Tracks Across America with Simon Cordery

1
00:00:04,040 --> 00:00:07,840
Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

2
00:00:08,179 --> 00:00:11,500
a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.

3
00:00:12,240 --> 00:00:15,309
My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum

4
00:00:15,339 --> 00:00:18,710
of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center.

5
00:00:19,710 --> 00:00:23,080
Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors,

6
00:00:23,520 --> 00:00:27,480
scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between,

7
00:00:27,929 --> 00:00:31,100
sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics.

8
00:00:35,109 --> 00:00:36,480
Welcome to AMSEcast.

9
00:00:36,920 --> 00:00:40,410
We’re continuing our look at 250 years of American innovation,

10
00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:43,940
thanks to a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services,

11
00:00:44,230 --> 00:00:47,529
all in preparation for our nation’s upcoming semi-quincentennial.

12
00:00:47,950 --> 00:00:51,710
A few episodes ago, I spoke about railroads and American technological

13
00:00:51,710 --> 00:00:54,980
innovation with Al Churella, and today we’re going to continue a

14
00:00:54,980 --> 00:00:58,670
discussion of the innovations that the railways inspired, but with more

15
00:00:58,670 --> 00:01:02,110
of a focus on the world of business, commerce, and government, showing

16
00:01:02,110 --> 00:01:05,610
how those technological innovations had a really wide-ranging impact.

17
00:01:05,889 --> 00:01:09,119
And to help us do that, we’re joined by Dr. Simon Cordrey, now

18
00:01:09,120 --> 00:01:12,110
the chair of the History Department at Iowa State University.

19
00:01:12,449 --> 00:01:15,270
Prior to that role, Simon was department chair at Western

20
00:01:15,290 --> 00:01:18,300
Illinois University and at Monmouth College in Illinois.

21
00:01:18,690 --> 00:01:23,220
He has been widely published, with books including Mother Jones: Raising Cain

22
00:01:23,220 --> 00:01:27,330
and Consciousness, The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois

23
00:01:27,380 --> 00:01:31,900
Railroading, and his latest schedule for publication later this year, Gilded

24
00:01:31,920 --> 00:01:37,270
Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman.

25
00:01:37,570 --> 00:01:40,149
Simon, thanks so much for joining us in the AMSEcast.

26
00:01:40,150 --> 00:01:40,719
My pleasure.

27
00:01:40,719 --> 00:01:41,290
Thank you, Alan.

28
00:01:41,370 --> 00:01:43,369
Am I right about, you have the book, Gilded Age

29
00:01:43,370 --> 00:01:45,260
Entrepreneur, coming out later this year, is that right?

30
00:01:46,059 --> 00:01:46,599
September.

31
00:01:46,629 --> 00:01:47,310
Very good.

32
00:01:47,310 --> 00:01:48,299
I’m looking forward to that.

33
00:01:48,299 --> 00:01:52,070
I also want to, as we start today, thank Julie King, our mutual friend at the

34
00:01:52,070 --> 00:01:55,610
National Railroad Hall of Fame in Galesburg, Illinois, for introducing us.

35
00:01:55,630 --> 00:01:58,330
Julie is great and doing some great work there in Illinois.

36
00:01:58,670 --> 00:02:01,599
So Simon, I’m a bit obsessed with railroads.

37
00:02:01,630 --> 00:02:03,089
I’m learning more and more about them.

38
00:02:03,299 --> 00:02:07,289
We hope to have a railroad component at our K-25 Atomic

39
00:02:07,290 --> 00:02:09,880
History Center in the not too distant future, which I

40
00:02:09,880 --> 00:02:12,820
would love to talk to you more about in that future.

41
00:02:13,230 --> 00:02:14,790
But let’s go back in history.

42
00:02:14,840 --> 00:02:18,639
When did railroads come to America and how quickly did

43
00:02:18,639 --> 00:02:22,079
they grow once they started sprouting up on our soil?

44
00:02:22,850 --> 00:02:23,049
Yeah,

45
00:02:23,049 --> 00:02:25,520
let’s begin with the definition of what a railroad actually is

46
00:02:25,550 --> 00:02:28,450
because there are all sorts of rails and all sorts of roads.

47
00:02:28,460 --> 00:02:33,670
So, I would posit that a railroad is, well, essentially a vehicle with

48
00:02:33,690 --> 00:02:38,429
flanged wheels running on a rail of some sort, initially iron, later

49
00:02:38,509 --> 00:02:42,710
steel, cooled by steam locomotion, and so if that’s the definition

50
00:02:42,710 --> 00:02:45,910
that we can go with, let’s start on the Fourth of July, 1828, when

51
00:02:48,060 --> 00:02:50,660
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the signers of the Declaration

52
00:02:50,660 --> 00:02:54,900
of Independence, laid the first stone for the Baltimore and Ohio

53
00:02:54,920 --> 00:02:58,410
Railroad, which two years later ran the first trains in America.

54
00:02:58,410 --> 00:03:01,920
The B&O was the first railroad in the United States.

55
00:03:02,250 --> 00:03:05,480
The first train ran 13 miles from Ellicott

56
00:03:05,480 --> 00:03:08,310
Mills to Baltimore, and it was horse drawn.

57
00:03:08,320 --> 00:03:11,759
So, the first steam locomotive occurred later

58
00:03:11,759 --> 00:03:14,260
on in that same year, along the same track.

59
00:03:14,500 --> 00:03:19,340
And then in December of 1830 in South Carolina, the best

60
00:03:19,350 --> 00:03:21,959
friend of Charleston, the first American-built locomotive,

61
00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:25,920
pulled the first scheduled railroad run in the United States.

62
00:03:26,220 --> 00:03:28,949
And by 1830, we have less than 100 miles in operation.

63
00:03:28,950 --> 00:03:30,940
So that’s, you know, fragments here and there,

64
00:03:30,940 --> 00:03:32,699
short lines, as we might call them today.

65
00:03:33,009 --> 00:03:36,579
1840, we can see some pretty dramatic growth: 3000 miles in

66
00:03:36,580 --> 00:03:39,910
operation, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.

67
00:03:40,300 --> 00:03:42,859
By 1850, 9,000 miles.

68
00:03:43,160 --> 00:03:45,450
That’s substantial and rapid growth.

69
00:03:45,500 --> 00:03:48,239
And again, that’s spreading out now from the Mid-Atlantic and

70
00:03:48,240 --> 00:03:51,540
New England to Ohio and Michigan, as well as through the South.

71
00:03:51,790 --> 00:03:54,340
And in 1856 a milestone occurs when the first

72
00:03:54,340 --> 00:03:56,520
rails are laid across the Mississippi River.

73
00:03:56,590 --> 00:04:00,440
That’s the Rock Island, the Chicago and Rock Island railroad, crosses the

74
00:04:00,440 --> 00:04:04,495
Mississippi River, brings Abraham Lincoln into contact with the railroad

75
00:04:04,770 --> 00:04:09,760
industry in his guise as a lawyer, and railroads can begin to expand westwards.

76
00:04:10,859 --> 00:04:15,550
That also generates incredible, incredible growth.

77
00:04:15,570 --> 00:04:17,789
By 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, there are

78
00:04:17,790 --> 00:04:20,949
about 30,000 miles of track in the United States.

79
00:04:20,980 --> 00:04:26,029
So, in 30 years, you’ve gone from basically 100 miles to 30,000 miles.

80
00:04:26,230 --> 00:04:27,299
And the growth continues.

81
00:04:27,349 --> 00:04:33,010
By 1870 you’ve got 52,000, almost 175,000 by 1890.

82
00:04:33,150 --> 00:04:36,450
The high point is reached in 1916, about

83
00:04:36,460 --> 00:04:40,330
254,000 miles of track in the United States.

84
00:04:40,330 --> 00:04:42,530
But that’s the high point, and then it starts to drop.

85
00:04:42,799 --> 00:04:47,930
By 1950 there’s only about 223,000 and for reasons that we’ll discuss

86
00:04:47,930 --> 00:04:52,629
later on today, there’s about 140,000 miles only, relatively, only.

87
00:04:53,220 --> 00:04:57,190
So, there was rapid expansion, but also some precipitous decline

88
00:04:57,190 --> 00:05:00,110
as well, in the development of railroads in the United States.

89
00:05:00,330 --> 00:05:01,759
I’ve been to Carrollton many times.

90
00:05:01,780 --> 00:05:04,949
I didn’t know that connection, and certainly the case you alluded

91
00:05:04,949 --> 00:05:08,609
to with Abraham Lincoln and the steamboats and the bridge across

92
00:05:08,610 --> 00:05:12,240
the river, a fascinating story we can talk about some other time.

93
00:05:12,240 --> 00:05:14,610
But really, truly phenomenal growth.

94
00:05:14,610 --> 00:05:17,600
How did it compare to growth of rails in other countries?

95
00:05:18,030 --> 00:05:20,390
So, in terms of the pace of growth.

96
00:05:20,429 --> 00:05:22,410
It easily matches the United Kingdom.

97
00:05:22,889 --> 00:05:25,230
The rest of Europe was much slower.

98
00:05:25,240 --> 00:05:28,200
France and Germany, for example, were slow adopters, and that’s

99
00:05:28,200 --> 00:05:32,589
in part because they were slow—relatively slow—to industrialize,

100
00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:37,360
and there was less of a demand, less capital available, and quite

101
00:05:37,360 --> 00:05:41,220
simply, I suppose, the innovative capacity wasn’t there yet.

102
00:05:41,230 --> 00:05:43,659
I mean, France and Germany are certainly going to catch up and

103
00:05:43,660 --> 00:05:47,840
surpass Britain and the United States in terms of railroad innovation.

104
00:05:48,370 --> 00:05:53,269
Railroads tended to follow industrialization, and they tended to follow empire.

105
00:05:53,280 --> 00:05:56,700
So, for exa—in the case of India, you’ll see railroads developing quite

106
00:05:56,700 --> 00:06:03,010
rapidly after 1860 in India because of the need for, well, to be blunt, rapid

107
00:06:03,010 --> 00:06:07,610
military deployment in the Indian subcontinent, but also because of the need

108
00:06:07,630 --> 00:06:12,710
to transport raw materials to the coast, to ship, for example, cotton to the

109
00:06:13,090 --> 00:06:17,490
UK, and then also to get finished products like textiles to their customers.

110
00:06:18,270 --> 00:06:23,480
So, as this is happening here in the US specifically, what kind of changes are

111
00:06:23,480 --> 00:06:27,440
happening in the business world to both support and carry on that expansion?

112
00:06:27,440 --> 00:06:30,979
And then around that, in terms of suppliers and the things growing

113
00:06:30,980 --> 00:06:33,619
up around the rail industry, what do we see in the business world?

114
00:06:34,010 --> 00:06:36,500
Well, there’s a lot of knock-on effects.

115
00:06:36,559 --> 00:06:40,270
And so, clearly railroads need iron and then steel, so they were

116
00:06:40,280 --> 00:06:43,849
definitely important in the development of those industries.

117
00:06:44,210 --> 00:06:49,440
Railroads need timbers for those ties that the track is attached to, so the

118
00:06:49,440 --> 00:06:54,139
growth of forests and then lumbering is also important for the railroads.

119
00:06:54,330 --> 00:06:58,890
You need something to generate power for the locomotives, and so

120
00:06:58,890 --> 00:07:04,560
that would be initially wood and then coal and then oil as well.

121
00:07:04,820 --> 00:07:10,969
There are also multiple industries that don’t develop because of the

122
00:07:10,969 --> 00:07:15,360
railroad, but are expanding as a consequence of the railroad industry.

123
00:07:15,890 --> 00:07:18,190
So, we’re looking at the business world and how that’s

124
00:07:18,190 --> 00:07:21,799
changing, both with and around the rail industry.

125
00:07:21,990 --> 00:07:25,019
What about the impact of government and government

126
00:07:25,020 --> 00:07:27,050
oversight of that industry as it develops?

127
00:07:27,050 --> 00:07:29,629
We have things coming in like the Sherman Antitrust

128
00:07:29,629 --> 00:07:32,000
Act, Interstate Commerce Act, and so forth.

129
00:07:32,200 --> 00:07:34,299
How did that impact the industry and the growth

130
00:07:34,300 --> 00:07:36,860
of that over the 19th and early-20th centuries?

131
00:07:37,340 --> 00:07:40,440
The railroads were incredibly powerful.

132
00:07:40,960 --> 00:07:44,310
Railroad bosses had a tendency to want to control politics.

133
00:07:44,719 --> 00:07:48,049
And of course, anytime you have that sort of effect, you’re going

134
00:07:48,049 --> 00:07:50,780
to have popular pushback, and there was plenty of popular pushback.

135
00:07:51,680 --> 00:07:58,040
And you could argue that the first real instance of political intervention

136
00:07:58,090 --> 00:08:02,179
into the railroad industry occurred in the state of Illinois with Munn versus

137
00:08:02,179 --> 00:08:09,040
Illinois in 1873, a case where a grain elevator operator was essentially

138
00:08:09,450 --> 00:08:15,520
sued by the state for unfair practices, and the State won, unexpectedly.

139
00:08:15,830 --> 00:08:20,039
Even more important, in 1887, you get the case of the Wabash

140
00:08:20,080 --> 00:08:24,800
Railroad Case, where the United States sues the Wabash Railroad

141
00:08:24,810 --> 00:08:28,980
Company on the grounds that it’s charging differential rates

142
00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:34,089
crossing state lines, and that is a precedent setting case.

143
00:08:34,510 --> 00:08:38,970
The Federal Government wins that case, and it allows the federal government

144
00:08:38,980 --> 00:08:44,340
to then enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act and to make sure that the Interstate

145
00:08:44,380 --> 00:08:48,760
Commerce Commission can actually have some influence over the railroads.

146
00:08:49,040 --> 00:08:54,249
So, in terms of railroad regulation, the first railroad regulation that I’m

147
00:08:54,250 --> 00:09:01,720
aware of occurred in 1843, in of all places, Ireland, and set the standard gauge

148
00:09:01,730 --> 00:09:06,970
for the tracks in Ireland—the width between the tracks—and it sets the standard

149
00:09:06,970 --> 00:09:11,020
gauge at five feet and three inches, which is unusual because around the rest

150
00:09:11,020 --> 00:09:14,879
of the world today, the standard gauge is four feet, eight-and-a-half inches.

151
00:09:15,200 --> 00:09:17,520
In Ireland, it’s still five-foot-three

152
00:09:17,670 --> 00:09:20,959
because of that legislation passed in 1843.

153
00:09:21,280 --> 00:09:26,050
So, that is the first case that I found of railroad regulation.

154
00:09:26,580 --> 00:09:29,660
Something similar happens in the rest of the United

155
00:09:29,660 --> 00:09:33,860
Kingdom in 1846, when the gauge is set at four feet,

156
00:09:34,129 --> 00:09:36,530
eight-and-a-half inches, although exceptions are allowed.

157
00:09:36,890 --> 00:09:41,350
And then finally, in 1868 the kind of regulation that you would expect to

158
00:09:41,350 --> 00:09:45,260
see, a financial law passes, the Regulation of Railways Act, companies are

159
00:09:45,270 --> 00:09:50,199
required to publish standardized accounts so the public gets to see exactly

160
00:09:50,200 --> 00:09:53,180
what’s going on with all that money that the public and governments are

161
00:09:53,180 --> 00:09:57,240
pouring into those railroad companies in order to allow them to operate.

162
00:09:57,910 --> 00:10:01,290
Companies also are required to make emergency communication

163
00:10:01,300 --> 00:10:04,150
with the driver a regular part of their operation.

164
00:10:04,160 --> 00:10:08,499
So, in Britain, the carriages were mostly compartment carriages.

165
00:10:08,500 --> 00:10:12,920
So, people had essentially little self-enclosed compartment

166
00:10:12,950 --> 00:10:16,110
with two doors, one on each side, and if something went

167
00:10:16,110 --> 00:10:18,550
wrong, there’s no way to communicate with anyone else.

168
00:10:18,780 --> 00:10:21,880
And so, there are several instances, high profile instances of

169
00:10:21,880 --> 00:10:26,119
murders and robberies, and so as a consequence, the railroads

170
00:10:26,120 --> 00:10:30,300
were required to allow the public to communicate with the driver.

171
00:10:30,350 --> 00:10:34,060
And also this law, interestingly, designated smoking carriages.

172
00:10:34,320 --> 00:10:39,459
So, even as early as 1868 there’s a sense that smoking might not

173
00:10:39,469 --> 00:10:42,690
necessarily be the most social activity in which you can engage.

174
00:10:43,270 --> 00:10:44,930
In the United States, the first meaningful

175
00:10:44,930 --> 00:10:48,029
act is the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.

176
00:10:48,549 --> 00:10:51,720
The Interstate Commerce Act created the Interstate Commerce Commission,

177
00:10:51,970 --> 00:10:57,850
which has a long and very varied career, until it was disbanded in 1985.

178
00:10:58,180 --> 00:11:01,490
The Interstate Commerce Act required railroads to

179
00:11:01,490 --> 00:11:05,380
charge—and I’m quoting here—“Just and reasonable rates.”

180
00:11:05,730 --> 00:11:08,229
That sounds suitably vague, and it was.

181
00:11:08,540 --> 00:11:12,490
There was no definition of what constituted a just and reasonable rate

182
00:11:12,760 --> 00:11:16,890
for carrying goods and people, and so you can imagine a great deal

183
00:11:16,920 --> 00:11:21,350
of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict over exactly what that meant.

184
00:11:21,589 --> 00:11:24,059
The ICC heard shippers’ complaints.

185
00:11:24,230 --> 00:11:28,530
If the ICC ruled—and it’s a five-man commission in the 19th

186
00:11:28,540 --> 00:11:33,060
century, it’s a five person commission—and they could rule

187
00:11:33,060 --> 00:11:37,040
that the rate was unfair, but they couldn’t actually force

188
00:11:37,040 --> 00:11:40,249
the railroads to change the amount that they were charging.

189
00:11:40,250 --> 00:11:43,600
So, the great weakness of the Interstate Commerce Commission is it has no

190
00:11:43,600 --> 00:11:48,339
enforcement powers beyond then sending a case onto the federal courts, which

191
00:11:48,340 --> 00:11:52,690
may or may not rule in favor and also takes a lot of time to adjudicate.

192
00:11:52,820 --> 00:12:00,040
One thing that the ICC did do was to try and ban the differential rates

193
00:12:00,040 --> 00:12:05,120
where, if you were shipping a good over ten miles, you might pay $10 per

194
00:12:05,120 --> 00:12:09,860
mile; if you’re shipping something for 100 miles, you might pay $5 a mile.

195
00:12:10,240 --> 00:12:14,060
To our minds today, that makes sense because you’re essentially

196
00:12:14,190 --> 00:12:17,399
taking advantage of the economies of scale, but in the 19th century,

197
00:12:18,560 --> 00:12:21,380
the people didn’t look at it that way, and so it felt like it was

198
00:12:21,380 --> 00:12:26,160
an unfair, unjust charge, and so those charges were done away with.

199
00:12:26,320 --> 00:12:32,130
It’s certainly a case that the ICC was essentially toothless.

200
00:12:32,219 --> 00:12:35,530
In 1890 the federal government passed the Sherman Antitrust Act,

201
00:12:35,530 --> 00:12:38,400
and the Sherman Antitrust Act was supposed to ban monopolies.

202
00:12:38,830 --> 00:12:40,700
It didn’t do so very successfully.

203
00:12:40,700 --> 00:12:45,340
By 1907 there were seven major holding companies that controlled

204
00:12:45,679 --> 00:12:49,420
almost two-thirds of the total railroad miles, and they controlled

205
00:12:49,420 --> 00:12:52,400
most of the important railroad mileage in the United States.

206
00:12:52,809 --> 00:12:58,540
In 1904 though the Theodore Roosevelt administration used the Sherman

207
00:12:58,540 --> 00:13:03,190
Antitrust Act in order to bust Northern Securities, which was a

208
00:13:03,190 --> 00:13:07,869
holding company that controlled three main railroads in the northern

209
00:13:07,870 --> 00:13:10,950
tier of the United States, two of which were transcontinental by the

210
00:13:10,950 --> 00:13:14,930
definition of the day—they went from Chicago and Minneapolis to the West

211
00:13:14,930 --> 00:13:19,980
Coast—and successfully sued and forced Northern Securities to break up.

212
00:13:20,270 --> 00:13:25,130
But really, essentially, the Schuman Antitrust Act was not

213
00:13:25,130 --> 00:13:28,550
particularly successful by the standards of expectations

214
00:13:28,550 --> 00:13:32,870
of those who were championing antitrust legislation.

215
00:13:33,100 --> 00:13:35,410
I think a more meaningful piece of legislation was

216
00:13:35,410 --> 00:13:38,590
indeed the Railway Safety Appliance Act of 1893.

217
00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:43,440
This act, which was the result of lobbying by a man by the name of Lorenzo

218
00:13:43,440 --> 00:13:48,149
Coffin, who was the Iowa commissioner of railroads and was very interested

219
00:13:48,160 --> 00:13:54,020
in safety appliances, he spent about 15 years trying to convince railroad

220
00:13:54,020 --> 00:13:59,030
companies that they should have uniform couplers to connect the cars

221
00:13:59,300 --> 00:14:03,949
and that they should have a single and safe automatic braking system.

222
00:14:03,960 --> 00:14:06,679
And there was one in existence: the Westinghouse brake,

223
00:14:06,720 --> 00:14:11,480
which had been around since the 1870s was incredibly adept

224
00:14:11,580 --> 00:14:16,180
at stopping trains because if a car uncoupled, the system

225
00:14:16,270 --> 00:14:20,309
automatically applied the brakes, and that was a brilliant system.

226
00:14:20,599 --> 00:14:23,939
But the railroad companies considered it to be too expensive, they had their

227
00:14:23,940 --> 00:14:29,589
own systems of braking, and so not until 1893, after Lorenzo Coffin’s lobbying,

228
00:14:29,660 --> 00:14:34,520
along with the Master Car Builders Association, did the federal government pass

229
00:14:34,520 --> 00:14:38,210
the Railway Safety Appliance Act, which made railways so much safer that within

230
00:14:38,219 --> 00:14:43,170
a year, the number of accidents involving railway employees had dropped by half.

231
00:14:43,500 --> 00:14:46,800
But that’s an example of, I think, successful regulatory legislation.

232
00:14:47,100 --> 00:14:47,830
I think so.

233
00:14:47,830 --> 00:14:50,780
And it’s fascinating, as you said these moves that the government

234
00:14:50,780 --> 00:14:54,520
took to respond to this new industry, I’m curious as to how,

235
00:14:54,719 --> 00:14:57,429
over time, when we look at a new, disruptive technology that

236
00:14:57,429 --> 00:15:00,400
comes into play, how society and government reacts to that.

237
00:15:00,400 --> 00:15:04,050
So, right now, for example, AI is the topic of the day, of

238
00:15:04,050 --> 00:15:07,100
how we, over time, will respond to that with regulation or

239
00:15:07,100 --> 00:15:10,159
non-regulation, or whatever we end up doing, I think it’s really

240
00:15:10,160 --> 00:15:12,989
interesting to see how that happened with the rail industry.

241
00:15:12,989 --> 00:15:15,320
And you noted in the ’80s there were changes.

242
00:15:15,580 --> 00:15:17,689
There’s deregulation of the industry.

243
00:15:17,940 --> 00:15:21,480
When did that happen exactly, and how did it affect the railroad industry?

244
00:15:22,110 --> 00:15:25,080
In the 1970s the railroads were in a terrible state.

245
00:15:25,100 --> 00:15:27,930
In the 1970s the railroad industry was full of bankrupt

246
00:15:27,950 --> 00:15:31,300
lines, there were accidents, there was lots of very,

247
00:15:31,300 --> 00:15:34,480
very slow running trains because the track was so bad.

248
00:15:34,850 --> 00:15:39,319
It was so bad that by 1980, the federal government

249
00:15:39,330 --> 00:15:42,290
realized that one of the biggest problems was regulation,

250
00:15:42,300 --> 00:15:44,760
that what it had to do was deregulate the industry.

251
00:15:44,760 --> 00:15:47,310
And so, Harley Staggers, senator from West Virginia,

252
00:15:47,370 --> 00:15:52,200
and other politicians, passed the Staggers Act.

253
00:15:53,180 --> 00:15:56,450
And in 1980 the Staggers Act, by deregulating the industry, allowed the

254
00:15:56,450 --> 00:15:59,550
railroad companies to do something revolutionary, which was, respond

255
00:15:59,550 --> 00:16:02,910
to supply and demand without the federal government getting in the way.

256
00:16:02,940 --> 00:16:06,130
And that liberated the railroad industry.

257
00:16:06,280 --> 00:16:10,699
And that liberation took at least two forms, one of which was railroad

258
00:16:10,699 --> 00:16:14,950
companies no longer had to run unprofitable passenger and freight trains.

259
00:16:15,340 --> 00:16:20,760
Before 1980, railroad companies had to get authorization in

260
00:16:20,760 --> 00:16:24,540
order to abandon services, especially passenger services.

261
00:16:24,550 --> 00:16:28,569
So, you might have a passenger train that’s running five times a week.

262
00:16:28,609 --> 00:16:32,620
It has six passengers a run, and it’s losing thousands of dollars.

263
00:16:32,940 --> 00:16:36,380
The federal government took a long time to allow companies to

264
00:16:36,380 --> 00:16:40,360
abandon those trains, and so that’s one thing they were able to do.

265
00:16:41,620 --> 00:16:45,270
Companies were then able to abandon unprofitable track.

266
00:16:45,660 --> 00:16:48,260
So, there was a lot of overbuilding, in the 1880s and

267
00:16:48,260 --> 00:16:50,780
1890s in particular, and one of the reasons we reached the

268
00:16:50,780 --> 00:16:55,680
peak in 1914 is because there’s so much track being built.

269
00:16:55,840 --> 00:16:57,970
There’s lots of duplicate track, there are lots of companies

270
00:16:57,970 --> 00:17:04,040
competing for the same relatively small supply of business, and

271
00:17:04,040 --> 00:17:07,950
as a consequence, there’s a lot of track that isn’t really needed.

272
00:17:08,060 --> 00:17:12,869
And so, Staggers allows companies to abandon that track.

273
00:17:12,869 --> 00:17:17,380
And where I live in Iowa, you can drive in almost any direction from

274
00:17:17,589 --> 00:17:20,980
here in Ames, and you will see the consequence of that is you will

275
00:17:20,980 --> 00:17:24,839
see the former track beds, some of which have been turned into walking

276
00:17:24,849 --> 00:17:27,800
and biking paths, some of which you can still see because there’s

277
00:17:27,829 --> 00:17:31,400
basically long humps in the field, usually surrounded by trees.

278
00:17:31,550 --> 00:17:35,290
And so, that enabled the companies to focus on profitable

279
00:17:35,290 --> 00:17:38,009
lines only, or lines that they thought they could turn

280
00:17:38,009 --> 00:17:41,010
a profit with, once they had consolidated their mileage.

281
00:17:41,299 --> 00:17:44,050
I know that as the 20th century progressed, that industry,

282
00:17:44,060 --> 00:17:46,439
as you said, was in pretty bad shape by the ’70s.

283
00:17:46,780 --> 00:17:49,830
How did deregulation help that industry move forward?

284
00:17:49,960 --> 00:17:50,709
Where does it stand

285
00:17:50,710 --> 00:17:51,310
today?

286
00:17:51,719 --> 00:17:54,690
So, there are fewer companies today, as a consequence.

287
00:17:54,690 --> 00:17:58,000
There are only six major Class I railroads in

288
00:17:58,000 --> 00:18:00,229
the United States, two of which come from Canada.

289
00:18:00,590 --> 00:18:04,790
And the other thing that it allowed the railroads to do was to

290
00:18:05,880 --> 00:18:09,389
differentially price, and so they could respond to market fluctuations.

291
00:18:09,389 --> 00:18:15,479
And so, for example, if a trucking company is able to provide a service

292
00:18:15,480 --> 00:18:19,240
at a certain rate, the railroad companies are allowed to undercut that

293
00:18:19,240 --> 00:18:23,660
rate, which they weren’t before Staggers, and so it allows them to respond

294
00:18:23,660 --> 00:18:27,850
to those market opportunities quickly in a way that they weren’t before

295
00:18:29,349 --> 00:18:29,509
1980.

296
00:18:29,509 --> 00:18:32,360
I know they’re still a massive part of the economy.

297
00:18:32,360 --> 00:18:35,110
I think some folks were out in the interstate, and we’re surrounded by

298
00:18:35,160 --> 00:18:39,200
tractor trailers and so forth, and we might downplay the role of rails in

299
00:18:39,200 --> 00:18:43,260
moving goods across the country, but still a massive part of the economy.

300
00:18:43,820 --> 00:18:46,720
Yeah, I don’t think you can underestimate how much the railroads provide

301
00:18:46,750 --> 00:18:50,839
because the container, for example, which is the common way of shipping goods

302
00:18:50,839 --> 00:18:57,800
from the coast to central points like Chicago and Norfolk and New York and

303
00:18:57,800 --> 00:19:02,829
Philadelphia, the container—the intermodal container—allows goods to be shipped

304
00:19:02,840 --> 00:19:07,689
quickly from one type of transportation, like a ship, onto a train, onto a

305
00:19:07,690 --> 00:19:12,559
truck, and that has really facilitated the flow of goods in the United States.

306
00:19:13,080 --> 00:19:14,260
Also, heavy commodities.

307
00:19:14,620 --> 00:19:17,840
As coal-fired power plants are coming back online,

308
00:19:17,950 --> 00:19:21,299
where’s that coal going to be shipped from and how?

309
00:19:21,340 --> 00:19:24,829
And so, the answer is, well, the railroads have always shipped

310
00:19:24,840 --> 00:19:28,200
coal, and they will continue to do so as long as there is a demand.

311
00:19:28,580 --> 00:19:31,610
If you were to put all of that coal on the road,

312
00:19:31,810 --> 00:19:33,760
that would slow things [laugh] down considerably.

313
00:19:33,800 --> 00:19:40,000
So, yeah, 125 or 150-car coal train carrying crucial commodity from

314
00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:44,840
the mine to the power plant is taking a lot of strain off of the roads.

315
00:19:45,020 --> 00:19:46,249
And any bulk commodity.

316
00:19:46,430 --> 00:19:50,030
One thing I meant to ask you a bit earlier, when we were talking about changes

317
00:19:50,060 --> 00:19:54,570
in the business world, certainly looking at the effect of the railways on

318
00:19:54,620 --> 00:19:59,120
labor and labor organization, can you summarize how did the development

319
00:19:59,120 --> 00:20:03,490
the railroads affect the labor organization and labor market in America?

320
00:20:04,190 --> 00:20:07,830
In the first railroad labor organization was the

321
00:20:07,840 --> 00:20:11,729
Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers of 1863, and they were

322
00:20:11,730 --> 00:20:15,000
a brotherhood in the sense that they were a craft union.

323
00:20:15,010 --> 00:20:19,090
They wanted to organize only the engineers who drove the locomotives.

324
00:20:19,599 --> 00:20:24,810
And their aim was to create mutual relations, good relations,

325
00:20:24,810 --> 00:20:29,490
between management—or supervisors, in their case—and the engineers.

326
00:20:29,930 --> 00:20:34,510
And they also provided insurance provisions, basic insurance, accident

327
00:20:34,510 --> 00:20:37,300
insurance, sickness insurance, funeral benefits for their members.

328
00:20:37,330 --> 00:20:42,280
So, they were less interested in confrontation and more interested

329
00:20:42,480 --> 00:20:47,490
in seeing their role in partnership with the corporations.

330
00:20:47,750 --> 00:20:49,550
Well, that worked all very well and good until about

331
00:20:49,770 --> 00:20:53,310
1877 when there was a national railroad strike.

332
00:20:53,550 --> 00:20:58,770
In 1877, that mutualist ideal fell to pieces and

333
00:20:58,770 --> 00:21:01,240
confrontation became the expectation of the day.

334
00:21:01,490 --> 00:21:05,149
The Brotherhoods engaged in confrontation, but because they only

335
00:21:05,250 --> 00:21:10,149
represented sectors of the labor force, they weren’t always successful.

336
00:21:10,160 --> 00:21:13,370
More successful, far more successful was the American Railway Union,

337
00:21:13,700 --> 00:21:19,710
which, in 1894 after about a year of existence, was pushed into a strike

338
00:21:20,200 --> 00:21:24,020
because of what was happening in Pullman, Illinois, when Pullman workers,

339
00:21:24,020 --> 00:21:27,100
who were building luxury railroad cars and freight cars, were pushed

340
00:21:27,100 --> 00:21:32,080
out of work because they wanted to respond to the depression and earn

341
00:21:32,240 --> 00:21:35,040
a bit more money, or at least keep the wages that they were earning.

342
00:21:35,500 --> 00:21:40,290
And as a consequence, a national railroad strike was called.

343
00:21:40,540 --> 00:21:45,740
And this establishes this kind of confrontational expectation between

344
00:21:45,750 --> 00:21:50,709
labor and capital that we still see today in negotiations over contracts.

345
00:21:51,230 --> 00:21:56,756
Another effect of the railroad labor unions started in 1925, with the

346
00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:02,150
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who were very important in both

347
00:22:02,210 --> 00:22:08,570
establishing the decent working conditions for porters on the railroads, but

348
00:22:08,570 --> 00:22:14,180
also—and in the long-term, probably more importantly—helping to build the kind

349
00:22:14,180 --> 00:22:19,530
of knowledge and awareness of politics that led into the civil rights movement.

350
00:22:19,540 --> 00:22:22,699
A. Philip Randolph, one of the leaders of the Brotherhood of Sleeping

351
00:22:22,699 --> 00:22:26,969
Car Porters, is a towering figure in the civil rights struggles.

352
00:22:27,200 --> 00:22:29,060
Something I learned a bit about during my time in

353
00:22:29,060 --> 00:22:32,240
Illinois; really an important and fascinating story.

354
00:22:32,890 --> 00:22:36,700
Another effect that the railway expansion had on our

355
00:22:36,700 --> 00:22:39,240
society is something I think we don’t think a lot about,

356
00:22:39,240 --> 00:22:43,180
but it had an effect on how we keep time throughout the US?

357
00:22:43,180 --> 00:22:44,479
How did that happen?

358
00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:49,000
So that, once again, you can see that happening first in the UK.

359
00:22:49,220 --> 00:22:54,390
I mean, the first creation of a standard time came in 1840, when the

360
00:22:54,390 --> 00:22:58,759
Great Western Railway linked its times table to Greenwich Mean Time.

361
00:22:58,760 --> 00:23:01,080
And so, if Bristol was five minutes ahead of London

362
00:23:01,219 --> 00:23:03,839
in real life, it didn’t matter because now the Bristol

363
00:23:03,839 --> 00:23:06,119
trains would arrive according to Greenwich Mean Time.

364
00:23:06,299 --> 00:23:11,209
And by 1855, almost all British Railways were running by Greenwich Mean Time.

365
00:23:11,630 --> 00:23:13,540
You see early efforts in the United States.

366
00:23:13,540 --> 00:23:18,889
In 1869 there was a petition by Chicago area railroads to ask the Common

367
00:23:18,889 --> 00:23:23,429
Council to adopt a standard set of time zones for the Chicago area.

368
00:23:23,529 --> 00:23:26,830
That effort failed, but it was one of many, culminating in November

369
00:23:26,830 --> 00:23:33,439
of 1883, when railroads were able to convince all the companies across

370
00:23:33,440 --> 00:23:38,020
the United States that were running trains to adopt the four time

371
00:23:38,020 --> 00:23:44,850
zone map that we have now, and that made operations much, much easier.

372
00:23:44,960 --> 00:23:48,570
And it’s enacted into law in 1918 at the conclusion of the

373
00:23:48,570 --> 00:23:51,169
First World War, when the federal government agrees we have to

374
00:23:51,170 --> 00:23:54,270
have these standard times and these other standard time zones.

375
00:23:54,280 --> 00:23:58,289
So, yeah, it’s certainly something that changes the way we look at the world.

376
00:23:58,320 --> 00:24:02,140
Because, you know, if we were to live by our own time zones,

377
00:24:02,140 --> 00:24:05,220
we would have a very different sense of how the world operated.

378
00:24:05,230 --> 00:24:09,179
So, yeah, I mean, the railroads standardized time in the way

379
00:24:09,179 --> 00:24:13,220
that they standardized so much about the world around us.

380
00:24:13,450 --> 00:24:16,389
It’s phenomenal to me that it took so long to do that.

381
00:24:16,389 --> 00:24:19,014
And to think that the fighting of the Civil War, for example, and

382
00:24:19,020 --> 00:24:22,240
the massive amount of men and material that were moved around on the

383
00:24:22,240 --> 00:24:26,240
rails during that time, we still didn’t have a standardized time.

384
00:24:26,500 --> 00:24:27,879
So, that’s really interesting.

385
00:24:28,200 --> 00:24:31,220
Speaking of time, I love my watches, Simon, people will tell

386
00:24:31,220 --> 00:24:34,010
you that, and I have a mixture of manual and digital ones.

387
00:24:34,010 --> 00:24:35,940
So, let’s talk about digital technology for a moment.

388
00:24:35,949 --> 00:24:41,010
I like that segue [laugh] . So, how has digital technology, new technology,

389
00:24:41,370 --> 00:24:45,700
newer, faster trains, how has that impacted the railroad industry in the US?

390
00:24:46,330 --> 00:24:48,400
So, let’s address the question of speed.

391
00:24:48,960 --> 00:24:52,340
Because unfortunately, with the honorable exception of the Northeast

392
00:24:52,340 --> 00:24:56,530
Corridor, trains in the United States aren’t much faster, if at all,

393
00:24:56,770 --> 00:25:01,110
than they were in the 1950s, at the heyday of the express trains.

394
00:25:01,110 --> 00:25:03,429
And so, I’m going to give you a couple of examples there.

395
00:25:03,790 --> 00:25:08,199
The Broadway Limited, which ran from New York City to Chicago:

396
00:25:08,670 --> 00:25:13,770
in the 1950s, it took 15-and-a-half hours to traverse that route.

397
00:25:14,180 --> 00:25:18,960
Today, the Lakeshore Limited, Amtrak’s crack train between

398
00:25:18,960 --> 00:25:21,959
Chicago and New York takes about 19-and-a-half hours.

399
00:25:21,980 --> 00:25:26,080
So, we’ve lost four hours there, and there are lots of reasons for that.

400
00:25:26,090 --> 00:25:29,170
Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks, the tracks aren’t always high

401
00:25:29,170 --> 00:25:32,850
speed accessible, the equipment isn’t necessarily—although

402
00:25:32,850 --> 00:25:35,389
it should be—able to run at those high speeds.

403
00:25:35,790 --> 00:25:37,320
But the same is true for freight trains.

404
00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:40,750
And so, in the 1950s the Santa Fe, the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe was

405
00:25:40,750 --> 00:25:45,769
running the so-called Super C between Los Angeles and Chicago, 2200 miles.

406
00:25:46,139 --> 00:25:47,300
It took 40 hours.

407
00:25:47,920 --> 00:25:49,890
That was admittedly an exception.

408
00:25:49,970 --> 00:25:53,120
It was the fastest freight train over that distance

409
00:25:53,120 --> 00:25:55,560
in the world at the time, but that’s very impressive.

410
00:25:55,560 --> 00:25:58,950
Today, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief—which admittedly has to make

411
00:25:58,950 --> 00:26:02,650
stops to let passengers get on and off—takes about 43 hours,

412
00:26:02,910 --> 00:26:06,360
and as far as I know, there are no freight trains today that

413
00:26:06,680 --> 00:26:10,800
can match the Super C. So, in terms of speed, not so much.

414
00:26:10,940 --> 00:26:14,550
However, digital technology is great for

415
00:26:14,580 --> 00:26:18,119
operational efficiency and safety, for time tabling.

416
00:26:18,500 --> 00:26:23,429
Digital technology is incredibly useful for better safest signaling.

417
00:26:23,879 --> 00:26:26,840
Moving away from mechanical signals to digitally

418
00:26:26,840 --> 00:26:30,080
controlled, or electronically pulse controlled signals has

419
00:26:30,110 --> 00:26:34,159
proven to be much more effective at avoiding accidents.

420
00:26:34,650 --> 00:26:38,690
Better inventory control in terms of where goods are at any one

421
00:26:38,700 --> 00:26:44,159
time, those digital outputs are very, very useful for keeping

422
00:26:44,170 --> 00:26:46,940
track of all of that freight that’s moving around the country.

423
00:26:47,550 --> 00:26:49,810
Simply keeping track of cars.

424
00:26:49,820 --> 00:26:54,430
I mean, even today, freight cars get lost, and so digital technology

425
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:58,240
has allowed companies to track their cars much more efficiently.

426
00:26:58,529 --> 00:27:02,030
And also communication between dispatch centers and crews.

427
00:27:02,280 --> 00:27:06,219
Obviously, if you’ve got cell towers, if you’ve got satellite

428
00:27:06,220 --> 00:27:10,579
communication, that makes things a lot easier in an environment where

429
00:27:11,090 --> 00:27:14,820
the large railroads dispatch their trains from a central center.

430
00:27:14,839 --> 00:27:17,619
So, for example, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe has a

431
00:27:17,629 --> 00:27:21,120
massive, great dispatching Center in Fort Worth, Texas,

432
00:27:21,470 --> 00:27:24,230
from which it controls virtually all of its trains.

433
00:27:24,230 --> 00:27:28,570
And the same is true for the other major Western road, the Union Pacific,

434
00:27:28,730 --> 00:27:32,159
which has a dispatch center in Omaha, Nebraska, that does the same thing.

435
00:27:32,160 --> 00:27:35,260
So, there are some local dispatching, but almost all

436
00:27:35,260 --> 00:27:38,399
of it is controlled by satellite, and I think that

437
00:27:38,429 --> 00:27:40,240
would have been impossible without digital technology.

438
00:27:40,470 --> 00:27:42,330
You mentioned Amtrak a couple times there.

439
00:27:42,330 --> 00:27:45,730
When I lived in DC, I would take Amtrak up to New York

440
00:27:45,730 --> 00:27:49,290
or Boston, and certainly, my time in Illinois, it was a

441
00:27:49,290 --> 00:27:52,149
Godsend, frankly, from Springfield to Chicago and back.

442
00:27:52,150 --> 00:27:54,439
I got to know that route pretty well.

443
00:27:55,030 --> 00:27:57,550
I could fall asleep and wake up at the right time, and so forth.

444
00:27:57,550 --> 00:28:02,420
And is Amtrak a sustainable model, an expandable model in the US?

445
00:28:02,429 --> 00:28:04,860
What is the status of Amtrak right now?

446
00:28:05,450 --> 00:28:08,810
I imagine that working for Amtrak at the moment is a matter of holding

447
00:28:08,810 --> 00:28:12,149
your breath and hoping that the current administration doesn’t notice

448
00:28:12,150 --> 00:28:17,919
you because Amtrak only exists as a consequence of federal subsidies.

449
00:28:18,390 --> 00:28:20,379
But to be fair, that’s true around the world.

450
00:28:20,639 --> 00:28:23,220
There are literally no passenger rails that

451
00:28:23,220 --> 00:28:25,430
run over any distance that make a profit.

452
00:28:25,910 --> 00:28:28,510
Moving people is simply unprofitable.

453
00:28:28,670 --> 00:28:32,899
If you make back the operational costs, great, but you’re unlikely to

454
00:28:32,900 --> 00:28:36,180
be able to pay the capital costs of owning and operating a railroad.

455
00:28:36,640 --> 00:28:40,800
So yeah, Amtrak, where it does run, as you discovered,

456
00:28:40,800 --> 00:28:43,800
from Springfield to Chicago provides a very good service.

457
00:28:44,120 --> 00:28:49,000
And so, the problem is it doesn’t run everywhere, and it doesn’t run very much.

458
00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:52,740
I mean, there’s one train a day between Chicago and LA, and Chicago

459
00:28:53,210 --> 00:28:57,419
and Seattle, and so that’s simply not a great number of trains.

460
00:28:58,000 --> 00:29:01,200
The Northeast Corridor, However, as I said, is the honorable exception.

461
00:29:01,200 --> 00:29:04,340
Trains up to 150 miles an hour, over about,

462
00:29:04,650 --> 00:29:06,139
I think, about 30 miles of its track.

463
00:29:06,860 --> 00:29:08,050
125 miles an hour over the rest of it.

464
00:29:08,160 --> 00:29:08,850
Well, that’s good.

465
00:29:08,850 --> 00:29:13,000
That’s competing with the fastest trains in most of Europe, and that’s a high

466
00:29:13,020 --> 00:29:18,300
speed, efficient, effective, punctual service because Amtrak owns the tracks.

467
00:29:18,330 --> 00:29:19,169
And that’s the key.

468
00:29:19,400 --> 00:29:22,790
Across the rest of the country, Amtrak doesn’t own the rails over which

469
00:29:22,799 --> 00:29:26,620
it runs, and so they are, I wouldn’t say, hostage to the host railroads,

470
00:29:26,620 --> 00:29:29,830
but they are certainly reliant upon the host railroads to make sure their

471
00:29:29,830 --> 00:29:32,909
trains are dispatched on time, to make sure the track is available on

472
00:29:32,910 --> 00:29:38,690
time, to make sure that they can operate, and that is genuinely a problem.

473
00:29:38,980 --> 00:29:40,450
Could Amtrak expand?

474
00:29:40,709 --> 00:29:41,349
Potentially.

475
00:29:41,510 --> 00:29:48,490
It looks like, according to transport economists, that any medium-distance

476
00:29:48,490 --> 00:29:54,840
run, say 300 miles, Chicago to Detroit, can be effectively operated by rail

477
00:29:54,840 --> 00:29:59,710
in competition with road and air, and that has potential for the future.

478
00:30:00,020 --> 00:30:02,180
Again, the problem is not owning the tracks.

479
00:30:02,430 --> 00:30:05,710
Amtrak is simply too dependent upon the host railroads

480
00:30:05,710 --> 00:30:08,760
on the one hand and federal subsidies on the other.

481
00:30:09,510 --> 00:30:15,020
There are in the United States two major high-speed projects underway—or

482
00:30:15,020 --> 00:30:18,530
one is genuinely underway, and the other one is trying to raise capital.

483
00:30:18,950 --> 00:30:22,220
The one that’s underway is Brightline West, which is building

484
00:30:22,220 --> 00:30:27,439
a high speed track between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

485
00:30:27,660 --> 00:30:31,630
Brightline West is building about 218 miles—admittedly,

486
00:30:31,630 --> 00:30:33,679
from a suburb of LA because it’d be very expensive to

487
00:30:33,679 --> 00:30:37,440
build into LA—the financing does include federal subsidies.

488
00:30:37,440 --> 00:30:39,889
They have about, I think, $4 billion in federal money

489
00:30:39,889 --> 00:30:42,530
out of the $12 billion that they have raised so far.

490
00:30:42,650 --> 00:30:49,490
They’re projected to open in 2028 and it’s a completely—as in France, as

491
00:30:49,490 --> 00:30:54,900
an in parts of the United Kingdom—it is a completely separate right of way.

492
00:30:54,900 --> 00:30:58,640
So, only Brightway West trains will run, and they’ll

493
00:30:58,640 --> 00:31:01,710
run up to speed of 150 miles an hour over those tracks.

494
00:31:01,710 --> 00:31:06,030
They reckon that the 218 miles can be traversed in about two hours.

495
00:31:06,509 --> 00:31:10,309
Another exciting, although perhaps more utopian, project is

496
00:31:10,309 --> 00:31:14,270
the Texas Central, about 240 miles from Dallas to Houston.

497
00:31:14,270 --> 00:31:17,210
The Texas central estimates that you can travel

498
00:31:17,910 --> 00:31:20,980
between those two major cities in 90 minutes.

499
00:31:21,150 --> 00:31:23,659
It would be great if they actually had started construction.

500
00:31:23,960 --> 00:31:29,270
They haven’t, so it’s unclear when those trains will start to run.

501
00:31:29,389 --> 00:31:33,950
But there is, you know, at least there is some sense that

502
00:31:33,950 --> 00:31:37,830
there is a little bit of ambition and a little bit of

503
00:31:37,830 --> 00:31:41,170
desire to provide high-speed rail in the United States.

504
00:31:41,380 --> 00:31:43,999
Having made the drive between Dallas and Houston a few

505
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:46,510
times, I would have welcomed any other alternative to that.

506
00:31:46,660 --> 00:31:50,959
I wonder, as you talked about the lack of profitability for passenger lines,

507
00:31:51,160 --> 00:31:54,990
is there any path from here to there making that a profitable enterprise?

508
00:31:55,010 --> 00:31:58,250
Is it a question of owning lines and technology,

509
00:31:58,250 --> 00:32:01,019
or is there no clear path to profitability?

510
00:32:01,650 --> 00:32:04,679
In the United States, at least, certainly since after the Second World

511
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:09,510
War, railroad passenger travel was always subsidized by the freight side.

512
00:32:09,830 --> 00:32:14,600
And so, in the United Kingdom, the attempt to privatize passenger

513
00:32:14,600 --> 00:32:18,129
rail—or all of rail—has failed miserably, and so the government

514
00:32:18,130 --> 00:32:21,850
is busily re-nationalizing most of the rail network in the UK.

515
00:32:22,310 --> 00:32:26,310
And part of that is passengers are people.

516
00:32:26,480 --> 00:32:30,850
And so, unlike a load of coal, people expect to get to their

517
00:32:30,850 --> 00:32:34,049
destination on time, people expect to be warm and comfortable,

518
00:32:34,270 --> 00:32:38,989
people expect a relatively reliable service, and people complain.

519
00:32:39,280 --> 00:32:43,520
And so, railroads have to make sure that their service is all of the

520
00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:49,230
above, as well as, in competition with road and air, economically priced.

521
00:32:49,240 --> 00:32:50,280
And I think that’s the key.

522
00:32:50,280 --> 00:32:52,880
If railroads had a monopoly on long-distance travel and could

523
00:32:52,880 --> 00:32:55,260
charge anything they wanted to, and we had to take them,

524
00:32:55,370 --> 00:32:57,810
okay yeah, they could be profitable, but then who couldn’t?

525
00:32:58,379 --> 00:33:03,240
So, I suspect the answer is, passenger rail will probably never

526
00:33:03,340 --> 00:33:07,160
be profitable until there is an incredible change in the way

527
00:33:07,410 --> 00:33:12,450
we calculate cost, in the way we look at capital construction.

528
00:33:12,460 --> 00:33:15,490
I mean, there is a passenger railroad in Florida that runs

529
00:33:15,490 --> 00:33:19,750
between Miami and Orlando, Brightline—the company that owns

530
00:33:19,780 --> 00:33:24,230
Brightline West, the LA to Las Vegas train—Brightline in Florida,

531
00:33:24,560 --> 00:33:27,629
owned by Fortress Investment Group, is not making a profit.

532
00:33:27,670 --> 00:33:29,919
It’s been operating since I think, 2018.

533
00:33:29,960 --> 00:33:32,500
Of course, naturally, they had a bit of a problem during Covid.

534
00:33:32,580 --> 00:33:34,419
They had to cease operations during Covid.

535
00:33:34,980 --> 00:33:39,510
They are operating an excellent service with regular, fast trains.

536
00:33:39,830 --> 00:33:42,080
Most of the track is owned by the Florida East

537
00:33:42,080 --> 00:33:45,110
Coast, so they don’t own the track they run on.

538
00:33:45,310 --> 00:33:46,770
It’s a model, perhaps, for the future.

539
00:33:47,210 --> 00:33:50,210
And Fortress Investment has said that they are in this

540
00:33:50,219 --> 00:33:52,620
for the long-term, and they expect to make a profit

541
00:33:52,889 --> 00:33:55,180
eventually, but that’s not at the moment their priority.

542
00:33:55,180 --> 00:33:56,850
Their priority is building up a customer

543
00:33:56,850 --> 00:33:59,300
base and proving that the service has value.

544
00:33:59,560 --> 00:34:02,889
I wonder—and Simon, I know I’m getting way off topic of the

545
00:34:02,910 --> 00:34:06,282
US here, but I’m curious—I’ve taken trains, obviously in the

546
00:34:06,282 --> 00:34:10,409
UK, but also in Spain and Italy, and they’re always very busy.

547
00:34:10,429 --> 00:34:12,980
And we just were, this summer, in Italy and took

548
00:34:12,980 --> 00:34:15,420
a wonderful train from Rome to Naples and back.

549
00:34:16,310 --> 00:34:17,920
Are those government owned, typically?

550
00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:21,359
Is that how they manage those systems, or are they a mix?

551
00:34:22,420 --> 00:34:24,479
Yeah, it’s a mix of government and private.

552
00:34:24,500 --> 00:34:27,929
And so, most of the railroad operators in Europe now have what’s

553
00:34:27,929 --> 00:34:31,470
called open access, where if you want to run a train, you can do.

554
00:34:31,480 --> 00:34:35,520
You can bid on runs, and of course, open access

555
00:34:35,520 --> 00:34:38,170
operators bid on the potentially most profitable runs.

556
00:34:38,540 --> 00:34:42,700
So, anything from Rome to Florence, or Rome to

557
00:34:42,700 --> 00:34:47,189
Bologna would of course, be open-access oriented.

558
00:34:47,260 --> 00:34:51,409
And those trains run in competition with the state subsidized trains.

559
00:34:51,739 --> 00:34:56,630
And yeah, Europeans are simply used to traveling by train.

560
00:34:56,630 --> 00:35:00,149
Part of that is that distances tend to be a lot shorter, which is

561
00:35:00,150 --> 00:35:03,880
helpful, but also there’s slightly less car ownership, the roads

562
00:35:03,880 --> 00:35:06,620
are nowhere nearly as good as the roads in the United States,

563
00:35:06,950 --> 00:35:13,089
and people are just more used to the culture of public transport.

564
00:35:14,160 --> 00:35:14,850
And God love them.

565
00:35:14,850 --> 00:35:19,219
I love Italy, and Naples is an amazing city, but I would never drive a car

566
00:35:19,219 --> 00:35:22,900
in Naples, so I [laugh] knew better than to try to drive a vehicle in Naples.

567
00:35:23,129 --> 00:35:25,279
So, a really fascinating conversation.

568
00:35:25,289 --> 00:35:27,330
Tell us more about your upcoming book.

569
00:35:27,590 --> 00:35:27,770
Oh

570
00:35:27,910 --> 00:35:28,520
thanks, Alan, yes.

571
00:35:28,530 --> 00:35:32,400
It’s Gilded Age Entrepreneur, and it’s the life of Albert Benton Pullman,

572
00:35:32,520 --> 00:35:36,900
who was the brother, the elder brother, of George Mortimer Pullman.

573
00:35:36,900 --> 00:35:39,290
And George Pullman is the name that everyone knows.

574
00:35:39,299 --> 00:35:44,040
He was the individual credited with developing the luxury sleeping car.

575
00:35:44,560 --> 00:35:49,190
What we don’t know, and what my forays into the archives reveal is that

576
00:35:49,450 --> 00:35:53,740
Albert Pullman was the craftsman of the family who was most responsible

577
00:35:53,750 --> 00:35:59,289
for actually the designs of the luxury cars, especially in the first 10

578
00:35:59,799 --> 00:36:03,509
to 15 years of the company, when they suddenly gained so much attention.

579
00:36:03,900 --> 00:36:09,330
But he was also the marketing genius behind Pullman’s campaigns to convince

580
00:36:09,330 --> 00:36:13,403
the traveling public that they should ride these luxury cars, pay a little

581
00:36:13,460 --> 00:36:17,739
bit extra, but ride in your living room and in your bedroom, basically.

582
00:36:17,740 --> 00:36:20,220
That’s what they were aiming to replicate.

583
00:36:20,620 --> 00:36:25,290
And so, he also had an interesting life outside of the Pullman Company.

584
00:36:25,300 --> 00:36:29,799
Albert Pullman, the entrepreneur, was a banker.

585
00:36:30,300 --> 00:36:33,610
He was a banker in a bank that the federal government shut down.

586
00:36:33,780 --> 00:36:36,570
He was an insurance executive in an insurance

587
00:36:36,590 --> 00:36:39,100
company that was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire.

588
00:36:39,150 --> 00:36:43,460
He was a manufacturer, and he was someone who had many

589
00:36:43,470 --> 00:36:46,990
patents of railroad products that were, with one exception

590
00:36:46,990 --> 00:36:50,690
at the end of his life, never employed by the railroads.

591
00:36:50,969 --> 00:36:52,410
So, he had a fascinating life.

592
00:36:52,660 --> 00:36:55,430
And he illustrates the kind of the everyday entrepreneur.

593
00:36:56,430 --> 00:36:59,109
In the 19th century, you have people who are striving, obviously,

594
00:36:59,110 --> 00:37:02,669
to get rich, and those strivers tend to be ignored because we

595
00:37:02,670 --> 00:37:06,595
look at the Morgans and the Rockefellers and the George Pullmans.

596
00:37:06,960 --> 00:37:10,980
And so, Albert Pullman and his strata, ignored in part because the

597
00:37:10,980 --> 00:37:15,580
sources aren’t there, but also ignored because we tend to focus on

598
00:37:15,580 --> 00:37:20,760
the triumphs, and we tend not so much to look at those who were not

599
00:37:20,900 --> 00:37:23,949
as successful as they might have wanted to be on their own terms, and

600
00:37:23,950 --> 00:37:25,290
that’s certainly Albert Pullman.

601
00:37:25,420 --> 00:37:26,289
Sounds fascinating.

602
00:37:26,290 --> 00:37:29,140
I look forward to reading that in September when it comes out, Simon.

603
00:37:29,369 --> 00:37:29,619
Thank you.

604
00:37:29,619 --> 00:37:30,410
And I appreciate that.

605
00:37:30,690 --> 00:37:32,565
And thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast.

606
00:37:32,565 --> 00:37:34,240
I really enjoyed our conversation.

607
00:37:34,510 --> 00:37:34,910
Thank you.

608
00:37:35,120 --> 00:37:35,500
Me too.

609
00:37:35,500 --> 00:37:36,250
This was great fun.

610
00:37:41,300 --> 00:37:44,080
Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast.

611
00:37:44,389 --> 00:37:48,710
For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at

612
00:37:49,029 --> 00:37:55,420
AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

613
00:37:55,850 --> 00:37:58,169
I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science

614
00:37:58,170 --> 00:38:00,970
and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person.

615
00:38:01,290 --> 00:38:05,439
You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org.

616
00:38:05,910 --> 00:38:09,359
Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues

617
00:38:09,370 --> 00:38:13,200
at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental

618
00:38:13,200 --> 00:38:17,180
Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National

619
00:38:17,180 --> 00:38:23,029
Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

620
00:38:23,529 --> 00:38:25,270
And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests

621
00:38:25,270 --> 00:38:27,100
today, and to all of you for listening.

622
00:38:27,580 --> 00:38:30,360
I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of AMSEcast.

623
00:38:32,970 --> 00:38:35,950
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would like to ask that you consider

624
00:38:35,950 --> 00:38:40,530
becoming a member of the 117 Society, the newest membership opportunity

625
00:38:40,580 --> 00:38:44,040
offered by the American Museum of Science and Energy Foundation.

626
00:38:44,810 --> 00:38:47,990
By joining the 117 Society, you will help us continue

627
00:38:47,990 --> 00:38:50,799
this podcast and our other innovative programming.

628
00:38:51,179 --> 00:38:54,110
You will support the expansion of our vitally important educational

629
00:38:54,110 --> 00:38:57,970
outreach, including virtual classes, and you will help ensure that both

630
00:38:57,980 --> 00:39:02,609
the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center can

631
00:39:02,610 --> 00:39:06,680
continue to provide world-class exhibits to our community and to the world.

632
00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:10,390
Benefits of membership includes special access to video

633
00:39:10,390 --> 00:39:14,600
and audio content, and 117 Society merchandise, as well

634
00:39:14,600 --> 00:39:17,530
as all the benefits of our Atom Splitter Membership Level.

635
00:39:18,119 --> 00:39:20,410
To learn more, go to AMSE.org.

636
00:39:21,510 --> 00:39:26,290
The 117 Society is vital to the future of AMSE and the K-25 History Center.

637
00:39:26,690 --> 00:39:29,330
I hope you will consider joining, and thank you very much.