The historic “John Bull” of the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and its train

Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line, built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days. It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his message like a letter, beginning with “Dear sir” and ending with “Yours truly.” The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward “under flag.” That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily proceeded at snail’s pace.

It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie’s superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound express at Turner’s. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent’s orders. So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.

It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early railroads.

At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, “some two hundred thousand dollars in a year,” and his neighbors laughed at him for his extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months’ operation of the road the receipts—mostly from freight—were $1,755,285.

To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property—a property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods, rather than of through passengers.

The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the beginning, the different roads—such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, and New York Central—were being pushed west over the Alleghany Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the Sandusky, was the first locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.

The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad—now a part of the Wabash—extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N. J.,—the founders of a famous locomotive works—was landed from a packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:

In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,—afterwards a part of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the extended New York Central system—was also pushing toward Chicago as a goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted beside the “fly-by-night” schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing completion.

Chicago’s first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des Plaines; and its first locomotive, the Pioneer, had been bought second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it was a railroad, and it was with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.

The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears, construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to effect their escape to the North.

Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States, that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the People’s Pacific Railroad,—and a part of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan. There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas City by 1856. That particular railroad—the Missouri Pacific—through its western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the coast within the past year.

When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer. The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham, who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war, into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he believed so earnestly. He found it—making a route that would save 148 miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities. When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends, Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento—the Crocker brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.

How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys. “Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a bank swallow’s hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight half the battles of the Revolution.”

While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began that has never been approached in the history of railroad building. Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford, who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.

After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific, and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific—the westernmost of the chain of Gould roads—has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a number of years to come. 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. It has been assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of the so-called “pooling agreements,” and it has cut its own strong arms by building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line, large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all but passed into history.