Day 186: Railroads in the Heartland

During the formative years of the railroad industry, the desire for the iron horse and a grasp of the realities of finance and politics prompted states in the Old Northwest to launch ambitious systems of public works (canals and railroads in particular), unded and built by "the people." But the crippling economic impact of the Panic of 1837, which devastated the region, eventually prompted the sale of state-sponsored railroads to risk-taking capitalists. The time seemed auspicious for private enterprise to open this transportation frontier.   

It would be a combination of individual investors, syndicates, and the continued financial backing from units of government (federal, state, and local) that made possible the completion of the rail network in the Midwest. And it was an impressive accomplishment. At midcentury, Ohio counted 575 miles of railroad; Michigan, 342; Indiana, 228; Illinois, 111; and Wisconsin, 20. Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, however, had none. On the eve of the Civil War, the Ohio mileage, largest in the nation, had soared to 2,946; Illinois, 2,790; Indiana, 2,163; Wisconsin, 905; and Michigan, 779. Even though Minnesota continued to await the iron horse, Iowa's mileage stood at 655, and Missouri's was 817. Expansion continued before and after the Panic of 1873 triggered several years of severe depression and again after the hard times of the 1890s interrupted track laying.   

Sections of the Midwest saw some construction following the return of prosperity with the Spanish-American War and up until World War I. Unlike railroad building on the Great Plains and in parts of the West, which was considerable during the 1920s, by 1917 the railroad map of the Midwest had jelled. Most of the new lines between 1898 and 1917 were feeders, branches primarily created to haul agricultural, lumber, or mineral traffic, although some cut-offs, designed to speed the flow of goods and people, were installed. In 1911 the Interstate Commerce Commission, which Congress created twenty-four years earlier to regulate the rail enterprise in the public interest, made its annual enumeration of the mileage in the Midwest. Illinois ranked in the top position regionally with 11,980 miles (only Texas, with 14,777 miles, could claim a greater intrastate network); Iowa, 9,855; Ohio, 9,128; Michigan, 8,943; Minnesota, 8,931; Missouri, 8,108; Indiana, 7,447; and Wisconsin, 7,399. Such impressive figures were hardly surprising considering these states' economic strengths and population levels.   
The vast natural and human wealth and potential of the Midwest caused it to attract ''smart money." Investments poured into farms, businesses, and factories and continued for decades, interrupted only by the occasional depression and eventually by the "rust bowl" years of the 1970s and 1980s. This growth prompted railroad promoters in the antebellum years to recognize that the iron horse must link more than "inland" communities to a waterway: lake, river, or canal. It did not take long for a broken and scattered pattern of rail lines to give way to what economic historian Alfred D. Chandler has correctly labeled "system building." The thrust of railroading after the Civil War was to fuse together smaller, independent roads into larger, unified ones. A combination of mergers, leases, and stock controls made possible a sophisticated railroad structure. These consolidated roads, flying their own corporate banners, undertook their own programs of line construction.
   
By the dawn of the twentieth century the Midwest could not claim to be the sole place served by affiliated rail systems, often allied with the nation's premier banking and investment houses. Yet a regional review suggests that the East and especially the South still had substantial numbers of small and medium-sized carriers, although even there the loss of corporate independence was accelerating. On the other hand, great railways already dominated the West. The Southern Pacific, for one, had gained "octopus" status in the minds of Californians, owing to its size, economic prowess, and the literary skills of novelist Frank Norris. Again, the Midwest took on more of a balanced, mixed position. Here a combination of systems, notably the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; and Illinois Central; lesser carriers like the Chicago Great Western; Detroit, Toledo & Ironton; Minneapolis & St. Louis; Monon; Pere Marquette; and Wisconsin Central; and a number of autonomous short lines, including the Kalamazoo, Lake Shore & Chicago; La Crosse & Southeastern; and Muscatine North & South, predominated.   

Regional differences did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. In a 1903 interview for a Twin Cities newspaper, A.B. Stickney, the driving force behind the Chicago Great Western, which recently had completed a strategic extension into the Omaha Gateway from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the reporter that "we in the richest farm and factory belt of our country have created a mixture of large and not so large railroads. . . . The Maple Leaf Route [Chicago Great Western] faces the task of continuing to provide the best service to its many loyal patrons in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri where there are so many David and Goliath contests."   

By the turn of the twentieth century the railroad map of the Midwest was unequaled. Anyone who examined it would quickly sense that this was the vital center of America's massive and far-flung network of steel rails. Most striking were those principal east-west arteries the "high-iron" speedways from eastern metropolises to Chicago and St. Louis and the equally significant transcontinental roads or their connectors to western destinations. Moreover, there were other important lines and the many miles of branches and twigs that sprang from the sturdy stems.

~~ Railroads in the Heartland : Steam and Traction in the Golden Age of Postcards -by- H. Roger Grant

Day 137: Book Excerpt: Engines Of Change

Railroads for India were proposed initially in the mid-1830s. Fifteen years of promotion and debate ensued until key decisions in favor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (hereafter GIPR) and the East Indian Railway (hereafter EIR) were made in March 1849. Thus, finally, railroad building in Britain’s largest imperial possession began in 1850. The ceremonial turning of the first sod for the GIPR occurred at Bombay on October 31, 1850. Work on what became the main railroad in Bengal and in the Gangetic Valley, the EIR, began near Calcutta in 1851.

In 1853, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie (in office 1848–1856) laid out a comprehensive plan for the development of the trunk lines. The capable, hard-working, and assertive Dalhousie was a committed technological modernizer. His political responsibilities before he went to India had made him familiar with British railroads. Dalhousie later claimed he had unleashed in India the “great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations—I mean Railways, uniform Postage, and the Electric Telegraph.”

Dalhousie’s influential, lengthy (216 pages handwritten in a sprawling, bold hand) memorandum—a “minute” in the language of the day—deserves close study. It provided justifications and guidelines for the system of railroads that was developed in South Asia under British auspices in the third quarter of the 19th century. The governor-general emphasized the political and military benefits railroads would provide. “Immeasurable” advantages would accrue to a colonial administration composed of a “comparative handful” of British administrators and soldiers scattered over the subcontinent. Railroads would enable Britain “to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible.”

Dalhousie also noted the “commercial and social advantages” of railroads. These advantages included an increase in trade between India and Britain: more Indian “produce,” including raw cotton, would be transported to Britain, and more manufactured British goods would be sold in India. Railroads would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth, and encourage “progress in social improvement” similar to that which occurred in Europe and the United States of America.

The hardheaded Dalhousie stressed the political, military, and economic benefits accruing largely to Britain, to the Anglo-Indian connection, and to the colonial regime. He sought to influence calculating decision makers in London: his political masters, and also potential British investors from whom the bulk of the financing for India’s railroads had to be obtained. Thus, in the 1850s and for many decades, India’s railroads were conceived and executed as a colonial project. British authorities, with little input from Indians, decided when and where lines would be built—and a good deal more. India’s railroads were meant to serve British interests first and foremost, among which military and administrative security and economic benefits were central. The interests of Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth: an assertion accepted then as later by many Indians even though Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj (1921) about the railroads’ contribution to the British control of India. Gandhi, in fact, went further. He denounced railroads as “evil” since “good travels at a snail’s pace.”

Gandhi was a central figure in the Indian struggle for independence from 1919 to his assassination in 1948. His views on railroads, however, were not widely accepted—and he himself used railroads to travel across India in the nationalist cause. Most nationalists’ denunciation of the railroads came to focus on the ways in which the system operated and on the British dominance of the upper echelons of the workforce: railroads per se and their progressive presence were not questioned. More typical of Indian views held in the 1870s (and in the 1970s) were those of Framjee Vicajee who published a forty-four page pamphlet titled Political and Social Effects of Railways in India (1875). The pamphlet praised the many interconnected, progressive changes railroads had set in motion across South Asia, “the great economical and social changes, due partly to railways and partly to other instruments of civilization” through which India was “silently passing.”

~~Engines Of Change: The Railroads That Made India -by- Ian J. Kerr