American Railroad as Icon
What follows is a preliminary, longer version of the article "Railroad" in American Icons..., v. 3 (Garland, 2006); the general reader is encouraged to seek out the print concise and illustrated version, in many ways better:
On the Chicago area’s lakefront north of the city 2005 was both the sesquicentennial of the completion of the first rail line as far as Waukegan, forty miles north, in 1855 and also the semi-centennial of the demise of the parallel interurban, light-rail service in 1955. Today excellent commuter service to the city survives over the original 1855 line, and heavy freight still rumbles over the later-built by-pass rail lines over a mile west. But the heyday of intercity rail passenger service has passed, eclipsed in the 1950s and 1960s by cars and federal highways and as well as by inexpensive long-distance intercity jet air travel. Even so, the railroad lives on as an icon, embodied in powerful electric and diesel locomotives, ubiquitous commuter trains in population centers, great transcontinental freight trains serving global commerce, and even nostalgic preserved scenic and railfan short line service, often with restored steam locomotives or trolley cars. Unlike for other pervasive American images, perhaps, railroads reflect a continuity of contemporary vitality with a distinctive and long heritage tied to American industrial or economic and also geographic development.
The power and centrality of of the railroad’s image in American life recently has been recognized in an April 22-23, 2004 conference, held at St. Louis’s John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and entitled “Iron Icon: the Railroad in American Art.” The proceedings of this conference were published in 2005 as a special number (14) of Railroad Heritage, the periodical of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. These scholarly papers address visual but also literary and popular cultural manifestations of the “Iron Icon,” from rail jargon as adopted into the broader language along with popular music, films, children’s literature, and much more (5). Already by 1996 University of Illinois Professor of English George H. Douglas, in All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life (Smithmark) declared that “...the American love affair with trains and things concerning the railroad was never more fully expressed than in the popular culture” (352).
Any examination of this phenomenon requires a multifaceted approach to the emergence, rise, and changes of this American icon, the railroad. On one hand a chronological survey reveals the organic development of this image while on the other manifestations in a range of media and material cultural areas can break down perspectives from several popular viewpoints. From the perspective of a timeline, four main phases can be outlined: (1) emergence, with its novelty and promise; early transport construction and (2) hegemony, with led to rural and frontier displacement and antagonism from those affected; (3) the era of fast deluxe trains, from the 1890s to the 1960s, with its associated romance; and (4) the latest era when the rails have become global players in heavy freight hauling while subsidized commuter and perhaps long-distance service are accessible for most residents, especially of metropolitan areas. Also, the American rail icon has emerged through a series of forms: in photography, and and visual advertising, in popular literature and songs, for the last century in film, video or CDs/DVDs, and the internet; and in rail collectibles, modeling, and preservation--the material cultural aspect of the rail icon’s continuity and indeed indelibility.
Overview of Periods
Mid-Nineteenth Century Development, Construction and Hegemony
As railroads and locomotives burst on the American scene in the 1830s and 1840s, they were only one of a number of significant inventions of the time promising irrevocably to alter the character of life on the continent. Like the printing press in 1450s Europe, which changed dramatically peoples’ access to information, spreading both the Renaissance and the Reformation, the railroad eliminated geographic isolation, leading to more perfect markets for goods, centralization of populations in cities, and the creation of a U.S. national identity, vs. several regional and competing ones. Analogous to the well-established printing press, though, photography captured moments in time for posterity--including an American locomotive as early as 1848. Also, the invention of the circular saw in the 1830s made possible the rapid construction of houses from wood, stimulating the swift growth of cities like Chicago served by Great Lakes timber lands and lumber shipping, by boat and later by train. Today architectural preservationists date the end of craftsman-built houses and buildings to this period of innovation. Thus, the railroad’s appearance in America was part of a cluster of changes that launched an epic of expansion unparalleled in human history, as the east-coast focused U.S. spanned the North American continent between the 1830s and the 1890s. Chicago’s population, for example, grew from a few thousand inhabitants in the late 1830s to a million by 1890, just prior to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition there. By then it was a continental rail hub like nothing on its scale elsewhere, before or since. Through all this the railroad’s image as a powerful force for change was a dominant national symbol.
The railroad’s rise in the United States was preceded by its demonstration and early precedent-setting establishment in Great Britain and Europe. The first true railroad line was the Manchester and Darlington, where Robert Stephenson’s “Rocket” locomotive pulled the first train over an independently-owned rail company line in September of 1830. this quickly stimulated intense interest in the U.S., within a year leading to a demonstration in Philadelphia by Baldwin. As railways crisscrossed Britain and much of France in the next two decades, they similarly led to a U.S. rail network, mostly in the industrial and relatively urban northeast. The unprecedented push into areas unsettled by European descendants by mid-century sparked a crisis of transatlantic consequences as the American union’s regional rivalries descended into open warfare, in 1861-65. This struggle, the Civil War, was won by the industrial and rail-organized north and settled the hub of western expansion at Chicago--where eastern lines from the Atlantic shore terminated and the new lines west began. The first line of five thrown across the continent to the Pacific Ocean was completed in 1869 and by 1893 the by-then settled continent frontier was declared “closed” by historian Frederick J. Turner at Chicago’s world’s fair of that year.
This epic phase of railroad power and transformation was summed up in a quote from British historian Thomas Macauley and engraved over the glitteringly majestic entrance to architect Louis Sullivan’s widely-visited Transportation Building at the 1893 Chicago fair: “Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of mankind.” This is quoted at the end of Arthur D. Dubin’s Some Classic Trains (1964, 432). As this development took place it created a transcontinental, uban-centered culture superseding the earlier Jeffersonian agrarian and localized society envisioned by Connecticut Wit Timothy Dwight in his 1796 poem, Greenfield Hill, and by President Thomas Jefferson when his 1803 Louisiana PUrchase added most of the trans-Mississippi west to the United States. As rail travel erased time and distance it introduced a new culture of standardization: time zones, standard track gauges, and combined or merged rail lines, which swept away local isolations and initiatives; rail terminals and depots re-centering communities; new commuter and light-rail lines decentralizing the exploding new metropolises like Chicago and New York (while at the hub grew new skyscrapers); new wealth for (and from) rail builders, financiers, and wholesalers; and a new unified transatlantic, largely urban/suburban culture.
The pervasiveness of the railroad in the 19th C. U.S. was symbolized, even often anthropomorphized, in the image of the locomotive, also an epochal culmination of machine age power, the pinnacle of industrial achievement. Controlled and channeled raw, elemental power--fire, steam, smoke, and iron--in motion, the locomotive sped across the landscape in the daylight, momentarily lit up the rural night, and reached far beyond its immediate visible area through the sound of its mighty, distinctive whistle.
The locomotive, its train, and the people who ran them were also powerfully iconic figures in popular American perception. They represented the best of the new industrial men, the engineers and conductors asserting their authority over the lifelines of communities and regions and serving as stewards of the lives of passengers and customers. Synchronizing their watches in classic photographs they appear as men ultimately integrated into the Machine Age--sovereign but subject to the higher, preordained rules of timetables and their subculture’s strict social hierarchy. The train’s engineer was visibly special. At the beginning of his chapter “How I Rode with Harold Lewis on a Diesel Freight Train Down to Gridley, Kansas, and Back” in Richard Rhodes’ The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American MIddle West (1991), the author quotes Stephen Crane from “The Scotch Express” that “’It should be well-known fact that...the engine-driver is the finest type of man that is grown. He is the pick of the earth’” (87-88). He is the embodiment of the highest virtues “’ for outright performance, carried on constantly, coolly, and with no elation’” by “’a temperate, honest, clear-minded man.’” Rhodes observes that for every country boy over four years old and into maturity one’s “’ambition in life...was to be a locomotive engineer or, failing that, to ride with one” (91). Rhodes recalls as well, from his childhood, the electric trolleys run by their conductors. His father “rode one to work every day for forty years” (95).
Railroad Era Power--Flexed and Checked
As rail lines pressed inexorably westward, the locomotive pulling a train symbolized, as in the famous Currier & Ives print “Westward the Course of Empire,” the wedge being driven by railroads between the exploding industrial, European-American culture and the retreating and shrinking hunter-gatherer Native American way of life, which was in harmony with nature. As recently as the 1990s this iconic image has been vividly portrayed in the Disney animated feature film, Spirit, wherein a dark, menacing steam locomotive is the villain for this story centered on wild horses and Native Americans in later-mid-19th C. western America.
As Disney’s Spirit recalled for a recent generation of children, there was indeed a dark or sinister side of the locomotive in this period of its stretching out to encompass and settle the continent. It brought fire, noise, and soot into the heart of pristine nature and bucolic settings. If all the efficiency and standardization broke down, dramatic train wrecks also captured the popular imagination, and many memorable surviving photographic images record these fearsome and somehow wonderful iconic occurrences. Danger was there for the traveler and a mistake could bring down even the greatest locomotive. If in Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick the immense white whale could destroy the men hunting it, nature striking back at mankind, then also modern man’s greatest and most complex mechanical system, the railroad, could include the seeds of its own destruction. Best remembered in song is Casey Jones, who wrecked his racing train.
Another negative image of the railroad perhaps best is found in Frank Norris’s novel, The Octopus (1901), part of a reform era trilogy on wheat from the farm to the city grain markets and beyond to its consumption. In The Octopus, Norris creates in his title a highly visual image of the 1890s railroad, at its peak with the country settled, reaching out with its tentacles to strangle the by-now-subject farmers with confiscatory freight rates for their grain, after having given them easy access to the land. As a result, they are reduced to little more than serfs by the heartless corporate trusts run by distance financial forces.
By the 1890s many railroad workers had organized to protect themselves against the monopoly power of the railroads. Labor organizer Eugene Debs arose as an icon of workers’ dissent with the 1894 Chicago Pullman company strike which quickly spread nationwide, due to the new unions, to the workers on lines that operated Pullman cars. Debs drew the country to its knees before President Cleveland called out troops to put down the strikers; Debs himself was put in jail for six months, when he was able to write and prepare for two decades of political action as standard-bearer for a quite viable Socialist Party before world War I. Workers’ distrust of labor too often would prevail throughout the rest of the rail era and into the present. But the distress led to new regulation on the federal and state levels, as areas like California’s inner valley, the site of The Octopus, and as customers all over sought protection from monopoly powers of rail lines. Labor too was protected by new legislation.
Deluxe Express Trains
Emerging in the 1890s, flourishing into the 1940s, and surviving into the 1960s and some beyond within Amtrak, the new elite high-speed, long-distance trains incorporated the best of the sleeper, diner and club car technology and luxury which had been introduced by George Pullman of Chicago in the years following the Civil War. As longer lines were consolidated from local ones and as the new transcontinental lines west of Chicago developed, speedy and comfortable transit became a sought-after commodity for elite business and leisure travelers. The major east-west lines especially competed for passengers with their ever-better, faster trains--such as the New York Central’s “20th Century Limited” and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Broadway Limited” which competed and even raced between Chicago and New York in less than a day over their respective rail rights of way. High Society, important businessmen, and later entertainers chose their favorite lines to their destinations. Photographers in Chicago stations snapped shots of film stars between trains, for example. The still standard treatment of this subject is found in Arthur D. Dubin’s two Kalmbach-published volumes, Some Classic Trains (1964) and More Classic Trains (1974), reproducing several hundred images of trains, cars, layouts, menus, celebrity travelers, and routes. Starting in the 1930s Lucius Beebe (and later joined by photographer Charles Clegg) had brought to the general reading public the beginning nostalgia for the era of great trains of the Gilded Age and soon after, and helped mold an image or icon of a great age of high-speed rail travel, in books such as High Iron.
The era of the great trains between the 1890s and the 1940s was characterized by stiff competition which stimulated creative and innovative advertising, to distinguish one from the other among the various lines which all ran Pullman standardized equipment. Much of this was done by selling not just speed and luxury, but also the country through which the train traveled and also the destination--the colorful Southwest with its interesting Native American inhabitants and their handicrafts (Santa Fe) the Maine woods (Boston & Maine), respectively. Exotic desert scenery vs. picturesque mountain views led to colorful posters and brochures which aimed to sell the sizzle, not just the steak. Business travelers sought speed and comfort, but to lure the discretionary traveler to a memorable trip was the key to profitability of passenger service, from the early 1920s on competing with automobiles and eventually with air travel. By 1948-49 a change in the character of this rail promotion was signaled by the Chicago Railroad Fair, held for two summers on the site of the 1933-34 Century of Progress exhibition on the lakefront near the Loop. The romance, simplicity and comforts of long-distance modern rail passenger travel were touted, but without the need to contrast them to the post-World-War-II automobile boom already underway or the increasing viability of air travel advanced by technical developments from wartime and new airfields, such as Chicago’s Midway.
Passenger Rail Changes and Freights New Global Role
With the virtual completion of the Eisenhower-era federal super highway program by the mid 1970s and the increasing availability of low-cost jet travel by the late 1960s, most major railroads gave up their intercity deluxe and regular passenger service by around 1968. To fill the vacuum around 1970 the federally-funded Amtrak corporation was established to preserve, through subsidies, essential and the most viable intercity and long-distance trains. Some of the great trains lived on in name and some equipment (Super Chief and its postwar dome cars), though generally the service was spartan, while some private bedroom cars continued to be available. On the east coast high-speed rail travel along the Boston-New York-Washington corridor was even profitable--but catering to business and less demanding passengers than of old.
At the same time, the world trade especially with Pacific nations such as Japan and later southeast Asian countries and by 2000 increasingly with China led to greatly increasing volume of trade from the west coast. Thus, train watchers at Flagstaff, AZ can see an unbroken series of long Santa Fe freights heading east from southern California ports with goods from Chinese factories. At the same time grain and midwestern products are heading west to PUget Sound ports on their way to Asian markets. Also, in the Twin Cities coal rattles by from Montana to electric plants in Chicago over the Union Pacific, formerly Northwestern tracks--reflecting the 1990s new mergers of western railroads into a few super systems. Chicago, always a hub, has become a bottleneck as Pacific goods struggle to pass through on their way to the east coast. The image of the train is still one of power and even speed, but more an icon of computer controlled transport efficiency, essentially labor free compared to the days of steam. A few fortunate men and now women staff the locomotive cabs to wave at youngsters as they pass by. In the cities commuter service still carries hundred of thousands of travelers daily, but for a highly simplified service based on conductors to take tickets. Here and there a vestigial private car, such as for Lake Forest to Chicago for rush hour business leaders, survives to recall an earlier age of elite service. Regional transportation authorities promote and subsidize this suburban service while municipal transit services provide an intra-city alternative to high-cost and slow car travel and central city parking. This matrix of services provides an alternative to the car in an age of high gas prices, and the image of the railroad is on the rise as an efficient carrier, a modern civilized counterbalance to the age of the automobile since World War II. Railroad suburbs again offer a premier opportunity to leave the car in the garage, and new stations and lines are a possibility in future metropolitan transportation plans where highways are being eschewed for their role in creating sprawl. The train, no longer a monopolizing and controlling power squeezing the populace, offers a lifeline of alternative commuting for many.
The “Iron Icon” Across the Media and in Material Culture
This survey already has made references to the railroad in literature, including railfan historical studies of the mid 20th C. Popular stories about railroaders and their life were the staple of Railroad Stories, a periodical which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s--becoming in time Railroad Magazine and later Railroad and Railfan. From the glory days stories and articles on railroad subjects appealed to railroaders and to young men especially. Not surprisingly, these pulp stories highlighted the dangers and thrilling experiences of railroad life. In this period the railroad was an ubiquitous presence in American life, with all the romantic and escape images that offered to young people, especially those in small towns and on farms--travel, interesting colleagues, colorful escapades, etc.
But the dominant periodical publisher in the field, for railfans with an overlap into the industry audience, is Kalmbach Publishing, near Milwaukee, WI. they now have branched out into many successful hobby publications, but their start came with Trains, a monthly begun just before World War II and still the major name in the field, with over a hundred thousand subscribers. Their offshoot, the quarterly Classic Trains, aims at the nostalgia audience for the final days of steam and for the early days of diesel locomotives. These full-color now periodicals focus on visual images, the work of artists--for whom they have been the key patrons often--and photographers.
Music
From before the first running of railroads in this country they had become the subject of song. The first stage of the rail icon was the booster’s rose-colored view. This began with the July 1, 1828 publication of the “Carrollton March”--looking forward to the opening of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that year: “’Oh, we’re all full of life, fun and Jollity,/ We’re all crazy here in Baltimore./Here’s a road to be made/With the pick and the spade,/’Tis to reach to Ohio, for the benefit of trade.” George Douglas quoted this ditty (353) from Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (U. of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 41. Railroads were staple subjects of songwriters in the 19th C. who wrote tunes printed up as sheet music, to be played and sung at home. This was the most participatory period for audiences of songs and music relating to trains. By the 20th C. early recording and the radio introduced, according to Douglas, the railroad as the subject of country and western songs. When radio came along in the 1920s and 1930s, when rural electrification was subsidized, the rural and southern audiences for country music identified with the subjects of hobo songs by Vernon Dalhart, including his “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which by the 1940s and 1950s was in elementary school song books. Such music became perennial campfire singing staples, such as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”--again with a populist inclination.
By the 1940s, of interest to elite travelers and workers both were songs from films and musicals, such as “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” from the Hollywood Judy Garland film, The Harvey Girls. Around the period in the 1940s of romanticized westerns and of the Railroad Fair, this was the beginning of the nostalgic edge to the image of the railroad, looking back to a simpler and slower time--when trains stopped on the way west over the Santa Fe at Fred Harvey restaurants for meals.
Film, Etc.
By around 1900 film had begun to draw elite and specialist interest. But it was the pioneer film, the Great Train Robbery, which--according to Douglas--captured the popular imagination for the medium and and launched the wildly popular silent nickelodeon theaters around the country. This short feature film was shot in a realistic location and then innovatively edited to provide the pacing and drama which would hold the audience (362-63).
As movies, with sound after 1930, evolved and matured, trains provided good settings for action, due to the limits imposed by the standardized and well-known settings and in the context of motion. For comedic effect Douglas cites Harry Langdon’s 1920s effort to shave on a swinging Pullman car in the Luck of the Foolish. Later in the 1950s Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis engage in farcical confusion over cross dressing and mixed up tightly-constraining Pullman upper berths. By the 1980s Amtrak had so much become the butt of jokes in John Candy and Steve Martin’s Trains, Planes, and Automobiles that the company would not let any reference to the organization be shown. Also, trains continuously have provided the dangerous settings for action films, as in the recent Mission Impossible, utilizing the a subway train and the added constraint of a tunnel overhead. Fast freights and subways are modes of railroading known to a wide, popular audience and, thus, they reflect the image of the rail icon today.
For the specialist railfan there have been specialized 8 mm home movies since World War II, with preservation/conversion of these to videotape by the 1980s a major advance in access to railroad sites for a wide popular audience. Many of these have been made by amateur train-watchers, who at least until the early 21st C. terrorism scares were photographing trains while lurking around rail yards and busy transfer points. In the last decade again these videos and photographs have been converted to CDs and DVDs, increasing the likelihood of their ultimate preservation as well as wide distribution at low cost. Given the dramatic changes in computer technology, the fixed costs for editing and duplicating equipment has dropped dramatically to enable most railfans so inclined to prepare their own moving pictures of railroads. Since the 1990s, too, these along with still shots have been mounted on the internet, on personal sites or hospitable line-specific historical society or library/archive sites, etc. The internet has been a major new distributor of railfan information and of associated community building, promoting preservation of the railroad as icon.
Hobbies: Modeling, Collectibles, and Preservation
Making model trains and also toys goes back to the 19th C., but this hobby reached a high point in the era of radio, from the late 1920s to about 1950, when listeners’ ears were occupied but their eyes and hands were not. By the early 1930s there were small firms catering to the interests, needs, and limited pocketbooks of most modelers. Also, Kalmbach’s Railroad Modeling monthly magazine was a source of ideas and tips. In Chicago elite railfan Elliott Donnelley’s Scale-Craft built and sold items for modelers in the 1930s and then in various manners until the late 1940s. Donnelley’s discursive catalog copy and side stories provide a good window on the dynamics of the popular hobby during the Depression and wartime.
After World War II many youngsters were able to own H or HO small scale model train outfits from Lionel and American, archetypically first set up in an oval under a Christmas tree. Well developed set ups have been shown in museums and department stores, involving ingeniously constructed stations, typical buildings, and natural terrain. As with other 1950s images and icons, the model train with its idealized microcosm of ordered suburban or ex-urban living served by handsome trains suggests a postwar/cold war yearning for a simple, nostalgic, uncomplicated world. The young, mostly male model railroaders with their fathers and grandfathers worked together to create little utopias centered on trains, with all the iconic power and dominance implied, which they could manage, grow, and ultimately control.
On a larger scale have been the preserved railroads and rail museums of the last forty years especially. These now are in every corner of America and offer a nostalgic, preserved sample of railroad life or glimpse at railroad history. Notable examples include the still-running narrow-gauge Durango and Silverton line in southwest Colorado, since before 1960 a tourist mecca; the Baltimore & Ohio Museum in Baltimore, with its significant collection of early locomotives; and the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento, which includes the collections of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society and also the Beeby and Clegg photo archive. But most of the smaller, more informal museums located across the country are run largely with amateur volunteer efforts, work and management. A good example of this substantial segment of the rail preservation network is the Illinois Railway Museum, at Union IL, in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago. Work goes on steadily restoring or rehabilitating with volunteer work and then sometimes operating cars and locomotives of every types found in the region, including transit and interurban. The Museum in a nearby town also maintains an archive of Pullman drawings and a collection of railfan and technical books in an old Carnegie library. The staff is very small, beyond the volunteers, and a professional curator hired briefly in recent years led to a return to a more amateur model, perhaps reflecting the deep-seated railroaders’ distrust of ‘management.”
As in many other popular hobby areas, various collectibles are sub-icons, if you will, of the larger whole. Antique and recovered signal lanterns recall a pre-electronic era of standardized, ingenious labor-intensive communications. Dining china, linens, and servers’ uniforms recall and symbolize the elegant era of the great trains. Posters, brochures, and timetables incorporate now increasingly treasured railroad commercial art, as seen for example in Michael Zega’s “Iron Icon...” conference paper (24). One of Zega’s examples is The Burlington’s Number One, with an engineer in the middle and flanked by locomotive views and high Rockies scenery, highlights a new fast locomotive employed by the line. The engineer, the new locomotive, and the scenery reflect in one view the icon the advertisers sought to convey to their would-be passengers: speed, reliability, and exotic mountain views: the new America of the Machine Age.
Some Further Reading
Beebe, Lucius. High Iron: A Book of Trains. New York: Appleton-Century, 1938.
Douglas, George H. All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life. Smithmark, 1996.
Dubin, Arthur D. Some Classic Trains. Milwaukee: Kalmbach Publishing, 1964.
________. More Classic Trains. Milwaukee: Kalmbach Publishing, 1974.
Iron Icon: the Railroad in American Art, April 22-23, 2004, special number (14, 2005) of Railroad Heritage. Madison, WI: Center for Railroad Photography and Art (www.railphoto-art.org). Includes Michael Zega, “The American Railroad Advertising Booklet, 1870-1950”, 20-25, and and several related articles.
Miller, Arthur H. “Trains and Railroading” in Concise Histories of American Popular Culture. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982, pp. 409-12.
Rhodes, Richard. The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West. Rev. ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.
Essay author Arthur H. Miller is Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections, Donnelley and Lee Library, Lake Forest College, and a director of the Board of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. The College library’s railroad collection is the archive of the Center, and it hosts the Center’s annual photography conference in March. Miller has a Ph.D. in English (American Literature) from Northwestern University and is the author of the article on “Trains and Railroading” for Greenwood’s Dictionary of American Popular Culture (1988 and later eds.). amiller@lakeforest.edu.