As I recall from my childhood — the recollection quality not being the greatest — I took my one and only train ride when I was in first or second grade. We took a school bus from East Leroy into Battle Creek, and were all let off at the old — I want to say it was the New York Central depot, but I’m not totally sure — and waited together to get on board a Michigan Central train headed for Kalamazoo. On the way, the conductor did the usual spiel that conductors in the Fifties and Sixties probably did for schoolchildren: giving us facts about the train, asking us if we could figure out how fast we were running, that sort of thing. The chief thing that I remember, though, was how fun and exciting the ride was. It was my first experience with some other mass transit than a school bus; I had never been on a train or a city bus or an airplane before that time. Like most young kids of the early Sixties, passenger trains were still something new and exciting to our experience, which is why the memory stays with me to this day.
This was back in about 1964, when intercity passenger service was having its last gasp under the old railroad companies. Almost gone were the days of routinely hopping a train to go between, say, Detroit and Buffalo, or other points; or, for the wealthy and famous, booking a sleeper on the 20th Century Limited in New York and waking up the next day in Chicago, cosseted in streamlined velvet. As airplanes, and then the personal, deterministic transportation of the private automobile took hold of America, passenger service became less and less profitable for the railroads. It took the federal government to save passenger trains; stepping into the expanding vacuum left by discontinuations, it created Amtrak in 1971, assuming the running of passenger service in exchange for the “rolling stock” of the railroad companies. Even then, the remaining freight service saw many rocky times….
But railroad enthusiasm has not died out. Similar to the “roadgeeks” I’ve noted in a regular article, rail fans — and there are more of them out there than you know — study old routes and new diesel-electric locomotives, research the history of the old lines (the “fallen flags”), and trade memorabilia back and forth. The subculture thrives, and preserves the knowledge of times nearly lost to living memory.
But why the interest in something that has, seemingly, been nearly supplanted in usefulness? Goleor of reasons, actually, many of which I’m probably not aware of. But I can make some good guesses. For some, the fascination they felt as a child, the promise of travel and adventure and unknown vistas, has never faded. Add to that the romance of routes with names like the Coast Daylight, the City of New Orleans, the Canadian or the Orient Express….
For some, as I may have noted in that article on highways above, it is a study of a central facet of the history of civilization, especially in North America. Both the United States and Canada were explored by the pioneers and trailblazers, but the ground they crossed was settled and broken by people who first traveled on the iron horse. For every mile traversed by the railroads, settlements and farms expanded off perpendicular to the line by many more miles, forming towns that opened up the western continent. (The cost, of course, was the end of a lifestyle for the Native American/First Nation tribes living on the land the white man settled; this is another aspect of history that must be remembered and considered.)
Students of business history examine the stories of each company’s development, as well as their effect on the overall economic picture of the country. That, of course, also leads to studying the biographies of the men who built and ran the companies, particularly the “robber barons” such as J. P. Morgan, James Hill, Isambard K. Brunel, et al. These were men who built empires of finance out of steel and land, and built nations as a secondary effect. Engineering and technology catch your interest? Consider the designers, engineers and builders of the roads, e. g. George Stephenson, Sanford Fleming, George Pullman, etc. Their constructions helped to shape nations, and at times literally pulled history in their wake, from troops to living and dead presidents. Serious students don’t leave out these people and their achievements when looking at railroading.
None of this has died the death completely. Beyond the study of their past, you should look at the railways of today. Despite gloomy predictions in the Seventies following the collapse of the Penn Central, railroads survive today, mostly as bulk long-distance freight carriers. They haul only a tenth of what they carried in overall capacity in their heyday; but for unit loads of heavy bulk goods such as grain and ore, the long-distance freight is still the most efficient, economical form of transport.
And what of intercity passenger service? It was expected that Amtrak would oversee the quiet death of that service, according to one author I’ve seen. How dead is it? Care to book a trip?
No, railroads are not as big as they once were, but they still do the job. Check the links below to learn about their past and present, and see a suggested bibliography for further study.
