Tracks Across America with Simon Cordery

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. We’re continuing our look at 250 years of American innovation, thanks to a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, all in preparation for our nation’s upcoming semi-quincentennial.

0:47 A few episodes ago, I spoke about railroads and American technological innovation with Al Churella, and today we’re going to continue a discussion of the innovations that the railways inspired, but with more of a focus on the world of business, commerce, and government, showing how those technological innovations had a really wide-ranging impact. And to help us do that, we’re joined by Dr. Simon Cordrey, now the chair of the History Department at Iowa State University. Prior to that role, Simon was department chair at Western Illinois University and at Monmouth College in Illinois. He has been widely published, with books including Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness, The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading, and his latest schedule for publication later this year, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman.

1:37 Simon, thanks so much for joining us in the AMSEcast. My pleasure. Thank you, Alan. Am I right about, you have the book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur, coming out later this year, is that right? September. Very good. I’m looking forward to that. I also want to, as we start today, thank Julie King, our mutual friend at the National Railroad Hall of Fame in Galesburg, Illinois, for introducing us. Julie is great and doing some great work there in Illinois. So Simon, I’m a bit obsessed with railroads. I’m learning more and more about them. We hope to have a railroad component at our K-25 Atomic History Center in the not too distant future, which I would love to talk to you more about in that future. But let’s go back in history. When did railroads come to America and how quickly did they grow once they started sprouting up on our soil?

2:22 Yeah, let’s begin with the definition of what a railroad actually is because there are all sorts of rails and all sorts of roads. So, I would posit that a railroad is, well, essentially a vehicle with flanged wheels running on a rail of some sort, initially iron, later steel, cooled by steam locomotion, and so if that’s the definition that we can go with, let’s start on the Fourth of July, 1828, when Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, laid the first stone for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which two years later ran the first trains in America. The B&O was the first railroad in the United States. The first train ran 13 miles from Ellicott Mills to Baltimore, and it was horse drawn.

3:08 So, the first steam locomotive occurred later on in that same year, along the same track. And then in December of 1830 in South Carolina, the best friend of Charleston, the first American-built locomotive, pulled the first scheduled railroad run in the United States. And by 1830, we have less than 100 miles in operation. So that’s, you know, fragments here and there, short lines, as we might call them today. 1840, we can see some pretty dramatic growth: 3000 miles in operation, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England. By 1850, 9,000 miles. That’s substantial and rapid growth. And again, that’s spreading out now from the Mid-Atlantic and New England to Ohio and Michigan, as well as through the South.

3:51 And in 1856 a milestone occurs when the first rails are laid across the Mississippi River. That’s the Rock Island, the Chicago and Rock Island railroad, crosses the Mississippi River, brings Abraham Lincoln into contact with the railroad industry in his guise as a lawyer, and railroads can begin to expand westwards. That also generates incredible, incredible growth. By 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, there are about 30,000 miles of track in the United States. So, in 30 years, you’ve gone from basically 100 miles to 30,000 miles. And the growth continues. By 1870 you’ve got 52,000, almost 175,000 by 1890.

4:33 The high point is reached in 1916, about 254,000 miles of track in the United States. But that’s the high point, and then it starts to drop. By 1950 there’s only about 223,000 and for reasons that we’ll discuss later on today, there’s about 140,000 miles only, relatively, only. So, there was rapid expansion, but also some precipitous decline as well, in the development of railroads in the United States. I’ve been to Carrollton many times. I didn’t know that connection, and certainly the case you alluded to with Abraham Lincoln and the steamboats and the bridge across the river, a fascinating story we can talk about some other time. But really, truly phenomenal growth.

5:14 How did it compare to growth of rails in other countries? So, in terms of the pace of growth. It easily matches the United Kingdom. The rest of Europe was much slower. France and Germany, for example, were slow adopters, and that’s in part because they were slow—relatively slow—to industrialize, and there was less of a demand, less capital available, and quite simply, I suppose, the innovative capacity wasn’t there yet. I mean, France and Germany are certainly going to catch up and surpass Britain and the United States in terms of railroad innovation. Railroads tended to follow industrialization, and they tended to follow empire. So, for exa—in the case of India, you’ll see railroads developing quite rapidly after 1860 in India because of the need for, well, to be blunt, rapid military deployment in the Indian subcontinent, but also because of the need to transport raw materials to the coast, to ship, for example, cotton to the UK, and then also to get finished products like textiles to their customers.

6:18 So, as this is happening here in the US specifically, what kind of changes are happening in the business world to both support and carry on that expansion? And then around that, in terms of suppliers and the things growing up around the rail industry, what do we see in the business world? Well, there’s a lot of knock-on effects. And so, clearly railroads need iron and then steel, so they were definitely important in the development of those industries. Railroads need timbers for those ties that the track is attached to, so the growth of forests and then lumbering is also important for the railroads. You need something to generate power for the locomotives, and so that would be initially wood and then coal and then oil as well.

7:04 There are also multiple industries that don’t develop because of the railroad, but are expanding as a consequence of the railroad industry. So, we’re looking at the business world and how that’s changing, both with and around the rail industry. What about the impact of government and government oversight of that industry as it develops? We have things coming in like the Sherman Antitrust Act, Interstate Commerce Act, and so forth. How did that impact the industry and the growth of that over the 19th and early-20th centuries? The railroads were incredibly powerful. Railroad bosses had a tendency to want to control politics. And of course, anytime you have that sort of effect, you’re going to have popular pushback, and there was plenty of popular pushback.

7:51 And you could argue that the first real instance of political intervention into the railroad industry occurred in the state of Illinois with Munn versus Illinois in 1873, a case where a grain elevator operator was essentially sued by the state for unfair practices, and the State won, unexpectedly. Even more important, in 1887, you get the case of the Wabash Railroad Case, where the United States sues the Wabash Railroad Company on the grounds that it’s charging differential rates crossing state lines, and that is a precedent setting case.

8:34 The Federal Government wins that case, and it allows the federal government to then enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act and to make sure that the Interstate Commerce Commission can actually have some influence over the railroads. So, in terms of railroad regulation, the first railroad regulation that I’m aware of occurred in 1843, in of all places, Ireland, and set the standard gauge for the tracks in Ireland—the width between the tracks—and it sets the standard gauge at five feet and three inches, which is unusual because around the rest of the world today, the standard gauge is four feet, eight-and-a-half inches.

9:15 In Ireland, it’s still five-foot-three because of that legislation passed in 1843. So, that is the first case that I found of railroad regulation. Something similar happens in the rest of the United Kingdom in 1846, when the gauge is set at four feet, eight-and-a-half inches, although exceptions are allowed. And then finally, in 1868 the kind of regulation that you would expect to see, a financial law passes, the Regulation of Railways Act, companies are required to publish standardized accounts so the public gets to see exactly what’s going on with all that money that the public and governments are pouring into those railroad companies in order to allow them to operate.

9:57 Companies also are required to make emergency communication with the driver a regular part of their operation. So, in Britain, the carriages were mostly compartment carriages. So, people had essentially little self-enclosed compartment with two doors, one on each side, and if something went wrong, there’s no way to communicate with anyone else. And so, there are several instances, high profile instances of murders and robberies, and so as a consequence, the railroads were required to allow the public to communicate with the driver. And also this law, interestingly, designated smoking carriages. So, even as early as 1868 there’s a sense that smoking might not necessarily be the most social activity in which you can engage.

10:43 In the United States, the first meaningful act is the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The Interstate Commerce Act created the Interstate Commerce Commission, which has a long and very varied career, until it was disbanded in 1985. The Interstate Commerce Act required railroads to charge—and I’m quoting here—“Just and reasonable rates.” That sounds suitably vague, and it was. There was no definition of what constituted a just and reasonable rate for carrying goods and people, and so you can imagine a great deal of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict over exactly what that meant. The ICC heard shippers’ complaints.

11:24 If the ICC ruled—and it’s a five-man commission in the 19th century, it’s a five person commission—and they could rule that the rate was unfair, but they couldn’t actually force the railroads to change the amount that they were charging. So, the great weakness of the Interstate Commerce Commission is it has no enforcement powers beyond then sending a case onto the federal courts, which may or may not rule in favor and also takes a lot of time to adjudicate. One thing that the ICC did do was to try and ban the differential rates where, if you were shipping a good over ten miles, you might pay $10 per mile; if you’re shipping something for 100 miles, you might pay $5 a mile.

12:10 To our minds today, that makes sense because you’re essentially taking advantage of the economies of scale, but in the 19th century, the people didn’t look at it that way, and so it felt like it was an unfair, unjust charge, and so those charges were done away with. It’s certainly a case that the ICC was essentially toothless. In 1890 the federal government passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Sherman Antitrust Act was supposed to ban monopolies. It didn’t do so very successfully. By 1907 there were seven major holding companies that controlled almost two-thirds of the total railroad miles, and they controlled most of the important railroad mileage in the United States.

12:52 In 1904 though the Theodore Roosevelt administration used the Sherman Antitrust Act in order to bust Northern Securities, which was a holding company that controlled three main railroads in the northern tier of the United States, two of which were transcontinental by the definition of the day—they went from Chicago and Minneapolis to the West Coast—and successfully sued and forced Northern Securities to break up. But really, essentially, the Schuman Antitrust Act was not particularly successful by the standards of expectations of those who were championing antitrust legislation.

13:33 I think a more meaningful piece of legislation was indeed the Railway Safety Appliance Act of 1893. This act, which was the result of lobbying by a man by the name of Lorenzo Coffin, who was the Iowa commissioner of railroads and was very interested in safety appliances, he spent about 15 years trying to convince railroad companies that they should have uniform couplers to connect the cars and that they should have a single and safe automatic braking system. And there was one in existence: the Westinghouse brake, which had been around since the 1870s was incredibly adept at stopping trains because if a car uncoupled, the system automatically applied the brakes, and that was a brilliant system.

14:20 But the railroad companies considered it to be too expensive, they had their own systems of braking, and so not until 1893, after Lorenzo Coffin’s lobbying, along with the Master Car Builders Association, did the federal government pass the Railway Safety Appliance Act, which made railways so much safer that within a year, the number of accidents involving railway employees had dropped by half. But that’s an example of, I think, successful regulatory legislation. I think so. And it’s fascinating, as you said these moves that the government took to respond to this new industry, I’m curious as to how, over time, when we look at a new, disruptive technology that comes into play, how society and government reacts to that. So, right now, for example, AI is the topic of the day, of how we, over time, will respond to that with regulation or non-regulation, or whatever we end up doing, I think it’s really interesting to see how that happened with the rail industry.

15:12 And you noted in the ’80s there were changes. There’s deregulation of the industry. When did that happen exactly, and how did it affect the railroad industry? In the 1970s the railroads were in a terrible state. In the 1970s the railroad industry was full of bankrupt lines, there were accidents, there was lots of very, very slow running trains because the track was so bad. It was so bad that by 1980, the federal government realized that one of the biggest problems was regulation, that what it had to do was deregulate the industry. And so, Harley Staggers, senator from West Virginia, and other politicians, passed the Staggers Act.

15:53 And in 1980 the Staggers Act, by deregulating the industry, allowed the railroad companies to do something revolutionary, which was, respond to supply and demand without the federal government getting in the way. And that liberated the railroad industry. And that liberation took at least two forms, one of which was railroad companies no longer had to run unprofitable passenger and freight trains. Before 1980, railroad companies had to get authorization in order to abandon services, especially passenger services. So, you might have a passenger train that’s running five times a week. It has six passengers a run, and it’s losing thousands of dollars. The federal government took a long time to allow companies to abandon those trains, and so that’s one thing they were able to do.

16:41 Companies were then able to abandon unprofitable track. So, there was a lot of overbuilding, in the 1880s and 1890s in particular, and one of the reasons we reached the peak in 1914 is because there’s so much track being built. There’s lots of duplicate track, there are lots of companies competing for the same relatively small supply of business, and as a consequence, there’s a lot of track that isn’t really needed. And so, Staggers allows companies to abandon that track. And where I live in Iowa, you can drive in almost any direction from here in Ames, and you will see the consequence of that is you will see the former track beds, some of which have been turned into walking and biking paths, some of which you can still see because there’s basically long humps in the field, usually surrounded by trees.

17:31 And so, that enabled the companies to focus on profitable lines only, or lines that they thought they could turn a profit with, once they had consolidated their mileage. I know that as the 20th century progressed, that industry, as you said, was in pretty bad shape by the ’70s. How did deregulation help that industry move forward? Where does it stand today? So, there are fewer companies today, as a consequence. There are only six major Class I railroads in the United States, two of which come from Canada. And the other thing that it allowed the railroads to do was to differentially price, and so they could respond to market fluctuations. And so, for example, if a trucking company is able to provide a service at a certain rate, the railroad companies are allowed to undercut that rate, which they weren’t before Staggers, and so it allows them to respond to those market opportunities quickly in a way that they weren’t before 1980.

18:29 I know they’re still a massive part of the economy. I think some folks were out in the interstate, and we’re surrounded by tractor trailers and so forth, and we might downplay the role of rails in moving goods across the country, but still a massive part of the economy. Yeah, I don’t think you can underestimate how much the railroads provide because the container, for example, which is the common way of shipping goods from the coast to central points like Chicago and Norfolk and New York and Philadelphia, the container—the intermodal container—allows goods to be shipped quickly from one type of transportation, like a ship, onto a train, onto a truck, and that has really facilitated the flow of goods in the United States.

19:13 Also, heavy commodities. As coal-fired power plants are coming back online, where’s that coal going to be shipped from and how? And so, the answer is, well, the railroads have always shipped coal, and they will continue to do so as long as there is a demand. If you were to put all of that coal on the road, that would slow things [laugh] down considerably. So, yeah, 125 or 150-car coal train carrying crucial commodity from the mine to the power plant is taking a lot of strain off of the roads. And any bulk commodity. One thing I meant to ask you a bit earlier, when we were talking about changes in the business world, certainly looking at the effect of the railways on labor and labor organization, can you summarize how did the development the railroads affect the labor organization and labor market in America?

20:04 In the first railroad labor organization was the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers of 1863, and they were a brotherhood in the sense that they were a craft union. They wanted to organize only the engineers who drove the locomotives. And their aim was to create mutual relations, good relations, between management—or supervisors, in their case—and the engineers. And they also provided insurance provisions, basic insurance, accident insurance, sickness insurance, funeral benefits for their members. So, they were less interested in confrontation and more interested in seeing their role in partnership with the corporations.

20:47 Well, that worked all very well and good until about 1877 when there was a national railroad strike. In 1877, that mutualist ideal fell to pieces and confrontation became the expectation of the day. The Brotherhoods engaged in confrontation, but because they only represented sectors of the labor force, they weren’t always successful. More successful, far more successful was the American Railway Union, which, in 1894 after about a year of existence, was pushed into a strike because of what was happening in Pullman, Illinois, when Pullman workers, who were building luxury railroad cars and freight cars, were pushed out of work because they wanted to respond to the depression and earn a bit more money, or at least keep the wages that they were earning.

21:35 And as a consequence, a national railroad strike was called. And this establishes this kind of confrontational expectation between labor and capital that we still see today in negotiations over contracts. Another effect of the railroad labor unions started in 1925, with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who were very important in both establishing the decent working conditions for porters on the railroads, but also—and in the long-term, probably more importantly—helping to build the kind of knowledge and awareness of politics that led into the civil rights movement.

22:19 A. Philip Randolph, one of the leaders of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is a towering figure in the civil rights struggles. Something I learned a bit about during my time in Illinois; really an important and fascinating story. Another effect that the railway expansion had on our society is something I think we don’t think a lot about, but it had an effect on how we keep time throughout the US? How did that happen? So that, once again, you can see that happening first in the UK. I mean, the first creation of a standard time came in 1840, when the Great Western Railway linked its times table to Greenwich Mean Time. And so, if Bristol was five minutes ahead of London in real life, it didn’t matter because now the Bristol trains would arrive according to Greenwich Mean Time.

23:06 And by 1855, almost all British Railways were running by Greenwich Mean Time. You see early efforts in the United States. In 1869 there was a petition by Chicago area railroads to ask the Common Council to adopt a standard set of time zones for the Chicago area. That effort failed, but it was one of many, culminating in November of 1883, when railroads were able to convince all the companies across the United States that were running trains to adopt the four time zone map that we have now, and that made operations much, much easier. And it’s enacted into law in 1918 at the conclusion of the First World War, when the federal government agrees we have to have these standard times and these other standard time zones.

23:54 So, yeah, it’s certainly something that changes the way we look at the world. Because, you know, if we were to live by our own time zones, we would have a very different sense of how the world operated. So, yeah, I mean, the railroads standardized time in the way that they standardized so much about the world around us. It’s phenomenal to me that it took so long to do that. And to think that the fighting of the Civil War, for example, and the massive amount of men and material that were moved around on the rails during that time, we still didn’t have a standardized time. So, that’s really interesting. Speaking of time, I love my watches, Simon, people will tell you that, and I have a mixture of manual and digital ones. So, let’s talk about digital technology for a moment.

24:35 I like that segue [laugh] . So, how has digital technology, new technology, newer, faster trains, how has that impacted the railroad industry in the US? So, let’s address the question of speed. Because unfortunately, with the honorable exception of the Northeast Corridor, trains in the United States aren’t much faster, if at all, than they were in the 1950s, at the heyday of the express trains. And so, I’m going to give you a couple of examples there. The Broadway Limited, which ran from New York City to Chicago: in the 1950s, it took 15-and-a-half hours to traverse that route. Today, the Lakeshore Limited, Amtrak’s crack train between Chicago and New York takes about 19-and-a-half hours.

25:21 So, we’ve lost four hours there, and there are lots of reasons for that. Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks, the tracks aren’t always high speed accessible, the equipment isn’t necessarily—although it should be—able to run at those high speeds. But the same is true for freight trains. And so, in the 1950s the Santa Fe, the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe was running the so-called Super C between Los Angeles and Chicago, 2200 miles. It took 40 hours. That was admittedly an exception. It was the fastest freight train over that distance in the world at the time, but that’s very impressive. Today, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief—which admittedly has to make stops to let passengers get on and off—takes about 43 hours, and as far as I know, there are no freight trains today that can match the Super C. So, in terms of speed, not so much.

26:10 However, digital technology is great for operational efficiency and safety, for time tabling. Digital technology is incredibly useful for better safest signaling. Moving away from mechanical signals to digitally controlled, or electronically pulse controlled signals has proven to be much more effective at avoiding accidents. Better inventory control in terms of where goods are at any one time, those digital outputs are very, very useful for keeping track of all of that freight that’s moving around the country. Simply keeping track of cars. I mean, even today, freight cars get lost, and so digital technology has allowed companies to track their cars much more efficiently.

26:58 And also communication between dispatch centers and crews. Obviously, if you’ve got cell towers, if you’ve got satellite communication, that makes things a lot easier in an environment where the large railroads dispatch their trains from a central center. So, for example, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe has a massive, great dispatching Center in Fort Worth, Texas, from which it controls virtually all of its trains. And the same is true for the other major Western road, the Union Pacific, which has a dispatch center in Omaha, Nebraska, that does the same thing. So, there are some local dispatching, but almost all of it is controlled by satellite, and I think that would have been impossible without digital technology.

27:40 You mentioned Amtrak a couple times there. When I lived in DC, I would take Amtrak up to New York or Boston, and certainly, my time in Illinois, it was a Godsend, frankly, from Springfield to Chicago and back. I got to know that route pretty well. I could fall asleep and wake up at the right time, and so forth. And is Amtrak a sustainable model, an expandable model in the US? What is the status of Amtrak right now? I imagine that working for Amtrak at the moment is a matter of holding your breath and hoping that the current administration doesn’t notice you because Amtrak only exists as a consequence of federal subsidies. But to be fair, that’s true around the world.

28:20 There are literally no passenger rails that run over any distance that make a profit. Moving people is simply unprofitable. If you make back the operational costs, great, but you’re unlikely to be able to pay the capital costs of owning and operating a railroad. So yeah, Amtrak, where it does run, as you discovered, from Springfield to Chicago provides a very good service. And so, the problem is it doesn’t run everywhere, and it doesn’t run very much. I mean, there’s one train a day between Chicago and LA, and Chicago and Seattle, and so that’s simply not a great number of trains. The Northeast Corridor, However, as I said, is the honorable exception.

29:01 Trains up to 150 miles an hour, over about, I think, about 30 miles of its track. 125 miles an hour over the rest of it. Well, that’s good. That’s competing with the fastest trains in most of Europe, and that’s a high speed, efficient, effective, punctual service because Amtrak owns the tracks. And that’s the key. Across the rest of the country, Amtrak doesn’t own the rails over which it runs, and so they are, I wouldn’t say, hostage to the host railroads, but they are certainly reliant upon the host railroads to make sure their trains are dispatched on time, to make sure the track is available on time, to make sure that they can operate, and that is genuinely a problem. Could Amtrak expand? Potentially.

29:41 It looks like, according to transport economists, that any medium-distance run, say 300 miles, Chicago to Detroit, can be effectively operated by rail in competition with road and air, and that has potential for the future. Again, the problem is not owning the tracks. Amtrak is simply too dependent upon the host railroads on the one hand and federal subsidies on the other. There are in the United States two major high-speed projects underway—or one is genuinely underway, and the other one is trying to raise capital. The one that’s underway is Brightline West, which is building a high speed track between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

30:27 Brightline West is building about 218 miles—admittedly, from a suburb of LA because it’d be very expensive to build into LA—the financing does include federal subsidies. They have about, I think, $4 billion in federal money out of the $12 billion that they have raised so far. They’re projected to open in 2028 and it’s a completely—as in France, as an in parts of the United Kingdom—it is a completely separate right of way. So, only Brightway West trains will run, and they’ll run up to speed of 150 miles an hour over those tracks. They reckon that the 218 miles can be traversed in about two hours. Another exciting, although perhaps more utopian, project is the Texas Central, about 240 miles from Dallas to Houston.

31:14 The Texas central estimates that you can travel between those two major cities in 90 minutes. It would be great if they actually had started construction. They haven’t, so it’s unclear when those trains will start to run. But there is, you know, at least there is some sense that there is a little bit of ambition and a little bit of desire to provide high-speed rail in the United States. Having made the drive between Dallas and Houston a few times, I would have welcomed any other alternative to that. I wonder, as you talked about the lack of profitability for passenger lines, is there any path from here to there making that a profitable enterprise?

31:55 Is it a question of owning lines and technology, or is there no clear path to profitability? In the United States, at least, certainly since after the Second World War, railroad passenger travel was always subsidized by the freight side. And so, in the United Kingdom, the attempt to privatize passenger rail—or all of rail—has failed miserably, and so the government is busily re-nationalizing most of the rail network in the UK. And part of that is passengers are people. And so, unlike a load of coal, people expect to get to their destination on time, people expect to be warm and comfortable, people expect a relatively reliable service, and people complain.

32:39 And so, railroads have to make sure that their service is all of the above, as well as, in competition with road and air, economically priced. And I think that’s the key. If railroads had a monopoly on long-distance travel and could charge anything they wanted to, and we had to take them, okay yeah, they could be profitable, but then who couldn’t? So, I suspect the answer is, passenger rail will probably never be profitable until there is an incredible change in the way we calculate cost, in the way we look at capital construction. I mean, there is a passenger railroad in Florida that runs between Miami and Orlando, Brightline—the company that owns Brightline West, the LA to Las Vegas train—Brightline in Florida, owned by Fortress Investment Group, is not making a profit.

33:27 It’s been operating since I think, 2018. Of course, naturally, they had a bit of a problem during Covid. They had to cease operations during Covid. They are operating an excellent service with regular, fast trains. Most of the track is owned by the Florida East Coast, so they don’t own the track they run on. It’s a model, perhaps, for the future. And Fortress Investment has said that they are in this for the long-term, and they expect to make a profit eventually, but that’s not at the moment their priority. Their priority is building up a customer base and proving that the service has value. I wonder—and Simon, I know I’m getting way off topic of the US here, but I’m curious—I’ve taken trains, obviously in the UK, but also in Spain and Italy, and they’re always very busy.

34:10 And we just were, this summer, in Italy and took a wonderful train from Rome to Naples and back. Are those government owned, typically? Is that how they manage those systems, or are they a mix? Yeah, it’s a mix of government and private. And so, most of the railroad operators in Europe now have what’s called open access, where if you want to run a train, you can do. You can bid on runs, and of course, open access operators bid on the potentially most profitable runs. So, anything from Rome to Florence, or Rome to Bologna would of course, be open-access oriented. And those trains run in competition with the state subsidized trains.

34:51 And yeah, Europeans are simply used to traveling by train. Part of that is that distances tend to be a lot shorter, which is helpful, but also there’s slightly less car ownership, the roads are nowhere nearly as good as the roads in the United States, and people are just more used to the culture of public transport. And God love them. I love Italy, and Naples is an amazing city, but I would never drive a car in Naples, so I [laugh] knew better than to try to drive a vehicle in Naples. So, a really fascinating conversation. Tell us more about your upcoming book. Oh thanks, Alan, yes. It’s Gilded Age Entrepreneur, and it’s the life of Albert Benton Pullman, who was the brother, the elder brother, of George Mortimer Pullman.

35:36 And George Pullman is the name that everyone knows. He was the individual credited with developing the luxury sleeping car. What we don’t know, and what my forays into the archives reveal is that Albert Pullman was the craftsman of the family who was most responsible for actually the designs of the luxury cars, especially in the first 10 to 15 years of the company, when they suddenly gained so much attention. But he was also the marketing genius behind Pullman’s campaigns to convince the traveling public that they should ride these luxury cars, pay a little bit extra, but ride in your living room and in your bedroom, basically.

36:17 That’s what they were aiming to replicate. And so, he also had an interesting life outside of the Pullman Company. Albert Pullman, the entrepreneur, was a banker. He was a banker in a bank that the federal government shut down. He was an insurance executive in an insurance company that was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire. He was a manufacturer, and he was someone who had many patents of railroad products that were, with one exception at the end of his life, never employed by the railroads. So, he had a fascinating life. And he illustrates the kind of the everyday entrepreneur. In the 19th century, you have people who are striving, obviously, to get rich, and those strivers tend to be ignored because we look at the Morgans and the Rockefellers and the George Pullmans.

37:06 And so, Albert Pullman and his strata, ignored in part because the sources aren’t there, but also ignored because we tend to focus on the triumphs, and we tend not so much to look at those who were not as successful as they might have wanted to be on their own terms, and that’s certainly Albert Pullman. Sounds fascinating. I look forward to reading that in September when it comes out, Simon. Thank you. And I appreciate that. And thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. Me too. This was great fun. 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.

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