What's the value in railroad history?

In an era when many corporations, particularly those dealing with consumer goods, are either shedding their historic images or downplaying them, for a number of reasons, railroading seems to maintain its traditional, love-hate relationship with the past. Let’s take a short look at why.

Railroading is an old industry. Few businesses in America can trace their roots to the year 1827. That’s when the Baltimore & Ohio was chartered for the carriage of passengers and freight. I say few can, because there were older corporations among them several banks, a chocolate company, a tobacco company, and a distillery. With the exception of the banks, most were chartered to produce and/or sell a product or commodity rather than provide a service.

That it is such an old industry is often a thorn in the side of more modern or progressive railroad management. This is evidenced by a drive to develop new and innovative ways of moving freight and passengers to compete with other modes of transportation. Such a drive, it is thought, tends to look less focused on the future when historical considerations come to the fore.

For example, railroads did not burst on the scene all at once. The technology that became the standard in the late 19th century developed over time and with many fits and starts, and accidents. No current railroad wants to be seen as a developer of technology that takes experimental risks with people and goods.

Another reason is that the corporate culture of railroads before the late 20th century tended to be militaristic. In fact, it’s what has allowed railroads to historically participate in wars—from the American Civil War to the most recent military campaigns—without significant changes in the structures of authority and personnel. Military officers fit right in as supervisors, bosses, and even executives; and vice versa.

What most corporations today don’t want you to know is that their cultures are still militaristic. The difference is most corporations do not have a public face that is literally all over the map. Therein lies another of railroading’s problems with, and ties to, the past.

A remarkable segment of the general public, if and when they see a railroad at all, expects to see something different from today’s modern, technologically advanced freight haulers. Steeped in the literature, lore, and music of the past, many people expect steam locomotives, whistles, bustling country stations and the clickety-clack of rail joints. They expect boxcars with hoboes, flat cars with open stacks of lumber and manufactured goods, and wreckers that still go out with a twelve-wheeled crane to pick up derailed cars and put them back on the tracks. This segment also expects Pullman-style accommodations on passenger trains and dining cars with table linens.

It is this segment that is not only surprised, but also somewhat put off by what modern railroading and passenger railroading has become. It is why some railroads go out of their way to play down their past and lower these expectations.

Still others, however, have gone the other way. Union Pacific has maintained at least one steam locomotive in operating condition since…well, since forever. Locomotive 844 was joined several years back by a Challenger, an articulated steam locomotive representing a large class of the same built for several railroads. Though 844 has gotten the priority over the last decade or so, another locomotive of a type unique to Union Pacific, a Big Boy articulated, has been pulled out of a California museum and into Union Pacific’s steam shops. Restoration has commenced.

Imagine the good will generated with the potentially shipping and traveling public when Big Boy it’s the rails under its own power! Not that people will travel Union Pacific, but they will gain a favorable impression of railroads.

Other railroads have honored their pasts; for example, Norfolk Southern has its previous and current steam programs. Still others have at least allowed vintage equipment to operate on main lines, bringing back senses of the past that have long vanished from American rails. Still, current railroaders, honorable men and women interested in doing their jobs, earning their pay, and going home to their families without delay for some rattling antique, may look askance at these efforts and say, “What value?”

I could be trite and say that we must honor the past or we are doomed to repeat it; but that’s not really what history is about. Sometimes it is good, in railroad terms, to repeat the past, with better results. Witness the upsurge of street railways, usually termed streetcars in America, trams in Europe and elsewhere. Cities have become aware that non-polluting, quiet, odorless (sometimes there’s ozone and hot oil) surface vehicles are better than propane, diesel or even natural gas buses ever were.

Other “everything old is new again” features of railroading? It is widely held and documented that the “modern” technology of unit trains for bulk and intermodal well cars for merchandise has peaked. New business for freight railroading is likely to be carload freight in mixed manifest trains carried shorter distances and flat switched (no “modern” hump yards) at the end points. To do this old dance, new methods of getting and keeping freight on the rails and scheduling it to arrive on time will have to be developed using today’s “modern” technology of microprocessors that know everything about at train everywhere and at all times.

Whether this will translate to passenger rail has yet to be seen, but I think many in various positions of authority with government and Amtrak are starting to realize that even the intercity streamliner is a past that railroading should hang onto, and, admittedly with a super large capital investment, expand into many, many more markets than Amtrak now serves.

What value? Like historic buildings that we didn’t save from the wrecker’s ball, and those we did, there are old railroad technologies out there that we in America have too soon dismissed as passé. Some we’ve given the wrecker’s ball, and some we haven’t. Let’s look closely before we dismiss any more of them. There really is value there.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)