The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire, 1846-1917 (American Business, Politics, and Society) - Hardcover

Churella, Albert J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081224348X ISBN 13: 9780812243482

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012

Synopsis

"Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise," Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people—more than double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad of the World," this colossal corporate body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship between business and government to advances in technology and transportation.

Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.

About this title

About the Author:

Albert J. Churella is Associate Professor in the Social and International Studies Department at Southern Polytechnic State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

My earliest memories are of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, the PRR interrupted more than one family dinner, as my parents helped me to walk unsteadily outside to see a train lurch even more unsteadily down the little-used branch line to Mount Vernon, abandoned just a few years later. I am a product of the last year of the baby boom, born as the Standard Railroad of the World was dying. The Pennsylvania Railroad merged itself out of existence, becoming the Penn Central Transportation Company in 1968, shortly before I rode my first train. On more than one occasion, my parents would bring me to Union Station in Columbus, then less than a decade away from demolition. I could stand by the concourse windows and look down—an uncommon perspective for a small child—on the slowly spinning cooling fans on the Penn Central diesels that idled below. But on one particular day, the station was more crowded than it had been in years, as the United Aircraft TurboTrain was open for public viewing. It was Tuesday, May 25, 1971. I am certain of the date, because I still have the yellowed newspaper clipping, tucked in a box, forgotten through several moves, and serendipitously rediscovered less than a year before I finished writing this volume. An announcement that the train was offering a free one-way trip to Pittsburgh later that evening induced my father, in a world still innocent of automatic teller machines, to take every cent my mother had in her purse, leaving her behind to explain to an understanding teacher why I would not be in school the next day.

The Pan Handle route to Pittsburgh was now part of the Penn Central, but for all intents and purposes it still looked like the PRR, with the equipment, buildings, and people unchanged since the merger. The track was sound enough that my father could escort me to the glass partition aft of the upper-level engineman's compartment, watching as the speedometer briefly touched a hundred miles an hour. At Pittsburgh, we transferred to a local train, operated by the newly formed National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known as Amtrak. The train was still purely Penn Central, and probably consisted of a tired old E-8 locomotive pulling a few equally worn out coaches. We traveled through the night to Altoona, where it was too dark to see the Horseshoe Curve, arriving in the small hours of the morning, too late for a hotel, too early for rental cars to be available, just right for a restless nap on a hard wooden bench in the waiting room. Come morning, my father rented a car and we drove past the half-deserted buildings of what had once been the greatest railroad shops in the world. Climbing through hills that the Pennsylvania Railroad had drained of coal, we went to visit relatives in Ebensburg and Patton, a town named for a family that was closely connected with the PRR.

The Pennsylvania Railroad had once provided passenger service to Ebensburg, Patton, and countless other small towns, but those links to the wider world had long since disappeared, and even the freights called at increasingly infrequent intervals. My father's brother was born, grew up, still lived, and later died in Patton, amid first- and second-generation Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. For many decades, most people in Patton dug coal from the surrounding hills and loaded it into PRR hopper cars. Just after the dawn of the twentieth century, they were digging underneath Patton, at the same moment as their countrymen, along with Irish, Italians, and African-Americans, were burrowing through the muck and mire underneath the Hudson River, pushing the PRR one last mile into Manhattan, at almost the same moment that my uncle came into the world, in 1909.

My uncle's first memory was of an early day in school, lessons interrupted by a continuous wailing whistle, the teacher leaving briefly, then returning, telling the children to go to their homes, the school emptying as men ran uphill to the entrance of the mine. Explosions, fires, and cave-ins (he could not remember which one happened that day) were common enough during the early years of the twentieth century, but that incident soured him on a career in the mines. Years later, a stint at the Patton Clay Manufacturing Company, home of the renowned "Patton Pavers," so filled his mouth and nostrils with red dust that he worked for one day, went home, and never returned. For more than half a century, he ran a store and meat market, the last link in a chain of distribution in which the PRR brought the necessities and luxuries of life to yet another small town. The railroad yards were once filled with the PRR's cars, bringing in those supplies, and ready to carry away the coal and the bricks that made the town prosper. On later trips to Patton, I wandered through those yards, virtually deserted, and past the closed mines and the abandoned brickworks, full of the ghosts of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The years passed and the spirits faded, but never fully disappeared. I spent four years at Haverford College, the alma mater of David Bevan, chief financial officer and perhaps the most despised executive, and unfairly so, on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The surrounding suburb had once been home to one of the PRR's most respected executives, Alexander J. Cassatt, an individual with whom I share a monogram, if not necessarily the same wealth or managerial predilections. Haverford was an affluent bedroom community on the Main Line, one of the nation's first railroad suburbs, made possible and indeed planned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. At the small station nearly a century old, it was still possible to see the Broadway Limited, at that time operated by Amtrak, but now extinct, go flashing past. And the opposite perspective, glimpsing the Haverford station from a sleeping car window on the Broadway, the only proper way, I thought, to travel by from central Ohio to Philadelphia. The National Limited route from St. Louis had long since disappeared, and I was not about to rely on a car, bus, or airplane to reach my parent's home in Columbus. My post-Christmas trip back to college thus began on a frigid January night on the deserted platform at Crestline, Ohio, waiting for a train that offered transportation, warmth, companionship, the scenery of a nation transected. Minutes after flashing through Haverford, the train arrived at a far grander edifice than the one that I had left the night before. A magnificent structure, 30th Street Station had somehow escaped the sad fate of so many grand train stations, and it uplifted the soul of many a weary long-distance traveler. The nearby and contemporaneous Suburban Station seemed conversely design to crush the spirits of the commuters who daily trudged through its rabbit warren of underground passageways. And on numerous occasions, I traveled to both Philadelphia stations on the SEPTA Silverliner cars that had only recently replaced the last of the red rattletrap PRR MP-54 commuter equipment.

My connection to the Pennsylvania Railroad, perhaps tenuous, is hardly unique. It has become a routine experience, on telling someone that I am writing a book "about trains," to hear in response a story of an ancestor who worked for a railroad, or even worked for the railroad. The ancestral recollections, and particularly the reminiscences of those who earned a PRR paycheck, now nearly a lifetime ago, rarely paint a rosy picture of their employer. Railroading has always been, and remains, a brutally dangerous occupation, one that wears down men and women with the same steady predictability as it erodes rail, ties, locomotives, and cars. Many people gave their lives while serving the Pennsylvania Railroad, scalded in boiler explosions, crushed between cars, victims of momentary carelessness or simple bad luck. Others lost fingers, hands, arms, legs, or eyesight. The trauma was hardly confined to the ranks of labor, and even top executives succumbed to the strain of managing the world's largest transportation corporation. "Railroad service has become like that of the army and navy—in effect, service of the public, and . . . the work is more arduous than in civil life," one PRR executive noted in 1912. Variants of the phrase "retired owing to ill health" appeared with deplorable frequency in PRR personnel records and executive biographies. The incessant demands associated with running a railroad caused some executives to collapse under the strain, to request a transfer to less arduous duties, to suffer a complete nervous breakdown. Or worse. Of the first eight presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad, four died in office, and two others lived less than a year into their retirement. Many other executives died at their desks, felled by a heart attack or a stroke. In 1882, a writer for the trade journal Railroad Gazette portrayed the burden of management in starkly accurate terms. "The responsibilities and duties of this officer [the president] are almost too great to be borne by any one man who desires faithfully to fulfil them and not die an early death."

Employment at all levels of the company was demanding and dangerous in large measure because the PRR stood at the apex of industrial America. By 1875, it operated more miles of track, carried more tons of freight, reflected a larger concentration of investment capital, and generated more revenues than any other railroad in the United States. For two decades, beginning in 1881, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. At its height, the Pennsylvania Railroad controlled nearly 13 percent of all the capital invested in the American railroad network, and operated a tenth of the locomotives and a seventh of the freight cars in service in the United States. Nearly half of the electrified mainline track in the country belonged to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Its trains rumbled and roared across a four-track main line that stretched from New York to Pittsburgh, and over thirty thousand miles of track on eleven thousand miles of route, scattered across thirteen states and the District of Columbia. The Pennsylvania Railroad operated more miles of railroad than any other country in the world, with the exception of Britain and France. It manufactured far more steam locomotives than any other railroad. And, it built some of the most monumental civil engineering works and some of the grandest railway terminals in the country.

"The Company" (internal corporate documents routinely used the upper case, as if there were no other) employed more people than any other railroad in the United States. At peak employment levels, in 1919, more than 280,000 people worked for the PRR. That was more than twice the number of soldiers who were enlisted in the United States Army at the beginning of World War I. The company's senior executives enjoyed access to the highest levels of political and economic power, and they helped to shape the political economy of the nation. For many years the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad served as an industrial statesman, speaking on behalf of the railway industry and the values of capitalism. In the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the phrase "the President" could just as easily mean the occupant of the PRR's executive suite in Philadelphia as the individual who lived in the White House. "Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise," Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation."

Like the works of any nation, the legacy of the Pennsylvania Railroad endures. The size and the scope of the company's operations have left an indelible imprint on the physical and human geography of the United States. From the brutally truncated remains of Penn Station in New York, through the tunnels under the Hudson River, south to the grander edifices at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and west across the Rockville Bridge and the Horseshoe Curve, the PRR's engineering works—many of them more than a century old—endure.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was, and still is, intertwined with the lives of a great many people. The company shaped the lives of millions of Americans, from the train crews that moved millions of passengers and countless tons of freight, to the shop forces that labored at Altoona and other facilities, to the Irish, Italian, African American, and Hispanic track workers for whom the Pennsylvania Railroad represented both an income and an opportunity for social mobility. In 1914, an anonymous writer for the trade journal Railway Age Gazette, the successor to the Railroad Gazette, emphasized that a job with the PRR represented more than a paycheck. "To be a Pennsylvania employee," he observed, "is to have a fixed position, the assurance of fair treatment, and a certain respect and prestige in the social and business life of the community."

The Pennsylvania Railroad had many critics, which included many of its employees, passengers, and shippers—to say nothing of legislators, presidents, and an often-hostile press. Some of that criticism was justified, to be sure, but much was also the result of the PRR's status as the largest railroad—and the biggest target—in the world. For all of the criticism, however, most Americans respected the Pennsylvania Railroad and its beneficent influence on the maturing American industrial economy. In an era of weak national governance, the PRR was a highly developed bureaucracy. In an era of relatively modest federal budgets, the Pennsylvania Railroad had a budget larger than any other company in the United States, second only to that of the national government itself. In an era of sharply limited social welfare programs, the PRR provided benefits to its employees and to the communities that it served. "There was a time," the 1914 author continued, "when the farmers and storekeepers along the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad preferred to take Pennsylvania pay checks in payment of bills rather than United States greenbacks."

The sheer size of the Pennsylvania Railroad ensured that the research, writing, and above all the organization of its corporate history would be a daunting task. Simply listing the name of every employee who worked for the PRR in 1919 would generate a document nearly the length of this book. What was originally envisioned as a one-volume work has, with the kind indulgence of the publisher, growth to two rather lengthy volumes. The division between the two is set around 1917, at a time when the completion of the link to Manhattan, a changing regulatory environment, American entry into World War I, and looming highway competition significantly altered the PRR's course. Still, to keep this project within somewhat manageable limits, I had to downplay, or even discard, some elements of the PRR's history and emphasize others. To some degree, the choices are obvious. After all, how could one not discuss the building of Penn Station, the development of what was once the most sophisticated organizational bureaucracy in the world, or the application of extraordinarily sophisticated technological systems? In other areas, I have pursued more esoteric topics that I have found of interest, or that foreshadowed significant future developments. Even though several key issues, most notably locomotive d...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 081224348X
• ISBN 13: 9780812243482
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 968