Wabash Railroad

“ He began his railroad career as a rodman in the engineering corps of the Northern Missouri railroads, and from that humble position has risen, not rapidly perhaps, but slowly and certainly, until he has the passenger transportation responsibilities on his hands of what is probably the greatest railroad in the United States. After some years of strenuous work, he became, in 1872, the general freight and passenger agent of the Chicago and Pacific railroad, and in 1880 was made ticket agent of the Wabash, St. ”

“ Pursuant to this authority, and to a city ordinance, a formal agreement was entered into between the city and the railroad company that a certain street should be opened to public use and travel; its grade established and fixed for the purpose of having the street cross the railroad at such a height above the track as would permit the free operation of the railroad under the street, and prevent the dangers of a level crossing. The railroad, on its part, contracted to build a bridge over its track. It was held that the city had power to make the contract ”

“ Gould ever managed to make, and from the day it was closed he has lost no opportunity of extending his railroad properly, which, with lines that are yet on paper, but are almost certain to be built, is soon likely to embrace at least 6,000 miles of rail.
Though the General Manager’s office is at St. Louis, and none of the Gould roads—for the Wabash is not considered 646in the system—run east of the Mississippi, nothing of importance is transacted there without the knowledge and sanction of Mr. ”

“ The Great Northern—a great transcontinental trunk line—despite its sparsely settled western area, exchanges a large volume of through freight for the Pacific Coast for lumber and other bulky products carried east. The New Haven serves perhaps the most densely settled area in the United States, but much of its traffic is on branch lines and is of a retail character. The Wabash lies in well settled territory and hauls a heavy tonnage of low-grade freight. The last two are not only great trunk lines to the seaboard, but also tap the coal and iron fields. ”

“ At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond.
The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. ”

“ The American people have done much for the locomotive; and it has done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly reduced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the Government will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and Territories, which but for its power would have remained deserts for a century to come. ”

“ So the traffic from St. Louis and the rich country back of it must needs cross the Chicago currents and go to the north of Lake Erie. The Wabash—one of the least understood and most abused railroads in America—in those days first began really to justify the fine strategy of its position. It became the main factor in bringing St. Louis freight up to Detroit, where it no longer crossed into Canada by ferry but through the great tunnel which the Michigan Central completed about twelve or fourteen years ago ”

“ Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded. ”

“ Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen switching crews at Waverley. ”

“ As West Point was the nursery of the early constructing engineers, many of the early roads were built and operated by military men, whose impress in railway methods has survived to this day. When the civil war was over the railroads gained for their service thousands of men whose ability had stood the stern test of camp and battle, men who could meet unexpected conditions. These men bore the brunt in the wonderful railroad development that secured forever the commercial greatness of our country. ”

“ On shot the locomotive, like an arrow from the bow, the men throwing over the ties until the train was well nigh unloaded, when just as they were close to the curve by which the train arrives at the station, they saw the dreaded cars strike a tie, or something equally of service, and with a desperate plunge rush down the embankment, some fifteen feet, to the little valley, and creek below. ”

“ When I dropped off the train at Track’s End I saw by the moonlight that the railroad property consisted of a small coal-shed, a turntable, a roundhouse with two locomotive stalls, a water-tank and windmill, and a rather long and narrow passenger and freight depot. The town lay a little apart, and I could not make out its size. There were a hundred or more men waiting for the train, and one of them took the two mail-sacks in a wheelbarrow and went away toward the lights of the houses. ”

“ Any man who should have told these pioneers of the railway world that the United States would possess in the year 1889 a hundred and sixty thousand miles of railroad, enough to belt the world seven times at the Equator, would have been regarded as a lunatic. ”

“ In every considerable town, there are whole fleets of wagons that reach to the outermost limits, both for collection and for distribution. In this service the automobile truck has begun readily to displace the older type of horse and wagon. The wagon service brings the express package, no matter how small or how large, to a central distributing depot, where all are gathered together and sent, in through railroad cars, to their destinations, being handled very largely as we have seen the L. C. L. freight handled in the great transfer houses of the railroads. ”

“ As the first locomotive in the United States came from [232] England in 1825, it may be believed that what Davy saw in 1834 would be almost as astonishing to people of to-day. A dozen vehicles that resembled old-fashioned coaches stood in line on the flat rails that formed the railroad, while an ungainly locomotive, with a smoke-stack nearly as large as the boiler, and with a flat-car behind, loaded with wood and barrels of water for use on the run, was blowing off steam and showing every sign of a desire to make a start. ”

“ When a railroad has to fight to earn the interest on its bonds, it is willing to do anything that will give it a longer lease of life.
The D. W. & I. was, as will be seen, an unimportant road. It ran only one passenger-train a day in each direction, and, as it was not on the way to anywhere, its business, both freight and passenger, was purely local. At the beginning of its existence, it had hauled a great deal of coal for the Chicago market, but this business had been killed by the development of the great Pocahontas « 118 » fields in West Virginia. ”

“ My supply train, carrying rations for 18 days, consisted of 181 wagons, which with the regimental wagons made up a train of some 250 wagons. My instructions were substantially as follows, viz: To proceed to Corinth, Mississippi by way of Salem and Ruckersville, capture any force that might be there, then proceed south, destroying the Mobile and Ohio Railroad to Tupelo and Okolona and as far as possible towards Macon and Columbus with a portion of my force, thence to Grenada and back to Memphis. ”

“ Engine the 107 was not rebuilt for a long time and was never again employed in passenger service. The foreman in one of the repair shops wrote to Philadelphia and learned that the 109 was completed on Thursday and the 107 on Friday. As I said a while ago, railroad employees are not superstitious,—they will all tell you so,—much less railway officers; but it is a fact to-day that a new locomotive or a locomotive that has been rebuilt is never taken out on the Denver and Rio Grande on Friday. ”

“ At the time he was writing, 1835, there were seven hundred and ninety-seven miles of railroads in operation in the United States. Passenger coaches were patterned after the old stage coach, the track iron straps on wooden stringers, yet here he was outlining what today is an accomplished fact. A railroad with stone ballast from Chicago to the South Pass (Granger, Wyo.) one branch diverging from there to the mouth of the Columbia, (Portland, Ore.,) the other to California, (San Francisco and Los Angeles, Cal.,) traversed by trains comprised of sleeping cars, dining cars and buffet cars. ”

“ Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city—Prince Rupert—at its western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next three years.
This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading—an eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. ”

“ Long before the clear Washington morning had broken which succeeded that stormy April evening of 1917 when the United States first entered the World War, the railroad executives themselves had been feeling that there would need to be correlated and coöperative effort to make the rail transport system of the country adequate to meet the new and added burden to be laid upon its already sadly bended back. ”

“ Better railroad man than he never took a train out of division. Stress of wind or stress of weather, storm, flood or blockade, Dave Hawk's trains came and went on time or very close. So he rode, grim old privateer, with his letters of marque on the company's strongbox, and Haverly trembled night and day till that day came that fear had foretold to him. A clap of thunder struck the Wickiup and Haverly's head fell low; and Dave Hawk sailed boldly on.
I was extra passenger man when John Stanley Bucks took the West End. ”

“ Our drives from up-country are sometimes held up a whole season when a bad jam forms in dry times. Every year in dynamiting these jams thousands of feet of logs are shattered. More are split on the ledges. We have agreed that we need a railroad. Considering our losses, we can afford to pay well for having our logs hauled to the smooth water. If you and your friends will finance and build such a road, we'll give you free right of way, turn over to you annually twenty million feet of timber for your log trains, and give you the haul of all our crews and camp supplies. ”

“ It was the end of the freight and passenger service and the beginning of the division under construction. Twice a day, long trains arrived from and departed for the East, while stages and wagon trains connected it with points in Idaho, Montana, and Utah. All the passengers and goods for the West, came here by rail and were re-shipped to their several destinations.
Twenty-three saloons paid license to the city, while dance halls and gambling dens were even more numerous. The great institution was the "Big Tent." ”

“ Highland, thirty miles out, was our first stop. We took water there; and before we could get away from the tank, Hubbard had his twin shafts of silver under my car. We got a good start here, but our catch engine proved to be badly coaled and a poor steamer. Up to this time she had done fairly well, but after the first [Pg 113] two hours she began to lose. Seeing no more of the freight train, I turned in, not a little pleased to think that Mr. Yank's headlight would not haunt me again that trip. I fell asleep, but woke again when the train stopped, probably at Vandalia. ”

“ In nearly every community, about every capital, State or National, you will find men who are capable of being influenced. This is especially true of new communities through which a railway is being built. It has always been so, and will be, so long as time expires. I mean the time of an annual pass. It is not surprising, then, that in Kansas at that time, the Grasshopper period,—before prohibition, Mrs. Nation, and religious dailies,—the company had its friends, and that Mr. Jones, an honest farmer with money to spend, had his. ”

“ Perhaps a fuller account of this catastrophe may be instructive in order to show the risks run by railroad men, the responsibility resting upon the most humble of them, and the enormous amount of suffering a man is capable of enduring and yet live. This gravel train "laid up" for the night at Clyde, and in the morning early, as soon as the freight trains bound west had passed, proceeded out upon the road to its work. It was the duty of the switchman to see that the trains had all passed, and report the same to the men in charge of the gravel train. ”