Boston and Albany Railroad

“ The railroad journey from Boston to Terre Haute, the western terminus of the road, was a very different one from that of today, taking then a week instead of a few hours.
They went down from Anson and Norridgewock to Boston where they exchanged their “money at Suffolk Bank for their bills, as they were good anywhere West, and none others were.”
Leaving Boston at 8 A.M., an all day ride took them to Albany, where they spent the night at the Delavan House. They went on early the next morning to Buffalo, which was reached at 11 P.M. Here they “put up at the Clarendon House. Tired. Sleepy.” ”

“ Some such motive, we doubt not, moved one or two of our natural and experimental philosophers to get up the project of a railroad from Boston to Albany; a project which every one knows, who knows the simplest rules in arithmetic to be impracticable but at an expense a little less than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and which if practicable, every person of common sense knows would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon. ”

“ In the beginning he would change cars four or five times between Albany and Buffalo; and when fifteen or sixteen years later the railroad had extended itself all the way out to Chicago there were three or four more changes to be made. To-day a solid train from New York or Boston to Chicago or St. Louis is so much a part of our regular order of things as to cause no comment whatever. Yet even to-day one cannot ride across the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific without a change of cars—that is, not in the United States. ”

“ As the last link in the chain of railroads from Albany to Buffalo was completed early in 1843, there was then, or soon after, continuous mail transportation by railroad from Boston, through Worcester, Springfield and Albany to Buffalo. The completion of the Hudson River Railroad, and of the New York and Erie Railroad in 1851, gave us direct railroad communication with New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, and the completion of the Buffalo & State Line Railroad and other roads in or before 1852, gave us further railroad service for the supply of the Buffalo office. ”

“ Here's eleven railroads reaching west to Buffalo, called the Central System. Here are others that go on to Chicago and others that run east to Boston. Here is the steamer line from New York to Albany, closed half the year. Here are two lines of railroad that run north from New York to the capital—the Harlem and the Hudson River. The Harlem road can be bought for less than six cents on the dollar. ”

“ A. it means that they will carry freight from Chicago to Philadelphia cheaper than they will carry from Chicago to Pittsburgh; that they will carry cheaper from Chicago to Albany than they will carry it to Pittsburgh; that Pittsburgh merchants can take goods to Boston, and take them to San Francisco a great deal cheaper—paying the freight to Boston and back—a great deal cheaper than they can ship them direct to San Francisco. There were three thousand tons shipped by Wilson, Walker & Co., to Boston, and from Boston to San Francisco, paying the freight to Boston and back. ”

“ In all, no less than forty-seven persons lost their lives, while sixty others were maimed or severely bruised. So much for a collision in October, 1854. In October, 1874, on the Boston & Albany road, the regular New York express train, consisting of a locomotive and seven cars, while going during the night at a speed of forty miles an hour, was suddenly, near the Brimfield station, thrown by a misplaced switch into a siding upon which a number of platform freight cars were standing. The train was thoroughly equipped, having both Miller platform and Westinghouse brake. ”

“ Business can be done cheaper in Boston than in New York; and yet New York has drawn away from us a large proportion of our legitimate business,—the sale of our manufactured goods; and this loss can be directly attributed to a defect in our railroad system, which can and should be remedied. I say defect, but, more properly, the want of a strong and independent line of railroad through to the West, controlled in the interest of Massachusetts. ”

“ To-day Boston is without a through and independent line to the West, and while we are shipping our goods to New York to be sold, to be transported over the great lines leading South and West, our own Western road, so called, in 1872, according to the annual report of the directors, carried through from Boston to Albany 112,071 tons of freight, and from Albany to Boston 556,202 tons—more than four times as much from the West than is carried to the West ”

“ It is doubtful if any other large American city would tolerate for a month the sort of suburban service which to-day is doled out to the Boston metropolitan district. Ancient and dilapidated cars, pulled by equally ancient and dilapidated locomotives, are the sad lot of the Boston commuter. The records of the railroad companies themselves show that some of these ancient coaches date from as far back as the early eighties; many of them go back into the nineties. Nightly the trains are crowded, not only to the extent of their seating capacities, but well beyond them. ”

“ Each evening at a quarter after seven a fast-freight train of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad leaves the Mott Haven terminal of that system, in the upper section of New York, for Boston. With selected equipment, it makes good time on the 229-mile run to Boston and pulls in there shortly before six o’clock in the morning. A hard-headed and long-visioned motor-truck concern in New York fills three to a dozen box-cars in that train each night. ”

“ There is an elevated road whose trains, like the surface cars, are accommodated in the centre of the city by the subway. All the various roads—surface, elevated (about 7 m., built 1896-1901) , and subway—are controlled, almost wholly, by one company. They all connect and interchange passengers freely; so that the ordinary American five-cent fare enables a passenger to travel between almost any two points over an area of 100 sq. m. The two huge steam-railway stations of the Boston & Maine and the Boston & Albany systems also deserve mention. ”

“ They dare not but learn. On this point the figures of the Massachusetts annual returns between the year 1871 and the year 1878 speak volumes. At the time of the Revere disaster, with one single honorable exception,—that of the Boston & Providence road,—both the atmospheric train-brake and the Miller platform, the two greatest modern improvements in American car construction, were practically unrecognized on the railroads of Massachusetts. Even a year later, but 93 locomotives and 415 cars had been equipped even with the train-brake. ”

“ Because of its isolated position Boston had not shared in the direct trade with the Central States, but had been compelled to buy and sell through the merchants of New York and Philadelphia. The new railroad completely altered the position of Boston and brought an era of great prosperity to the city, at the same time demonstrating the practicability of the steam road as a carrier of nearly all kinds of freight. ”

“ The first passenger railroad in America was operated between Albany and Schenectady.
The first train in the state, consisting of the locomotive "De Witt Clinton," named for the seventh governor, and three coaches (resembling early stage coaches) , was built for the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Co., the original unit of the present New York Central Lines, and was chartered in 1826 to run from Albany to Schenectady—a distance of 16 M. The locomotive was constructed at the West Point foundry and taken to Albany by boat. ”

“ Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. ”

“ It is the problem of the cities that counts—not merely Albany or Buffalo or Pittsburg, but New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago. There is no use in laying [Pg 141] down additional main tracks when the terminals in the hearts of these great cities are so sadly congested as to take a freight-car as long to move through a single one of them as from three hundred to five hundred miles on open line. ”

“ A natural evolution of traffic alongshore has been seen in the extension, so to speak, of the railroads across both salt and fresh water. Soon after the Boston and Providence Railroad was opened (June 15, 1835) , its directors made an agreement with a line of steamers to New York under which the vessels of rival lines were excluded from the terminal facilities of the railroad, and the passengers from the rival lines had to wait hours for a train on which to continue their journey. ”

“ Our blunders are often very expensive. The only redeeming thing about them is that we pass our experience on to others and save them from tumbling into the same pit. Thus it was with the early railroad builders. When the Boston and Providence Road was constructed this mistake was not repeated and a flexible wooden roadbed was laid. In the meantime a short steam railroad line had been built from Boston to Newton, a distance of seven miles, and gradually the road to this suburb was lengthened until it extended first to Natick and afterward to Worcester, a span of forty-four miles. ”

“ It is sufficient here and now to say that, with a few exceptions that prove nothing whatsoever, the only railroads that are to-day being successfully operated in the United States are the small railroads (small in comparative sense at least) , [Pg 249] properties like the Boston and Albany, the Lackawanna, the Bessemer and Lake Erie, the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburg, the El Paso and Southwestern, to single out but a few—railroads operated as individual units and by men who are not only on their ground but in close and constant personal touch with every inch of it. ”

“ Great improvements of the harbour were undertaken in 1902 by the United States government, looking to the creation of two broad channels 35 ft. deep. Railway rates have also been a matter of vital importance in recent years; Boston, like New York, complaining of discriminations in favour of Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Galveston. Boston also feels the competition of Montreal and Portland; the Canadian roads being untrammelled in the matter of freight differentials. ”

“ The New Haven monopoly in New England might be managed rather in the interest of New York than of the port of Boston. The Illinois Central, once devoted whole-heartedly to the upbuilding of New Orleans, must now, as a part of the Union Pacific system, comprehend San Francisco and even Savannah within the scope of its plans. New systems implied new traffic arrangements. Railroad policy must of necessity involve a choice, not between two evils, perhaps, but between a resultant good and a necessarily attendant evil. ”

“ In the early seventies when Cornelius Vanderbilt substituted steel for iron on the New York Central, he had to import the new material from England. In the Civil War period, practically all American railroads were single track lines—and this alone prevented any extensive traffic. Vanderbilt laid two tracks along the Hudson River from New York to Albany, and four from Albany to Buffalo, two exclusively for freight and two for passengers. By 1880 the American railroad, in all its essential details, had definitely arrived. ”

“ In 1804, for example, it took four days to get a letter from New York to Boston; and even as late as 1817 it cost a hundred dollars to move a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York and took twenty days to do it. In every direction the railroads made for national advancement and a more solid United States. No soldiers, no statesmen of our land deserve greater honor as useful citizens than do these men who braved every danger to build across the country our trans-continental railways. ”

“ A good many people attempting this very difficult problem of regionalizing the railroads of New England have attempted to leave the Boston and Albany out of their calculations, which not only spoils the picture but makes the entire regional plan almost utterly senseless. Others doing the same thing have attempted to balance matters by giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania, which is perhaps a little worse. ”

“ How it can be given is not as easy a problem to the big engineers. The Pennsylvania can and has planned still more low-grade relief-lines across and through the Alleghany Mountains, but Pittsburg still remains its bottle-neck—in there between the high hills and all but defying the railroad engineers. The New York Central needs more main-line trackage, but far more does it need relief of its own bottle-necks—at Albany and again at Buffalo. ”

“ There is not a wharf along the whole circuit which may not, without great expense, be made available for the export of the productions of the country, brought by the railroad car to the side of the ship, which shall convey it to the freight market. If we can secure to Boston a fair share of the export trade of the country, the import and domestic trade will follow, and we ensure the building of a city within the limits of my friend's annexation project, that will equal the greatest city of the continent. ”