War of the Classes: A Gilded Age TL

[Ofaloaf]

Forgive a man his indulgences.


Work all day for damn sure pay: The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, Part 1

The history of the American Southwest is tied directly to the birth and expansion of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. The brainchild of Cyrus K. Holliday, a Pennsylvanian and Free-Soil activist who adopted Kansas as his home in 1854, the ATSF would eventually come to dominate the Southwest, dictating the growth of old cities and marking the spot of new ones through the lines they built. By the time of their incorporation into the CA&SF, the railroad held domain over a vast empire stretching from San Francisco to St. Louis.

Known to Westerners as the “Santa Fe” and to Easterners as the “Atchison”, the ATSF's beginnings were remarkably humble for such a expansive system. Railroads first appeared in Kansas in 1855, and despite the crisis of Bleeding Kansas another dozen railroads burst into existence by 1857. All had great aspirations, and many of them-- such as the St. Joseph & Topeka, which employed Holliday from '57 to '58-- aimed to eventually reach the old trade mecca of Santa Fe, which drew in 16 million pounds of freight and millions in freight charges alone by 1860. Holliday himself dreamed to make a road connecting Kansas and Santa Fe, and on January 31st, 1859, wrote up a charter for the Atchison & Topeka Railroad Company, which was approved by Kansas governor Samuel Medary on February 11th.

Construction did not begin for years. Kansas convulsed in the throes of drought from June of 1859 to November of 1860, severely reducing traffic and potential capital within the state, and the Civil War did little to assist matters later. Wagons that had years previously gone west for a new beginning were found going back east with the slogan “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted” painted on their canvas covers. Nevertheless, stock promotions and planning went ahead, and in 1863 the still-only-on-paper Atchison & Topeka received a land grant reaching to the Colorado state line, to be revoked if the railroad failed to reach that point by March 3, 1873. In November of that same year, the still-jubilant stockholders of the A&T voted to change the name of the company to “Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad”. Not a mile of track had yet been laid.

Tentative work began in 1865 when the ATSF ordered 3,000 tons of English iron rails (at a staggering $100 per ton) and sent surveyor O. B. Gunn to explore the land granted to the company. By March of 1866, Gun had returned, submitting his maps and estimating that the route from Atchsion to Topeka could be built for $11794 per mile, not far from the $10000 per mile previously claimed by promoters. Excited by this news, Holliday and the ATSF attempted to sell stock out east to raise the needed funds, but nobody bought and the company was forced to void its order for rail. From 1866 to 1868, Holliday scrambled to raise money needed to build the line.

The Topeka-based Weekly Record of October 28th, 1868 issued a notice from the ATSF management advertising tracklaying work with wages of $1.75 per day. Two days later, the first shovelful of dirt was turned in Topeka, and construction began. Although it infuriated residents of Atchison, the board of directors made the pragmatic decision to build the first line from Topeka southwest to Carbondale, where large coal deposits had recently been found and offered an immediate source of freight, income and fuel. By March of 1869, seven miles were built and the railroad had purchased its Locomotive No. 1, a coal-burning 4-4-0 named “Cyrus K. Holliday”. No. 2, the woodburning “General Burnside” entered service shortly thereafter, and regular service from Topeka to the end-of-track began on April 26th, 1869, by that point with the line extending from Topeka to Wakarusa. By July 1st the line reached Carbondale, but the company surged on, eventually reaching Burlingame by September 17th of that same year.

In July of 1869 alone, the company earned $1685.14, freight accounting for $745.94 and passenger traffic $939.20. With the Topeka-Carbondale line completed, the ATSF was now able to show eastern investors good progress in construction and revenue generation, and Holliday's little railroad began to draw in a flush of stock purchases from Bostonian capitalists. When Atchison Associates, Holliday's original group of supporters, imploded after attempting to water down ATSF stock, it was these Bostonian investors who suddenly gained control of the company.

This was fortunate for the railroad. The ATSF's Bostonian dynasty would last for decades, their conservative and long-term management style ensuring growth and making Santa Fe stock wildly popular in the eastern stock exchanges. Henry Keyes, their first president for the railroad, held the title for less than a year, but he created the new financial base for the company, moving ATSF headquarters to Boston, picking Kidder & Peabody to become their American financial agents and Baring Brothers of London their European agents, solid choices all around.

Keyes' presidency was followed by Ginery Twichell in 1870, in turn followed by the Scotland-born Henry Strong in 1873 and the American Thomas Nickerson 1874. All members of the Boston circle, they continued to encourage “developmental” investment in the railroad, spending as much on internal rail upgrades and depot expansions as they did outward expansion of new lines to the west and south. With their management and the influx of capital that followed, the railroad slowly built westward to the cattle town of Emporia in December of 1869, where they then paused, raised more funds from New England and English investors, and began construction anew in 1871. The town of Newton, Kansas was founded where the ATST intersected the popular cattle route of the Chisholm Trail, and services there began in July of 1871. Freight and revenue had grown enough that the Boston circle decided it was time to reach eastern markets, and on May 13th, 1872, they finally built a line to Atchison, working with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy to finally connect western ranchers directly to Chicago cattle yards.

Despite all this progress, the company still had 330 miles of track to lay from Newton to the Colorado state line by the March 3rd 1873 deadline if it wanted to retain its land grants. Westward construction went as breakneck speeds in 1872, opening the line to Hutchinson on June 17, Larned on August 12, and wild Dodge City on the 19th of September. At each of these towns, business blossomed and crime soared as the railroad arrived; Larned briefly held the title of “meanest town in Kansas” until the crews moved on to Dodge City. Nevertheless, by December 22nd of 1872, the crews had completed the road to the Kansas-Colorado with only one last crisis: On the 23rd, Federal surveyors approached the ATSF foreman on-site and informed him that the state line was actually still four miles further west. Panicking, the foreman roused up whatever sober men were available, tore up sidings for spare rails, and hurriedly built the last stretch of track.

On December 28, 1872, the foreman wired to Topeka:

We send you greetings on completion of the road to the state line. Beyond us lie fertile valleys that invite us forward and broad plains lie away in the distance, dotted with mingling herds of bison and cattle, awaiting a further advance. The mountains signal us from their lofty crests and still beyond the Pacific shouts “amen.” We send you three cheers of past success, and three times three for that which is yet to come.

The Pacific would have to wait. The directors wired back the foreman, congratulating him on his work and ordering him to build the line a few miles into Colorado to reach the small trading settlement of Grenada and then cease work. The Santa Fe had exhausted its coffers. It would be another two years before the ATSF's finances were strong enough for further expansion, but in the meanwhile men still dreamed and planned. Holliday commissioned surveys from Grenada to Pueblo, and the company quietly set aside some profits for future campaigns. People outside the railroad also recognized its ambition. The editor of Topeka's Daily Commonwealth wrote in a December 29, 1872 article that

...the road cannot remain on the prairie in the Arkansas Valley, but must be pushed on to a profitable terminus in the cattle regions of southern Colorado, and the silver mines of the territory. It is our opinion, based on our knowledge of the enterprise and resources of the company, that the A.T. & S.F. road will not be completed until it is stopped by the waves of the Pacific, and has been made the fair weather trans-continental route of the nation.

[FDW]

I know this is a bit late, but still it's an interesting update you've got here…

[Ofaloaf]

Originally Posted by FDW

I know this is a bit late, but still it's an interesting update you've got here…

Honestly, my favorite updates to write have been the retardedly dry ones like this and the two Saluda, NC bits.

[Shawn Endresen]

Ginery Twichell? I'm sure you didn't make that up, because how could you? I think my spellchecker is trying to strangle me, in fact...

Interesting to see. Since railways lead to unions, and unions lead to unrest, they're helpful background

[RCTFI]

Good to see some new stuff here, Ofaloaf. As always let me just say that I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this TL.

[Ofaloaf]

AW YEAH BOI WE GONNA TALK MORE ABOUT CORPORATE REVENUES

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Steers & Silver: The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, Part 2


The ATSF needed more than aspirations to become a transcontinental railroad; it needed revenue to fuel construction. By building to Grenada the company had already done this in part, building their trans-Kansas line south of the competing Kansas Pacific road and offering a more convenient stop on the Chisholm Trail for cattle ranchers. Abilene, the previous destination for cattle ranchers in Kansas and connected by the Kansas Pacific to the national rail network, shriveled and died when the Santa Fe founded the city of Newton sixty miles to the south at the intersection of their own road and the Chisholm Trail. Newton's boom quickly came to an end, in turn, when Sedgwick County approved a $200,000 bond to support the first railway to reach Wichita and the ATSF created a new subsidiary, the Wichita & Southwestern, to snatch that bond and win control of a better cattle town than Newton. In May 1872 the W&SW was completed and Newton's glory days came to an end.

In the early 1870s, these cattle towns were an important source of revenue for the Santa Fe. 40,000 head of livestock were shipped east from Newton via the ATSF in 1871, and in 1872 70,000 head of livestock went east from Wichita the same way. 459,453 buffalo hides, 2,250,000 pounds of buffalo meat and more than ten million pounds of bones were shipped through the ATSF between 1872 and 1874. Ranchers, rustlers and buffalo hunters were what kept the railroad afloat when the economy tumbled in 1873.

Westward expansion of the Kansas Pacific spurred on the Santa Fe to find a more westerly center for cattle operations, and in 1876 the company began building huge cattle pens in Dodge City. The following year, a little less than 23,000 heads of livestock were shipped, but by 1884 at the peak of the cattle trade over 800,000 head of cattle (and 3,000 passengers) went east on the ATSF out of Dodge. Between 1871 and 1885, the company handled an average of 70-90,000 head of livestock annually. The company was not in such dire straits that only the cattle trade prevented bankruptcy, but during the financial crisis following the Panic of 1873 the revenue was certainly appreciated.

It wasn't just ledgers and rival railroads that concerned the Santa Fe during this period; whichever town the cattle trade was centered in, crime followed. Whorehouses and saloons tempted cowboys to blow their wages in town after a long run on the Chisholm Trail. Robbery and murder rates soared along the railroad towns of the ATSF. The company sent hired gun Bat Masterson to Dodge City, threatened to revoke its status as a divisional terminus, demanded that dance halls and saloons be closed on Sundays; nothing could rein in the chaos of the booming cattle towns. One Santa Fe conductor, upon hearing a washed-out prospector ask for a ticket to Hell, wearily told him that it'd be “65¢ and get off at Dodge”.

Although Dodge City and its ilk sapped the spirit of the Santa Fe, it did not sap its revenues. Despite high crime rates, the towns produced fair revenue for the railroad. Offers to move the divisional terminus to towns such as Caldwell were refused; oftentimes these offers would have come at a long-term economic cost to the railroad, which the Santa Fe directors were wise enough to recognize.

Dodge City's cows and cash are what ultimately paid for the next phase of expansion. West in Colorado lay great freight potential; In Trinidad and Cañon City lay coal fields, and in Pueblo a connection could be made with “General” William J. Palmer's narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande railroad. From there, track could also be laid to the boom town of Leadville, where silver had been discovered , and also southward to Santa Fe. A subsidiary company, the Pueblo & Arkansas Valley, was formed for ATSF expansion across Colorado, and tracklaying crews arrived at the ATSF end-of-track in Granada mid-1875. Construction began that June. By September 13th track had reached Las Animas, and on February 16th 1876 the crews reached La Junta. When the railroad finally reached Pueblo on March 7th, the town erupted in a two-day-long celebration, cherishing not the arrival of the first tracks into town, for the DRG already had a depot there, but the end of the DRG's monopoly on traffic in and out of town.

Four Bostonian ATSF directors visited Pueblo later that year, and personally went on a ten-day-trek across the crest of the Rockies to Del Norte and back via Alamosa and La Veta Pass. Making their own assessments, the directors immediately began drawing up plans for further westward expansion. The DRG, up until now unconcerned about the Santa Fe's expansion into its self-perceived 'territory', suddenly went into a panic. Wishing to cut off any further ATSF expansion, General Palmer expanded the Denver & Rio Grande south to El Moro, stretching his own finances and infuriating the residents of coal-rich Trinidad, which sat just five miles further south of El Moro.

Bad timing. Just as General Palmer got nervous, the ATSF Annual Report of 1877 formally announced that “...near the Close of the Year the Board elected W. B. Strong, Esq., of Chicago, Vice President and General Manager of the road. He brings... rare abilities and large experience which cannot fail to be of great benefit to the company.” That was an understatement. A brilliant empire-builder and highly ambitious, Strong would take the Santa Fe to heights not even dreamed of before leaving office in 1892. With expansion on his mind, one of Strong's first actions was to bring future general manager Albert Alonzo Robinson on board as his right-hand man in the company. A graduate of the University of Michigan, A. A. Robinson had worked on railroads as an engineer since 1869 and had initially been employed as Santa Fe's chief engineer during their expansion to Dodge City.

William Barstow Strong, P.I.M.P.

Strong immediately sent Robinson and a team of surveyors out to examine the Raton Pass. The ATSF's expansion into Colorado had taken a very southerly turn in the mid-1870s, ultimately aiming to enter New Mexico and fulfill the “Santa Fe” part of the company's name. The Colorado-New Mexico border, however, is extremely mountainous, and in the 1870s very few possible routes existed to connect the two states via rail. Of the couple of passes that were workable for railroads, the Raton Pass offered the easiest grades, least excavation and closest access to eastern Colorado towns such as Pueblo and La Junta. The Pass also was only wide enough for one set of tracks; whichever railroad built a line through the Raton Pass would control a major line of interstate traffic between Colorado and New Mexico.

A. A. Robinson and a grading crew made a covert trip on the Denver & Rio Grande's line down to El Moro early in the morning of February 27, 1878. On the same train as Robinson was the DRG's own chief engineer, J. A. McMurtrie, along with his own team of workers. Neither man recognized the other for who he was, so when the DRG train pulled in to El Moro, McMurtie first went to the local hotel and took a seven-hour nap, confident that he'd begin construction on the Denver & Rio Grande's line through the Raton Pass that afternoon. Robinson, meanwhile, bought a team of horses and brought his men straight to the Raton Pass, quickly negotiated a deal with the owner of a toll road that went through the pass-- the man sold the road to the Santa Fe in exchange for a lifetime of free passes on the railroad and a $50 credit per month at the local general store-- and commenced work. When McMurtie's men arrived at the Pass that afternoon, they were shocked to discover the Santa Fe crew already scraping away. After a few hours of fierce arguing and heckling, the DRG crews finally left, defeated.

Far from being the end of struggles between the Denver & Rio Grande and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, the conquest of the Raton Pass was to be the first battle in a war between corporations. Although overshadowed by the ongoing chaos in the East, the fight between the Rio Grande and the Santa Fe would nevertheless leave a dramatic impression of the American psyche.

[Nicksplace27]

Thank God This is back! I look forward to the transcontinental railroad race on the backs of the restless worker, as they get more and more red...

[00Zy99]

Originally Posted by Ofaloaf

The Evolution of a locomotive


Following the events of 1877, the demands of labor became a paramount concern of railroad officials. This was not due to any heartfelt passion on the part of managers, but rather due to a newfound awareness of workers' issues and of the need to find a way to break them. Numerous ways were developed to subvert labor agitation-- the creation of company-controlled unions, the permanent hiring of Pinkertons and “Red-Baiting” tactics working in tandem with the state and federal prosecution of independent union leaders were among the wide variety of solutions created by officials.

One of the most sophisticated and innocent-looking of these labor-breaking programs was heavy investment in research and development of new technologies. Improving the efficiency of trains was a clever way of introducing labor-cutting measures without much complaint from workers or the unions. If a single new engine could do the work of a pair of old “double-header” locomotives, for example, the manpower needed per each freight train could be halved. The period of 1860 to 1877 had seen relatively little improvement in railroad technology-- many trains in service in 1877 actually dated back to the 1850s, some even to the 1840s. Mechanics, fuel efficiency, safety, and basic construction techniques had changed very little from antebellum America up to the time of the Great Strike and 1877 insurrection, but for decades afterward there was a concentrated effort to promote new research in rail-related technologies.

John Garrett, President of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, was a leading proponent of technological investment. His company had suffered from some of the earlier outbreaks of labor unrest during the Great Strike, and the routes his company operated on were old, winding Appalachian lines which posed unique problems for the railroad. New locomotives had to be developed to deal not only with the issues of decreased manpower demands of the post-insurrection rail industry, but increased mechanical flexibility was now required to handle the B&O's routes in West Virginia and Appalachia. Fortunately for Garrett, the late 1870s experienced a boom in research that benefited the rail industry immensely.

Matthias N. Forney, an engineer from New England, patented a unique tank engine design in 1866, proposing a rigid engine design wherein the maximum possible weight of the engine rested directly on the drive wheels, increasing traction on the rails, while the weight of the tender, rigidly connected to the engine, rested entirely on one truck. This “0-4-4” (meaning 0 leading bogie wheels, 4 drive wheels, and 4 rear bogie wheels) arrangement maximized power efficiency via improved drive wheel traction while still providing the traditional stability of an 'American' 4-4-0 locomotive with its single trailing bogey. Following the custom of the time, 0-4-4 tank engines of this type were quickly known as 'Forneys'.

A classic 'Forney' 0-4-4. It is just as likely that the engine ran "backwards" as it did in the traditional tender-in-back-boiler-in-front style.

Forney locomotives enjoyed a boom in demand in the 1870s, as the rapidly-growing cities of America's industrial belt began building up suburban commuter lines, where the small Forneys performed well with the light loads and minuscule budgets of metropolitan light rail systems. Chicago and New York city both bought copious quantities of Forney locomotives, which they used in their suburban networks as well as in new elevated routes, as the compact nature of Forneys served perfectly for the tight curves and light loads demanded by these new lines.

John E. Wootten, an employee of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, developed an enlarged boiler and firebox for Reading locomotives which permitted locomotives fit with these devices to use readily-available anthracite coal, of which the Reading Railroad held a near- shipping monopoly on in Eastern Pennsylvania, for fuel usage. First introduced on the Reading in 1880, early Wootten-firebox locomotives enjoyed one other rare feature: the “camelback” cab. Due to the width of Wootten fireboxes and boilers and the visibility issues engines would have suffered from had they been designed in the traditional manner, the engineer's cab in these early locomotives was placed above the center of the boiler, rather than behind it as was usually located. “Wootten-Camelback” locomotives provided a better field of vision for engineers, but they also split the engine crew between the fireman at the tender and the engineer in the cab, severing communication between the two.

A later camelback locomotive from the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Note the large firebox just behind the cab.

The locomotive design eventually created by John Garrett (naturally called the 'Garrett') combined the benefits of both Forney and Wootten-Camelback locomotives. A reverse-engineered Wootten firebox and boiler rested in-between two tenders, which in turn rested on their own sets of drive wheels rather than unpowered wheel trucks. Like the Forney, the 'Garrett' placed all its principal weight on drive wheels, increasing traction and giving greater stability on the Baltimore & Ohio's treacherous West Virginian lines. The Wootten boiler likewise maximized the power available, as the enlarged area of the firebox and quantity of water flues within the boiler allowed for more fuel to be consumed produce a greater amount of steam at a vastly increased rate. Thanks to the placement of the drive wheels on the two tenders of the locomotive, the boiler itself did not need to rest on any wheels whatsoever, allowing it to be positioned much lower relative to the rails, decreasing the needed height clearance of the engine, and unintentionally improving air flow around the locomotive.

In short, the 'Garrett' combined the weight-distribution principles of Forney locomotives and power of Wootten designs to create a powerful engine that managed to replicate the force of an old-fashioned "doubleheader" pair of locomotives and add to that increased traction, speed, and labor-cost efficiency.

A more advanced Garrett locomotive built in the early 20th century. The central boiler is simply suspended between the two tenders.

Despite the numerous positive aspects of Garretts, they did not catch on with railroads immediately. The locomotives were complex, suffering from high maintenance rates which decreased their availability. They were expensive; increased production and repair costs were a natural result of the mechanical complexities of the engine. They were new designs, they were unproven, and they were very underdeveloped initially. The first Garretts introduced on the B&O railroad were small 0-4-0+0-4-0 designs (two sets of four drive wheels each, one per tender), utilizing only eight drive wheels total. For many years after their introduction, traditional single-driver locomotives remained the design of choice on Appalachian railroads.

'Garrett' locomotives were one of several new technologies introduced by the railroads in the 1880s. Through these new engines and other results of research investment, companies used technology as one of many techniques to break labor organization.

Where'd you get the Garrett pic? Is it photoshopped? It looks way more American than any other I've seen.

[Sicarius]

aw man i thought this tl was back

cruelbump

[King Henry]

Originally Posted by Sicarius

aw man i thought this tl was back

cruelbump

Yeah, I hate it when that happens to awesome (semi-)abandoned TL's