The History of the American Railroad with Albert Churella

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. Thanks to a generous grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, we’re creating an AMSEcast series focused on 250 years of American innovation in honor of our nation’s upcoming semi-quincentennial.

0:51 To help us do that, we’re joined in this episode by Dr. Albert Churella. With his MA and PhD from the Ohio State University, Albert is a professor at Kennesaw State University, where his research focus has been on transportation history and policy, with an emphasis on the topic we’re going to discuss today: railroads. So, Albert, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Well, thank you, Alan. It’s great to talk to you today. I love railroads. I remember growing up on a farm in Kentucky, but going into town, and it was always a big deal when the train went through town. So I’m, from an early age, the kid who would wait for the caboose to go by, and I was always very excited [laugh] by it. But now, as I’ve learned more about the importance of railroads in our economy today and certainly in our history and the technological advances behind them, I’m more and more enthralled with them.

1:40 You know, I know that I put this in my questions to you, and I understand it’s a difficult question, but when was the first train in operation in the US? Or do we know generally when the first train was in operation in the US, and where was that? I suppose the answer to that question depends on how you define the term railroad. At its most basic level, a railroad is simply a wheeled vehicle operating on a fixed guideway, and we have examples of that in Europe going back to the 16th century. And here in North America, even in the very late colonial period, there were a few examples of, kind of, what we would call today tramways propelled by humans or by horses. And certainly by the very, very late-18th century, there were several examples of tramways in the new United States.

2:27 But really, I think it’s the year 1825 that’s really critically important because that was when the Stockton and Darlington railway opened in Great Britain, almost exactly 200 years ago, actually, September of 1825. And the Stockton and Darlington pioneered a lot of the elements of what we would call a true railway. It had a corporate charter, it carried freight and passengers, it had steam locomotives for power rather than human beings or horses, it operated under a set of rules and timetables. And the Stockton and Darlington attracted worldwide attention, particularly in the United States, an area where there were vast distances that were, to say the least, badly served by overland transportation.

3:14 And there was an ongoing debate between proponents of canals, the kind of proven technology, and those who supported the brand new and largely untested technology of railroads. And so, people went from the United States to Great Britain and to the continent of Europe to examine what people there were doing and to bring back ideas. So, as far as the first, I suppose, proper railroad in the United States, it’s a contested claim, but it might be the Granite Railway in Quincy, Massachusetts, which opened in 1826, just a year after the Stockton and Darlington. And it attracted a lot of attention, in part because it was so close to Boston, and people could get out there and see it, and in part because it pioneered a lot of the elements of a true railway, like track switches and so on, even though it didn’t initially use steam locomotives.

4:04 Same year—1826—chartered, but took a while to get built, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which was short. It later became part of the New York Central. But designed to allow passengers to quickly bypass the very long and time-consuming set of locks leading from the Hudson River up to the, kind of, eastern end of the Erie Canal. And it was the first railroad designed from the beginning to use steam locomotives as power. And after that, there were a whole series of railroads that opened up, kind of in the anthracite country of northeastern Pennsylvania, taking coal from the mines, often by gravity, using gravity to kind of propel the loaded coal wagons down to the nearest canal and then using, sometimes horses, but increasingly locomotives, to drag the empty coal cars back up to the mines Again.

4:55 The Delaware and Hudson Canal Company had a railroad. It wasn’t the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. It was the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company that used a railroad. And it employed, very briefly, the Stourbridge Lion, which was really the first steam locomotive to operate in the United States. And then things are happening very quickly. I mean, the Camden and Amboy begins operating in New Jersey in 1832, connecting the north and south rivers, that is the Hudson in New York Bay, with the Delaware River near Philadelphia. In 1829, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company established—and again, note the name.

5:36 They’re hedging their bets here. So, they could build a railroad, they could build a canal, they’re going to try to see which one works the best. And by 1833 it was in full operation. At 133 miles, it was the longest railroad in the world at that time. So, even though the British kind of invent the modern railway, very quickly, Americans adopt it as their own and sort of go past, in some respects, what the British were able to do. They operated the Best Friend of Charleston, which memorably was the first steam locomotive to blow itself to pieces in the United States. And by the middle of the 1830s—I mean, very quickly—it was clear that railroads, not canals, were the transportation wave of the future.

6:19 What about the locomotive itself, the steam locomotive? Is that something that we adapted or took wholesale from the Brits? I think adapted is a much better term than adopted wholesale. There certainly is a process that historians of technology call technology transfer, that is taking elements of a technology from one place, in this case, Great Britain, and bringing it to another place like the United States. But there’s a big difference. And almost always when there’s technology transfer, it’s not seamless. It’s not like picking up something in one place and just plopping it down somewhere else and turning it on and letting it go because every environment is different in terms of geography, population characteristics, government regulations, financial instruments, all those kind of things, and that was certainly true with locomotives.

7:09 In Britain, there’s a pretty high population density, and there are a lot of, kind of, densely populated areas that are already connected by an extensive canal network. And so, when railways are laid over top of that existing canal network, they tend to be built to a very high standard: low grades, broad curves, tunnels, stone viaducts. I mean, they’re built to last from the very beginning. Double tracks, typically, to handle the expected freight. And they cover relatively short distances. I mean, if you lay a map of, say, the British Midlands over the United States, you see how small of an area that is compared to what people in the US were dealing with.

7:55 In the United States, there’s a shortage of labor, especially skilled labor, like masons and tunnel workers and so on, and a shortage of capital. Railroads are serving very sparsely populated areas, in some cases, what Americans call the wilderness. Of course, it wasn’t a wilderness. It was inhabited by indigenous people, and so on, but they see it, at the time, that way. There’s a push to get things up and running very quickly and very inexpensively, and what that means is build it cheap and then fix the problems later. So, initial American railroad lines are often single track, they have sharp curves, steep grades, they go over the mountains instead of through them, they have wooden trestles instead of stone viaducts.

8:43 I mean, there are exceptions, of course, but that was fairly typical. And then the thought was, once they begin making money and once they attract settlement and business, then you go back and upgrade and fix the problems. And so, that right there meant that Americans could not simply use the same locomotives that the British used. They tried. The Stourbridge Lion that operated on the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company’s railroad, widely celebrated as the first steam locomotive to operate in the US. It ran basically once, and was then proven to be too heavy for the track. It would have been fine in Great Britain, but it simply would not have worked in the American context.

9:24 The Camden and Amboy in New Jersey had better success with the John Bull, which, needless to say, was a British import, like the Stourbridge line. I mean, the name says it all. It arrived disassembled, packed in crates with neither blueprints nor instructions. And the Camden and Amboy’s mechanic, Isaac Dripps, who had, I should point out, never seen a steam locomotive before, Had only a conceptual idea of how it’s supposed to work, you know, he’s unpacking all these crates and looking at all these parts. He put the thing together. It worked. It worked, actually, fairly well, but he soon concluded that the John Bull needed modifications to make it suitable for American conditions. So, it’s a tender to carry fuel and water, a pilot, which we often call a cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive to kind of knock obstructions off the track.

10:13 And you know, again, these are unfenced right-of-ways, so the number of derailments caused by collisions with cows in the early days is really quite astonishingly high. A pony truck or pilot truck to guide the locomotive through sharp curves. And very soon, the John Bull and other locomotives began taking on a distinctively American shape. And in the 1830s, ’40s, ’50s, I mean Americans at that time, I think were a generation of tinkerers, experimenters, people who figured things out kind of in an ad hoc way, by just, like, putting pieces and parts together and seeing what worked and seeing what didn’t. And so, master mechanics at the steam locomotive builders and also in railroad shops, you know, they were overcoming problems—what historians of technology call reverse salience, that is, an impediment to the efficient use of the technology—and they were adding parts and deleting parts and changing things around.

11:13 And by the 1850s and well before the Civil War, there is a distinctly American style of locomotive. In fact, it’s called the American locomotive, the 4-4-0. So, that is a pilot truck with four wheels, two axles. There are four driving wheels on two axles, very rugged, very dependable, sprung, which means that it could accommodate undulations in the track, suitable for freight or passenger service, and it really became a sort of kind of dominant design in the United States. And over the decades that followed, especially after the Civil War, American locomotives grew much bigger and more powerful than their British counterparts.

11:54 You know, one problem the British had was very restrictive clearances. So, tracks were spaced closely together, the tunnels, the bridges, the profile was pretty small, and so American locomotives were massive. They became huge. In fact, by the 20th century, the Union Pacific Big Boy locomotive had a fire box for burning coal that was roughly the size of a two car garage in a suburban home today. I mean, these are gigantic locomotives, necessary to handle heavy freight trains and to cope with everything and the conditions that didn’t exist in Great Britain, like the crossing of the Rockies, Sierra Nevadas, the Appalachians, huge snow drifts, the brutally hot temperatures of the Southwest, you know, all these kinds of things.

12:41 And I’ll finish here by saying, in 1890, when there’s a rivalry, kind of a friendly rivalry, between the Americans and the British in terms of who had the, you know, the best locomotive design, in 1890 the editor of a railroad trade journal in the United States said that, and I quote, “Some of our English readers do not seem to appreciate the capacity of our locomotives on hauling heavy trains,” end quote. And he criticized British railroaders, who—again quoting—“Whose opinions are not based on American experience or conditions anything like those which obtain here.” So, this is a pretty clear realization that the United States is, in a lot of respects, very different and the locomotive technology that developed initially in Great Britain has been reimagined and reconceptualized and transformed into something extraordinarily new and different in the United States.

13:38 All I could think, Albert, when you talked about Mr. Dripps and opening that locomotive and trying to put it together without blueprints, is my experience always is, I would have several pieces left over at the end. I don’t know if he did or not, [laugh] but that would be beyond me, obviously, to try that. If he did have parts left over, he didn’t tell anybody about it. He was actually a steamboat mechanic originally, and he was working, you know, very, very close to both New York Bay and into the Delaware River. And it’s possible a few things wound up in the river by the time it was done. [laugh] . But it worked. I mean, it worked in the end. It worked. That’s all that mattered. That’s right. And am I correct, I think I read that two American innovations that were added were the coupler and the air brake.

14:19 Is that correct? Absolutely, yes. And the automatic coupler, the knuckle coupler, as it’s often called, and the air brake rank among the most important innovations and safety innovations, not just in the history of American railroads, but in American history, or, I guess, even world history in general, if you calculate them on the basis of the number of lives saved and the number of serious injuries that have been prevented. You got to remember that in the 1850s, ’60s, ’70s, even into the 1880s and ’90s, American railroads were extraordinarily dangerous places to work.

15:00 Casualty rates were far higher than they were for soldiers in combat in the Civil War. And what that meant was that if somebody began working for the railroad in the late teens, and they can anticipate maybe a 50 year—40 or 50 year—career, on average, they stood a one in four chance of being killed on the job, and had a 50/50 chance of suffering a serious injury. Now, those figures are misleading because that’s at a given time. Obviously, over 50 years, safety conditions improved, so the dangers that people faced at age 18 were not the same ones they faced when they were in their 50s or even into their 60s, but you get a sense of how dangerous railroads were.

15:46 And most of the people who were injured or killed had problems in what are often called small accidents. They died one or two at a time. They fell off the train, they were crushed between cars, they slipped and bashed their head open, the boiler blew up, they were scalded to death by the steam. In fact, that was even a common line in obituaries: “Enginemen so-and-so scalded to death by the steam,” which must be a particularly horrible way to die, especially given that it was not instantaneous. People could linger in agony for even several days before they succumb to their injuries. And there was pretty much an equal number of casualties—deaths and injuries—to non-railroaders, to passengers who were killed getting on and off trains, and to a large group of what railroaders variously referred to as trespassers, tramps, hobos, ne’er-do-wells, whatever, you know, people who were on the railroad right-of-away or hitching rides on trains and died as a result.

16:50 Yet the news media tended to focus on big disasters, horrible crashes of passenger trains that killed 40 or 50 people. And that’s true today. I mean, I’ve talked to people who say, “I’m not going to fly. It’s too dangerous. I saw what they showed on the TV about that plane crash and everybody died. I’m going to drive.” Ignoring the fact that, statistically, automobile travel is vastly, vastly more dangerous than commercial aviation. And so, something similar was going on in the, kind of, mid to late-1800s, and railroaders then—and now—are sensitive to public relations, right? I mean, nobody wants to be the lead story in a newspaper with, “New York Central train goes through bridge; dozens die.” I mean, this is… not good.

17:39 So, they responded by reassuring passengers that passenger train travel was safe because they were going to put air brakes and automatic couplers onto their passenger equipment. Why passenger equipment? Well, because passenger consists—that is collections of cars—they kind of stayed together. They weren’t shuffled around like freight cars and they typically stayed on one railroad. So, if a railroad bought a passenger car, paid for it, and bore the expense of adding air brakes and automatic couplers, then they could be sure that no other railroad was going to, kind of, borrow that car and use it without paying for it.

18:23 So, the question then became, okay, what kind of brakes? What kind of couplers? And as you might expect, there were numerous more or less simultaneous innovations. There were lots of competing designs for brake systems, air brakes, vacuum brakes, and for different kinds of automatic coupling systems. Now, the two that we’re familiar with—because they often say history is written by the winners—the two that we’re familiar with because they won out in the end are the air brake system that George Westinghouse patented in 1869 and the knuckle coupler, or it’s often called the Janney coupler, that Eli Janney patented in 1873.

19:08 So again, there were lots and lots of other choices here. Now, there are a couple of problems that face the railroads. I mean, passenger equipment, that’s pretty straightforward. You put all this stuff on, you tell your passengers, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to die because we’re committed to your safety.” Now, freight equipment is more difficult because, quite frankly, the traveling public, they’re sad if a railroad worker dies in the job, but it’s not going to keep them from traveling by train or boycotting the railroad, so there’s less of an incentive. And the scale of the problem is bigger. There are many, many times more freight cars than there are passenger cars, and what’s worse, from the railroads perspective, is that they travel all over the country because there are hundreds of different independent railroad companies.

20:01 And so, executives on one railroad are going to say, “Look, let me get this straight. We’re going to spend a huge amount of money equipping all of our freight cars with air brakes and automatic couplers, and then we’re going to interchange those cars with some other railroad, and that railroad is going to just sort of use them for a while before they return them. And they’re going to take advantage of our capital investment, and they got no skin in the game.” And the other problem is, these are integrated systems. I mean, as you can imagine, with air brakes, the whole train, every car on the train, has to be equipped with air brakes. If even one car in the middle of the train doesn’t have an air brake system, then none of it works.

20:44 As a stop gap measure, some railroads began to assemble trains in freight yards with the freight cars that had air brakes on the front close to locomotive, and those that didn’t have air brakes toward the back, which of course, took time and made operations much more inefficient because railroad workers had to sort out the air brake cars from the non-air brake cars and put them in the train. And then the train goes off, and it goes down the track, and the engineer sees an obstruction, some problem, dump the air, apply the air brakes. That’s great. So, the front of the train stops because of the air brakes, but the cars in the rear don’t have air brakes.

21:26 It takes time for brakemen to walk over the tops of the cars and apply the hand brakes. This is where momentum comes in. And so, the momentum of those cars then smash into the cars in front of them that are already stopped, and the train derails. And so ironically, the device that is designed to make railroads safer, in the interim, is making them more dangerous by causing accidents or making accidents worse. So, there are all sorts of reasons why railroads are kind of reluctant to bear the capital expense of installing air brakes or couplers. And so, you might say, well, where’s the government in all this? Doesn’t the government have some kind of responsibility for protecting workers and passengers by regulating safety?

22:12 Well, of course, this is early days. This is before the government began to really take on an active role in policing such things, but there was government involvement, not so much at the federal level, but at the state level. A lot of pressure from passengers, from railroad workers, from people who just were kind of horrified at the death and injury toll, they put pressure on state legislatures to pass safety legislation mandating air brakes, automatic couplers, those kind of things. Well, that’s great, but here’s the problem, remember what I said before about numerous competing systems that are incompatible with each other.

22:55 So, imagine that Ohio mandates one type of air brake system and one type of automatic coupler, and Indiana mandates a completely different type of air brake system and a completely different type of automatic coupler. What do you do? Do you stop your train at the state line and transfer all the cargo from one set of cars to another set of cars? That can’t happen. And when railroad executives realized this was going on, they were horrified and they said, “Ah, but there’s the Commerce Clause the constitution that gives the federal government the right to regulate commerce between or among the various states. That’s our salvation. So, what we need to do is go to the feds, to go to the national level and get Congress to adopt national safety legislation that overrides what the states are doing.” And so, this is an interesting thing about the history of regulation and the history of business government relations, that oftentimes it is the company being regulated that asks Congress to implement regulation, and in the process, kind of tells Congress what kind of regulation to implement.

24:07 And so, you say, but then, if that’s the case, why do we even need Congress to step in? Why don’t we let the railroads, you know, do the right thing? And the answer has to do with what business historian Thomas McCraw calls the gun behind the door. And you don’t have to see the gun to be afraid of it, to take action to avoid it, and that’s true here. Railroad executives knew that if they weren’t proactive, if they didn’t get ahead of the game, if they didn’t ask Congress to implement national regulation, then Congress was going to come down on them like a ton of bricks, and they would wind up with regulation that they found utterly unacceptable. So, how does this play out in practice?

24:48 Well, the Master Car Builders’ Association and other trade associations of engineers—I don’t mean locomotive engineers; I mean, like, mechanical engineers on the railroads—they meet. So, these are representatives from different railroads who don’t care about competition between Company A and Company B. They see this as a technical problem that they all have to work on together. And they agree on a set of standards for the use of air brakes and automatic couplers. They happen to pick Westinghouse’s standard for air brakes. Why? Because Westinghouse, very helpfully, gives them a whole set of ideas about the best kind of standardized air brake system.

25:33 And the proponents of the Janney coupler, not quite so much, there are a number of innovations here, but they all agree on this uniformity. They all agree basically to pledge their railroad companies to do the right thing, to take on their share of the responsibility and install these new systems. And then they go to Congress, and they hand Congress what amounts to the safety legislation. And the safety legislation is written in such a way that there is only one air brake system that can meet the criteria that Congress has stipulated, which of course is what the railroads told them to stipulate, and that’s the Westinghouse system.

26:15 And the legislation is written in such a way that only one type of automatic coupler, the Janney coupler, can meet the criteria. And so, that’s why those two things are written into the Safety Appliance Act of 1893, which mandates those and other safety improvements. A very typical process. There are delays in implementation. And of course, the railroads are accused of dragging their feet and putting profits ahead of human life and so on, but there are legitimate reasons why the railroads have to take time to get this all worked out. But eventually things like air brakes, automatic couplers become universal.

26:55 But it’s a very complicated story, and it’s a story that, as historians like Steve Usselman have pointed out—and Mark Aldrich as well—that tells us a lot about what factors are at play when we ask industry and government to make people’s lives better or safer. And one of the reasons that railroads eventually came around to safety appliances like air brakes and automatic couplers is they figured out that with those improvements, they could operate longer trains, heavier trains, and faster trains.

27:36 That is, they could be more efficient, more productive, and make more money. And if, in the process, fewer people were killed or injured, that was a very happy ancillary benefit. And so, I think the lesson we learn here is that corporate executives are not monsters. They don’t want to see their workers or their customers killed, but they’re also in business to make a profit—that’s capitalism—and the best way to ensure that companies do the right thing is to ensure that doing the right thing and doing the profitable thing are the same thing. That’s fascinating. And while we’re on safety, I wondered also about track signals.

28:17 When did those come into use? And what did they do before they were around? How did they manage the traffic of the trains at that point? Like every other aspect of railroad technology and railroad operations, use of signals came about in a kind of experimental fashion, incremental evolution over time, to cope with increasingly high traffic levels and operating environments and so forth. It’s an issue particularly in the United States. I mentioned that there were a lot of single-track railroads in the United States, and you see the problem. Imagine, like, driving down the freeway at 60 miles an hour, and there’s only one lane for the traffic going your direction and the traffic coming at you.

29:01 This is a problem. There’s got to be some way of regulating that, of keeping traffic moving, which is certainly important, but also preventing catastrophe in the form of a head-on collision. Or, you know, rear-end collision, which happened quite a bit on the railroads as well. Because these are fixed guideways. I mean, on a highway, even a single-lane highway, you can swerve around, you can go onto the median, or whatever it is, and get around an oncoming car. But the railroads, they’re set on their one guideway. And some of the early railroads, the single-track lines that operated with horsepower—so you have one Teamster with a horse and a wagon on the railroad coming north, and one Teamster with a horse and wagon coming south, they would simply.

29:44 Keep going until they ran into each other, and then they would discuss. When I say discuss, I mean yell and scream at each other and sometimes hit each other to try to figure out, you know, who gets to go ahead and who has to back everything up. Unhitch the horse, you know, take it around the other side of the car and go back to the nearest siding, or piece of double-track railroad. That obviously is utterly unworkable when it comes to steam locomotives and everything else. So, the question is, you know, how do you do this? How do you operate a single-track railroad with passing sidings for traffic in both directions, and trains moving at different speeds, which is also important, too. So, the most basic system is what’s called timetable and train order.

30:28 So, the railroads print timetables saying freight train number 17 is going to depart Poughkeepsie at 8:40 a.m. and arrive at Albany in 6:17 p.m. or whatever it is, and to keep to that schedule, keeping in mind that it’s very complicated because until the 1880s, many towns had their own unique time based on when the sun was overhead at their location, that became noon. And so, towns that are 30 miles apart, which they would be in the same time zone, might have a five minute time difference. We’ve always had to say, well, the train arrives at, what, Poughkeepsie time, Albany time, Utica time, which time— [laugh] it’s not Eastern time, right?

31:12 It’s the local time. And then on top of that timetable, there were train orders that basically said, you—the engineer and the conductor—have a right to move your train from this location to that location, and no farther. And you have to wait there for the other train to pass you, either same direction or the other direction, unless somebody comes out of the station and hands you another train order, which says, well, you know, okay, you can keep going to this station and so forth. And those orders were inviolable. You can’t go beyond what you’re permitted to do. And that had its limitations too because many trains waited and waited and waited to get new orders and things like that.

31:56 And so, in 1863 during the Civil War, when railroads are facing unprecedented traffic demands, moving soldiers, war material, and so forth, American railroads first adopted what’s called the block system, and it’s called that because they divided the tracks into blocks. And the key to the block system is that a block could only hold one train at a time, and that was considered the kind of fail-safe system. I mean, if only one train is in a block, they can’t possibly run into each other. And so, the idea was, a train cannot enter a block until another train has exited the block. So, there’d be telegraphers.

32:36 And railroads, I should point out, were not early adopters of telegraphy. There’s a story out there that says, the minute that Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph, which he did not, right? He invented parts of the telegraph system, but he really out lawyered his opposition and built a wall of patents and legal restrictions around himself, and therefore, kind of got the title of the inventor of the system—but after people like Morse and [House] and so on developed telegraphic systems, railroads were very slow to adopt these because they were unreliable. They could actually cause more accidents than they prevented. But eventually, by the 1860s, the railroads did begin to really widely adopt telegraphy.

33:18 And so, a block operator in a signal tower at the entrance to a block would display a clear signal saying, “This block is free. Train can enter.” And telegraph to his counterpart down at the next signal tower, “Don’t let anybody in. Set your signal to red because I got a train entering the block.” Train enters the block; exits the block. The second tower operator then says to the first tower operator, by telegraph, “Okay, your guys left, block is clear. What are you going to do here? Can I let a train the other direction come by me or are you going to let a train from your direction come by you to occupy the block?” And that’s how they worked things out.

34:01 Now, that was improved in 1870 but what’s called the interlocking system used at junctions where tracks cross each other and diverge and so forth. And it’s called that because a tower operator could throw a series of levers and that would flip switches and set signals and so on, that would interlock. In other words, it would absolutely prevent any other train except the one that’s going through the junction from entering. The signals will be automatically set against them. And laid on top of that was this guy, William Robinson who’s an Irish immigrant.

34:41 An amazing number of American inventors—and certainly American entrepreneurs, inventors, and so on—in the railroads were from other countries and immigrated to the United States. So, William Robinson develops the track circuit in 1872, and basically what it is a system whereby when a wheel on a locomotive, let’s say, makes a connection, that is, closes a circuit, then it sets the signals to red or to whatever color is being indicated. So, if a train enters a block, that wheel closes the circuit, sets the signal to red and pretty clearly indicates that the train behind it cannot enter, and of course, sets the signal down the line to red, so that a train come in the opposite direction can’t enter the block.

35:35 And there are all kinds of variations of this. There are distance signals and home signals, there are absolute stop signals, and proceed, prepared to stop, and all kinds of variants of signaling. And it’s often considered a fail-safe technology because once that wheel closes that circuit, the signal goes to red, and that’s all there is to it. But of course, it’s not fail safe. Nothing is fail safe, and it depends on the ability of the engineer to see, identify, and respond to the signal. If the engineer doesn’t pay attention or can’t see it because it’s foggy and doesn’t stop, then, well, there is a failure.

36:19 And so, railroads then put a lot of emphasis for engineers to make sure that they respond, vision tests, color blindness tests, and so on, to weed out employees who just can’t, you know, respond to this. But there’s always that desire to eliminate the human element, as if somehow technology is perfect and humans are fundamentally flawed. And that kind of comes back in the 1920s, when the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is the big federal agency regulating the railroads, it requires the railroads to make experiments with what’s called automatic train stop. And what that means is that when a train closes that circuit, sets the signal to red, it also triggers a sensor on the locomotive, often with a cab signal.

37:09 That is, there’s a signal inside the cab, a little one that replicates the big line-side signals, and the cab signal shows red, or whatever the indication is. And if the engineer doesn’t respond by closing the throttle and applying the brakes, there’s a whistle that goes off in the cab. If the engineer doesn’t respond to that, then the train stops automatically. That was never widely adopted, in part because, by the 1920s railroads were really incredibly safe and train crews were really very good. The failure rate, that is, the failure to distinguish and respond to a signal was extraordinarily low, inconsequentially low.

37:51 Also in 1920s, railroads began experimenting with centralized traffic control. And the name kind of says it all. A dispatcher, even hundreds of miles away from the actual piece of track carrying the trains, throws switches on a panel, and that controls the track switches—that is the movement of the rails—it controls the signals and so on, in guiding trains, and it’s a much more efficient way of moving traffic, particularly in single-track lines. It really increases capacity. Now, the latest innovation in recent times is positive train control. That was sort of in development.

38:32 It’s really the, kind of, second generation of automatic train stop. It’s much more complex than that. It was under development in the very late-20th and very early-21st centuries, and then mandated by Congress, following that horrific wreck at Chatsworth, California, in 2008, requiring basically the entire American railroad network, with some exceptions, to install centralized traffic control on their lines. It was supposed to be—at least members of Congress asserted that—this was off-the-shelf technology. In fact, it wasn’t. It was pioneering technology. It was actually technology that didn’t exist yet, even to the point where I’ve heard one railroad executive tell me that he was doing his part to develop positive train control, and he got a call from the Pentagon.

39:24 And some of the Pentagon said, you know, w“E hear you’re working on this positive train control system. We’re really intrigued by that because there are elements of it that seem to be better than what the military is capable of doing. So, when you figure this out, tell us how you did it.” And that gives a kind of an indication of just how pioneering and innovative this technology was. And it’s now in place, at a cost of $10 billion, more or less, and it does offer the potential to increase railroad safety, but as always, the question is, at what cost? How many accidents are likely to be prevented by positive train control that couldn’t be prevented by other means?

40:05 If I went into a locomotive today, if I went in and sat down with the engineer, how digital is it? Has it gone, like everything else, and gone high tech digital? Well, yeah, pretty much. I mean, some people have joked that a modern diesel locomotive is a computer with wheels attached. And I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, but railroads often has a reputation as being kind of old-school technology, big, heavy steel, you know, all that kind of stuff, clunky. The reality is that despite that reputation, railroads have been pioneers in electronics, digitization, computers, all that kind of stuff.

40:47 They were early adopters of mainframe computers, in the 1960s, to keep track of everything, from billing to car movements and so on. Some of those innovations didn’t work out. I mean, that’s true of any pioneering thing. They tried, in the ’70s, something called automatic car identification, which is essentially a barcode. I mean, scanning freight cars to keep an eye on where they are, sort of like you’d scan a carton of milk at the grocery store. And the problem was, of course, railroad cars get dirty and the labels get torn off and everything, and so that didn’t work very well. But beginning of the 1990s, things really sort of took off.

41:27 Diesel locomotives became high tech with onboard computer-based microprocessor monitoring systems regulating everything from fuel consumption to wheel slip to speed to air brake pressure and so forth. Digital technology enabled the use of what’s called distributed power. So, if you see a very long freight train go by at a [grade] crossing or something, you often see a couple locomotives at front, maybe one or two in the middle, with nobody in them, and then a locomotive or two at the end with nobody in them. And all those locomotives are being controlled by one engineer in the cab of the first locomotive.

42:08 Now again, that system took time to develop. There were experiments with that many decades ago. One notable failure involved taking a train through the Sierra Nevadas with distributed power using old-fashioned, kind of, analog radio control, and when the mid-train locomotive entered a tunnel, it lost the radio signal, went into reverse and broke the train in half. So, you know, these things happen. So, the systems in use today are obviously vastly, vastly better and more sophisticated. On the ground, sensors are evaluating everything from the condition of the rails and roadbed, looking for overheated wheels and axles.

42:51 I can mention in this context, the very serious wreck in East Palestine a few years ago with the chemical tank cars and everything else, caused by an overheated axle or wheel. And one of the unfortunate things about that was a defect detector spotted that and alerted the train crew, and they were in the process of bringing their train to a stop when the derailment occurred. So, if they’d been able to get just even a few more minutes out of that, quite possibly there would not have been such a catastrophic derailment. So again, the systems aren’t perfect, but they do actually work very well. Signaling is more efficient thanks to digital technology.

43:32 I mentioned positive train control and so forth, which has the potential, at least, to eliminate fixed line-side signals and to put an end to the block system that’s been around for 150 years by using positive train control and GPS to basically keep trains apart by their relative position to each other. The problem with a block system is that a block, once it’s established, is of the same length, and that block has got to accommodate everything from very long trains to very short trains, fast trains, slow trains.

44:15 And the elimination of a block system and the use of digital technology is—if you can imagine, you may have this on your own car, if you driving along the freeway and you get too close to the car in front of you get, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And so, that’s principle here, that trains can get so close to the train ahead of them, but no closer because the GPS signal will say, “Wait a minute. Got to slow the train down. Can’t go any faster.” And that offers the potential for using computers and digital technology to greatly increase the efficiency of railroad operations. You know, I jumped right over one innovation going to the digital world.

44:59 I jumped over the whole transition from steam to diesel. When did the diesel locomotive come into the picture? And did we—was that invented here or elsewhere? Well, the diesel engine, I think it’s important to distinguish between the diesel engine, which is a device that produces a form of power, usually from some kind of oil—diesel fuel, whatever—and a diesel locomotive, which is a platform with wheels on which a diesel engine is mounted that, in turn, generates power that’s transmitted to those wheels. And most locomotives in use today are actually diesel electric locomotives, so the diesel engine generates electric power, and electric power then turns the wheels to locomotive.

45:49 There are others. There are diesel mechanical systems, direct drive, diesel hydraulics, but most are diesel electric. So, the diesel engine dates to the—I almost at the last century, but it’s really the 19th century—Rudolph Diesel in Germany develops this, actually as a mechanism to burn pulverized or powdered coal. He doesn’t initially see that it’d be possible to burn what is, perhaps ironically, now called diesel fuel. And these engines are designed for stationary applications or for maritime use because they’re huge, they’re massive, they’re heavy. They won’t even fit in a railway locomotive.

46:29 But early railway engineers—again, mechanical and electrical engineers—they see the potential, and they’ve been experimenting. Even in the very, very late-1800s in the early years of the 20th century, there are experiments with self-propelled railcars. So, basically a passenger car with an engine in it that can be used to replace a steam locomotive and passenger cars on very, very lightly traveled branch lines. So, a lot of these early railcars, they use primarily engines that burn, like, gasoline or kerosene or something like that, distillate mixtures. Occasionally they’re burning diesel fuel, and they’re not, you know, hugely successful, but they’re out there.

47:15 They’re a path forward. But what really did it, I think, was the actions of the government, in particular the New York State Legislature. And in 1923 the New York State Legislature passed a bill known as the Kaufman Act that banned the use of steam locomotives within Greater New York, that is the five boroughs. And for the most part, this is not a problem for the railroads because the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central, and the New Haven have already electrified their tracks on the main lines leading into New York. But there are a lot of little short switching areas and dockside facilities where it makes no sense to install electrification.

48:00 What do you do? Well, that increases interest in internal combustion locomotives. Now, there’s a certain amount of legal wrangling as to what the Kaufman Act actually says and what it means, locomotives other than steam, electric locomotives. The Pennsylvania Railroad consults with their attorney—you know, always check with the attorneys—and the attorney, Clarence Heiserman, says, “As I read the legislation, a diesel electric locomotive qualifies as an electric locomotive, which means we can use diesels.” And so, that’s his reading of the letter of the law. But it wasn’t the Pennsylvania Railroad that was the first adopter.

48:44 It was the Jersey Central, or the Central Railroad of New Jersey that put into service—this is 1925, two years after the Kaufman act—put into service the first commercially successful, I guess, diesel locomotive, which was built by a consortium of builders: General Electric, Ingersoll Rand for the car body, mechanical, Westinghouse and so on, that were involved in the construction of these early, kind of, diesel locomotives. The railroads put them into place, not just on the Jersey Central, but on other railroads as well, because they had to comply with the terms of the law. But once they did that, they said, you know, these things have potential.

49:26 They’re far less powerful than steam locomotives, but we can work these things almost 24 hours a day, and that’s not true with steam locomotives. I mean, rule of thumb is, if a railroad needs to have 20 steam locomotives in service at a given time, they need to have 40 steam locomotives in their facilities: half of them working, half of them being serviced because of the low availability. And railroads found out pretty quickly that diesel locomotives were ideally suited for switching, that is, moving cars and yards at slow speeds because they had very high tractive effort.

50:06 There was a kind of rule of thumb among railroad motive power officials that said a steam locomotive could haul a train it couldn’t start, but a diesel locomotive could start a train it couldn’t haul. That is, you know, if what you wanted was to move a long train at 70 miles an hour across Kansas or wherever, early diesels were not going to do it. You need a steam locomotive for that. But if what you want is to take a very large group of cars in a freight yard from a standing stop to five miles an hour, which is all you need, a diesel actually has the advantage there.

50:48 And so, those early diesels are really kind of intriguing to railroad executives. But simultaneously, there’s a kind of increase in interest in these railcars. 1920s, everybody’s getting a car, Model T, maybe, but some kind of a car, so they’re not taking the train, the passenger train, anymore. And that’s causing problems for railroads, especially in these short distance routes. So, they’re buying more and more railcars, including cars that are built by companies like Electro-Motive, which—actually, I say, ‘built.’ Electro-Motive didn’t build anything; it subcontracted. All it did is, design these railcars, carry spare parts for them, and market them.

51:34 And that’s where its skillset really was: in marketing, not in manufacturing. And it relied very closely on the Winton Engine Company based in Cleveland, Ohio, and Winton became sort of the dominant producer of, sort of, mid-size internal combustion engines. And that caught the attention of, I don’t know, General Motors, which kind of was a big deal, and so GM bought Winton in the 1930s. And then after they bought Winton, they did some research, and they realized that Electro-Motive, the company built these railcars, was the single largest customer of Winton.

52:15 And they said, you know, why don’t we buy Electro-Motive, too? And so, all of a sudden, General Motors was now in the railcar business, which was important for Electro-Motive because, well, GM had some really good engineering people and a lot of money, which always helps. And Electro-Motive began building, not just these sort of single unit railcars, but entire trains, like the Burlington Zephyr, which debuted in 1934, this kind of famous non-stop run from Denver to Chicago, dawn to dusk. This is a big deal, right? This is the height of the Great Depression, or maybe the depths of the Great Depression.

52:59 I mean, people need a lift. They need something to get enthusiastic about. And so, there’s this brand new, diesel-powered stainless steel, shiny, really fast train that goes zipping along. I mean, schools canceled classes so the kids could line up along the tracks and watch this thing roar past. It had incredible newspaper coverage. There was a radio operator on board. I mean, you know, there are all kinds of gimmicks, including carrying Zeph, which was a burro—well, prospectors, Denver, Colorado, all that kind of thing—so carrying a burro from Denver to Chicago.

53:43 And poor Zeph at one point, the guy in the baggage car was holding on, on some rough track, and Zeph, of course, couldn’t hold on and he tipped over, fell on the guy in the baggage car. And so, they had to all, kind of, sort that out and everything. And it was that kind of excitement that permeated popular culture. There was even a movie called The Silver Streak, not the Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder film that came out decades later, which was Silver Streak without the ‘the.’ But it was a terrible movie—that is, The Silver Streak—but it featured as the only memorable character, the train.

54:25 The train was in advertisements and everything, and so everybody’s talking about it. And railroad executives said, “Wow, this is a public relations bonanza. We need streamlined passenger trains powered by diesel locomotives.” So, they began buying passenger locomotives because they were modern and shiny and beautiful, too. I mean, GM had a styling department that provided all sorts of artistic renderings to Electro-Motive: this is what locomotive should look like, beautiful designs like the Santa Fe war bonnet scheme and so forth, and that captured public attention. And the advantage for Electro-Motive was that once a railroad introduced diesels on a route like Chicago to Los Angeles, they had to build refueling facilities, they had to build maintenance shops, they had to train their employees—and GM help them do that, Electro-Motive helped them do that—and that, of course, lowered the effective cost of adopting even more diesels.

55:28 And these early diesels often weren’t great. I mean, some of the earliest Electro-Motive diesels, they had a maintainer on board, was back in the engine compartment, frantically fixing things while the train was barreling through Kansas at 60 or 70 miles an hour. I mean, OSHA would never allow that today, I’m sure. But they work just well enough to persuade the railroads to keep adopting these and to persuade companies like GM to keep putting resources into its Electro-Motive subsidiary. But the real prize, of course, was freight service. That’s where all the money was. And in 1939, Electro-Motive introduced the model FT, which was the first really practical long-distance mainline freight locomotive.

56:15 And not every railroad was—to coin a phrase—on board with the FT at first, but certain companies like the Santa Fe were just astonished. I mean, they were told by GM and Electro-Motive executives, “This is how much it’s going to save you, this is how efficient it is,” and they said, “Yeah, you know, maybe.” And when these things went into service, they kept checking and rechecking their figures because their estimates of the potential return on investment for these locomotives were far too low. In some cases, they were getting 30 or 40% return on investment per year from these locomotives.

56:58 And with that, the days of steam locomotives were numbered. World War II prolonged it because, of course, railroads needed every piece of motive power that would turn a wheel, but after 1945, it took basically a decade for diesels to banish steam locomotives from American railroads. And I should point out that the companies that built steam locomotives, like Lima and Alco and Baldwin, they eventually—not initially, but eventually—saw the handwriting on the wall, and they began building diesels. But they all failed, even though they had a lot of expertise in building railroad locomotives, diesels were so different from steam locomotives that they were basically shut out of the market, and it was Electro-Motive, ultimately General Motors, and also General Electric that dominated the market, not just in the US, but around the world.

57:54 So, it may be that the British, kind of, invented the steam locomotive and Americans adapted it. And it may be that Rudolph Diesel in Germany developed a diesel engine, but it was the United States that perfected and disseminated to the rest of the world the technology of diesels, especially diesel electric locomotives. We’ve had such a great conversation. I’m afraid we’re running out of time, but I do want to ask one important question as we end, and I’d love to have you back at some time, too. I really have learned so much from you. What a great conversation. But as we look at railways today, why are they still important in the US? I talk to people all the time who’ve been to Europe on vacation or business or whatever, and they come back and say, “Oh, my goodness, I rode the trains. They’re so wonderful.

58:42 Why can’t we have a train system like they have in Europe?” And we don’t, and for a lot of reasons, probably won’t, but even if what they’re saying is true of passenger service, it’s not true of freight traffic. And the reality is, the United States has, by far and away, the best system of railroad freight transportation in the world. In the United States, trains move 28% of traffic, that’s by ton mile. If you calculate it in terms of the value of commodities and so on, then trucks kind of have the advantage, but railroads are extraordinarily efficient, they can move far more freight over a far longer distance on a gallon of fuel than any other form of transportation, trucks, certainly airplanes, they have much lower emission standards, which is important when we talk about climate change.

59:28 They make our roads safer, right? I mean, every truck removed from the highway makes the highway safer. Put it as a container, put it on a flat car, and carry it by rail. Railroads employ 100,000 people directly and with the economic multiplier effect, all the people that they employ indirectly as well. And they do this without the lavish government subsidies that are expended on air travel, on highways, on inland waterways. So, railroads are the only mode of transportation where everything, from tracks to equipment to their operating system is owned and managed by private enterprise rather than by some government entity.

1:00:13 So, they don’t have access to government-built airports or government-built interstates or government-built barge canals or what have you. If you sit down and have lunch today and you eat a sandwich, the bread in that sandwich was made with wheat that was transported by rail. If you have a glass of milk, you pour it out of a plastic container that was made from petrochemical products that were delivered along the chemical coast, by rail. If it’s starting to get dark and you flip on a light switch, chances are the electricity that powers those lights was generated by coal that was transported by rail. So, in every aspect of our lives, we depend on railroad transportation, even if we ourselves do not ride trains.

1:00:59 I will say, my time in Illinois—I lived there for a few years—I was a frequent user of Amtrak from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago and back. It was great. I appreciated them so much, and it kept me from having to drive three hours up and down [laugh] the interstate for meetings in Chicago. So, I appreciated Amtrak for sure. And Amtrak has enormous potential, especially for, kind of, short and medium distance routes, 500 miles or less. And I mentioned the issue of European high speed railways. I don’t see that happening in the United States anytime soon. We’ll see what happens with the California High Speed Rail Project, which is vastly over budget and taking vastly longer than anticipated, and seems to be a kind of an object lesson in how not to build a high speed rail system.

1:01:44 But I think the United States—and Amtrak—have enormous potential for higher speed rail, maybe 125 miles an hour or less. We see that with Brightline in Florida. Maybe in the future, Brightline West in California and Nevada. And so, there’s a lot of potential for that. And you mentioned the advantage of avoiding highway travel. And what people, even in Europe, increasingly seem to want is not so much a fast trip, but a comfortable trip, a safe trip, a trip where they can be productive—thanks to WiFi, travel means you can get out your laptop or your cell phone and do something—and a trip where the travel times are predictable.

1:02:28 So, often we go by car, it could take an hour, could take three hours, maybe two hours on a train is longer than an hour by car, but if people know it’s going to be two hours every time, that’s a big advantage. It was. And I’ve used the Amtrak up the East Coast as well, from DC up to New York several times, and Boston as well, so avoiding that traffic and having that consistency was very important. As we close out, Albert, I just want to ask, what are you working on right now? Are you working on a book, or what’s next for you? What’s next for me is a history of Conrail, or the Consolidated Rail Corporation, which was—it’s still in business, actually, as a successor company, but it was formed in 1976 out of the wreckage—and that’s not too strong of a word to use—the wreckage of the Northeastern rail system, including the bankrupt Penn Central, which was a successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, the company that I’ve written extensively on.

1:03:21 And so, the Conrail story is important for any number of reasons. It marks, kind of, the renaissance of the American railroad industry, as the railroads kind of come back from the brink, from the abyss. It’s an example of how the government stepped in, almost at the last minute, to rescue the railroads from the problems that ill-advised government regulation and subsidization of competing modes of transportation had caused in the first place. And so, the government launches Conrail as a largely governmental Corporation, owning about 80% of Conrail stock, and pouring substantial amounts of money into remedying years of deferred maintenance.

1:04:07 And thanks to dedicated employees and a really, really good management team, Conrail became profitable. It defied the naysayers, people who said, “Well, when the government gets involved in business, the results are going to be disastrous.” They weren’t. They were spectacular. Conrail was privatized in the largest IPO in American history up to that time, and since split apart among two other railroad, CSX and Norfolk Southern. So, it’s an important story that way, but it’s also a story that has to do with the deregulation of the rail industry with the Staggers Act in 1980, part of this broad package of regulatory reform implemented during the Carter administration, which also included airline, truck, banking, and telecommunications deregulation, and it’s really that process and the success of Conrail that launched and validated these sort of neo-liberal economic revolution that sort of shaped American economic policy with the past 40 or so years.

1:05:14 And so, the story is, yes, about a railroad coming back from the brink, but also about a railroad that brought about and exemplifies a whole new phase in American economic history. And I’m working on this for the first time, I’ve never done this before, but I’m co-authoring a book with Jonathan Broder, who’s the former vice president of legal affairs for Conrail, now retired. He has got, of course, a great skill set to bring to the project. And so, we’re in the preliminary research stage. It’s a complicated project, but it’s an exciting one. I’m really looking forward to doing it. I’m very much looking forward to that. We’ll tell you, we’ve been trying to figure out ways we’re going to partner here locally with the Southern Appalachian Railroad Museum, and when I mentioned to those fine folks that I was going to talk to you, that you have great fans.

1:06:05 The three volume Pennsylvania Railroad series you did is revered among them. So, I wanted to pass that on to you, that you have some great fans here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Well, I’m glad to hear that. And I wrote the book, it was something of a challenge because, as you mentioned, I’m a history professor, and so we tend to write for academic audiences and inside the ivory tower and that sort of thing. But I also want to make it accessible to a kind of broad, popular audience because I think it’s an American story, not just a history story or an academic discourse, but it’s a story about America. And some of the best compliments I’ve received about the three volumes, the Pennsylvania Railroad series, are when people say to me, “You know, I was kind of surprised, but I was happy that you don’t write like a college professor.” And I thought, you know, that’s good.

1:06:58 I like that. I can accept that. And, in fact, I kind of like that a lot. Yeah, take that as a victory. And— [crosstalk] victory, yes. There you go [laugh] . Albert, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Well, thank you for the invitation, and please do keep in touch. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person.

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