, making the journey itself fun, and stimulated the response of the airlines, who felt it was essential to provide similar levels of service. The first domeliner was introduced by that pioneering railroad man Ralph Budd of the Burlington, and soon about a dozen major American railroads were using them to attract passengers. The Great Northern's Empire Builder was the “supreme example” of the concept, according to Geoffrey Freeman Allen, as the railroad repeatedly spent millions of dollars on providing ever more luxurious train sets: “[On the]
Empire Builder
, the upper floor of the ‘Super-Dome' seated 74 on settees angled towards the side-windows for comfortable viewing: the lower floor housed an enticing 35-seater lounge bar and writing room; an electrically powered dumb waiter made it simple to hoist drinks and snacks from the bar to passengers relaxing in the air- conditioned solarium above.”
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On the Twin Cities Hiawatha, drinkers in the “Tip-Top-Tap” lounge were advised of the next stop, as the name was illuminated on a display below the clock, whereas on the Santa Fe's Super Chief, passengers were kept up to date with news bulletins and stock reports and could write letters on special letterhead. And so on.

But it could not last. It was to prove a short-lived fad, an all too brief swan song for the railroads. For a while these trains made money, as they were frequently full and commanded premium fares, but the economics ultimately weighed against them. The airlines were gathering like paparazzi around a starlet, and their planes were becoming more efficient, faster, and bigger. Whereas a DC-3, still the workhorse of the skies in the late 1940s, could accommodate only 21 passengers and make four round-trips to the railroads' one, a decade or so later the Boeing 707 was carrying 176 and was able to make eight round-trips in the time it took a train to trundle across America's vastness. The choice between traveling overnight on a train from, say, New York to Chicago or hopping on a jet became a no-brainer, especially as airline fares plummeted.

With the rapid loss of their passenger market to the airlines in the 1960s, the railroads soon found the cost of providing an upmarket service on their long-distance services was unsustainable. Yet cutting out the creature comforts merely accelerated the decline in passenger numbers. To look after a maximum load of 323 passengers scattered royally in fifteen expensive cars, the Empire Builder required 25 service staff in addition to the locomotive crews and the conductor. Worse, under a national agreement with the unions dating back to the 1920s, locomotive staff were paid on a mileage basis, with a mere 100 miles constituting a full day's pay, whereas for the conductor and other on-board staff, it was 150 miles. These rules, drawn up when trains were far slower, proved crippling for the industry, but the unions steadfastly refused to recognize them as obsolete. It meant, for example, “it took eight crews to forward the
Burlington Zephyr
the 1,034 miles between Denver and Chicago, a feat done in 16.5 hours.”
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In other words, each crew member was receiving a full day's pay for a little more than two hours' work. Many staff had the choice of either collecting multiple wages for a day's work or simply performing a very short shift. It was easy money, but it was contributing to the death of America's passenger railroad.