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The Railroad That Never Was

Vanderbilt, Morgan, and the Herbert H. Harwood, Jr. South Pennsylvania Railroad

Indiana University Press

PRELUDE: THE OMNIPOTENT PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD

After the Civil War, U.S. railroads rapidly reshaped the country's economy, making possible mass production, large-scale mining and farming, and mass markets for it all. Railroading, too, had become a spectacular growth industry; capital was poured into building new lines seemingly everywhere—some of them soundly based, some purely speculative, and some that represented the honest but often naïve hopes of communities that hoped to have a bigger piece of the expanding economy. And with no federal regulation, rail rates gyrated between "whatever the traffic will bear," where there was little or no competition, and uninhibited and often vicious rate wars where there was too much.

The end of the war also ushered in the gradual creation of ever-larger and more powerful trunk-line railroad systems, the most powerful of which were the ones that dominated the industrial centers and large cities of the East and near-Midwest. As things shook down, there were three: the Pennsylvania Railroad, "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central system, and the Baltimore & Ohio, the pioneering American railroad, whose birth certificate dated to 1827. By the mid-1870s, all three linked the Atlantic coast with the gateways of Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. (The perennially weak and victimized Erie Railroad was a fourth contender, but its market penetration could never match its larger rivals.) Each of the "big three" was based in a different Atlantic port city: the Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Vanderbilt (along with the Erie) in New York, and the B&O in Baltimore. Each, too, competed with one another in different ways: Vanderbilt had no direct presence in Philadelphia or Baltimore, and at the time the B&O had none in Philadelphia or New York, while the PRR tapped all three ports. In common, though, all three fought for business through Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis as well as in many other markets west of the Alleghenies.

By 1873 the Pennsylvania (or "Pennsy," as many called it, not always fondly) had made itself the East's most powerful and aggressive system and the country's leading business corporation, thanks to the teamwork of its shrewd but shy president, J. Edgar Thomson, and his ranking vice president, the ebullient, aggressive, and manipulative Thomas A. Scott. In the space of only 15 years, including time out for the Civil War, these two opposite but lethally complementary personalities had transformed a single Harrisburg-Pittsburgh main line into a sprawling system reaching New York Harbor, Washington, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Louisville, and most of the important cities in between—and it was now extending into the Deep South.

Along with the "big three" (plus the Erie) was a network of what today would be called large regional lines that were especially dense in New England and the eastern Pennsylvania anthracite country. The "anthracite roads" included the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the Lehigh Valley, Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia and Reading—simply the "Reading" to almost everyone.

The Reading needs some special attention for reasons soon seen. Its main line connected the two cities of its corporate name, and by the end of the 1870s it had lines radiating from Reading and Philadelphia northwest to Shamokin, Sunbury, and Williamsport, Pennsylvania; north to Allentown and Bethlehem; west to Harrisburg; and northeast to Bound Brook, New Jersey, where a Central Railroad of New Jersey connection gave it access to New York Harbor. In addition, its Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company subsidiary owned vast eastern Pennsylvania anthracite acreages and was the state's dominant producer. Besides its huge coal traffic, the railroad had deep roots in Philadelphia's industrial and export-import markets and a strong presence in the New Jersey/New York area through the New Jersey Central partnership. At the time, in fact, it was claimed that the Reading was "one of the largest corporations in the world." But it had its problems, too, and was looking outside its territory to solve them.

By the early 1880s the dominant rail networks were physically much the same, but some key personalities had changed. Thomson and Scott were both gone from the Pennsylvania, Thomson having died in 1874 and Scott in 1881, a year after he was forced to retire. In their place was George Brooke Roberts, a civil engineer who was only 37 when he succeeded Scott in 1880. Unlike his outgoing and flamboyant predecessor, Roberts was typically described with adjectives like "cautious," "modest," "sober," "quiet," and "tight-lipped." Descended from Welsh immigrants who had prospered in eastern Pennsylvania, he was also a "gentleman" in the nineteenth-century Main Line Philadelphia sense of the word. In choosing him, the Pennsylvania's directors were seeking stability and regrouping after the dazzling but financially debilitating Thomson-Scott era; Roberts did his best to comply by building up the property while generally keeping to the geographic limits already set. (He did build or acquire some new lines, but most of these were meant to augment his existing system. There was only one major territorial invasion, and that was into the Reading's domain.)

Cornelius Vanderbilt had died January 4, 1877, at 82, leaving the management of his rail empire and most of his fortune to his oldest son, William H. Vanderbilt, or "Billy," as the Commodore (but nobody else) called him. Billy had initially disappointed his driven and imperious father, but slowly redeemed himself through genuine management skills and unflinching loyalty. As the Commodore aged and gradually withdrew from business, Billy increasingly—and capably—filled the gaps. Balding, but with impressively flared muttonchop whiskers, the younger Vanderbilt shared some of his father's shrewdness and aggressiveness, but lacked much of the old man's intense drive, daring, diplomatic skills, and cast-iron constitution. (And rightly so; few humans could match the Commodore.) He also suffered from high blood pressure, which would soon prod him into an early semiretirement and death.

While the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Vanderbilt lines competed for traffic between their terminals, each dominated some specific territories where the other was either a lesser presence or absent entirely. New York State was undisputed Vanderbilt turf; cities such as Albany, Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo all lay along its main line and were beholden to it. The New York Central's Lake Shore & Michigan Southern subsidiary also had such Lake Erie cities as Erie, Cleveland, and Toledo largely to itself.

Needless to say, the Pennsylvania Railroad was its mother state's principal servant—or its master, depending on one's perspective. Whatever the view, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Railroad were essentially synonymous, economically and politically. True, in Philadelphia and much of eastern Pennsylvania, it did have Reading to contend with, but it had effectively walled off the Reading from points west of Williamsport and Harrisburg. And although the Pennsylvania's arrival in Pittsburgh in 1852 spawned several independent connecting lines to the west, north, and south, Thomson and Scott promptly gobbled them up or otherwise put them under their protective custody. By the mid-1870s, the PRR had Pittsburgh almost entirely to itself, with tracks crammed in practically every level spot in the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio river valleys. The area's steel, coal, and coke industries had their choice of shipping via PRR or the rivers and not much else.

The "not much else" consisted of the Baltimore & Ohio, which showed up in 1871 after finally winning a frustrating 25-year battle to enter the state. The B&O's arrival theoretically broke the Pennsy's stranglehold on Pittsburgh's East Coast business, but as a practical matter the B&O's access to Pittsburgh industry was far more limited, and in any event it could effectively compete only for Baltimore business. Beginning in 1881 the astute PRR walled it off from the Philadelphia and New York/New Jersey markets, and it would not be until 1886 that the B&O reentered that territory. But even so, it always remained a handicapped competitor for northeastern traffic.

As a sidelight, it might be mentioned that in addition to its physical shortcomings, the B&O was then suffering through a debilitating management transition and financial problems. John W. Garrett was still on the scene, having held the presidency since 1858, but by the late 1870s he was suffering from severe physical and mental problems and becoming increasingly reclusive. (He finally died in 1884.) During his decline and after his death, his less capable and even more emotionally erratic son, Robert, was left to run the railroad, which in itself was hardly an improvement. But thanks in part to the elder Garrett's strategic weaknesses and his financial policies, the B&O was already floundering against the Pennsylvania's strong competition and unable to do much about it. While this sorry episode is another story entirely, it directly affected the B&O's role in several stages of the forthcoming South Penn saga.

So with only the not-too-useful B&O to the east and no meaningful competition to or from any western points, Pittsburgh was still the Pennsylvania Railroad's captive. Pittsburghers soon became restive and first looked to the west for salvation. In 1875 a group of local businessmen incorporated the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad to run from Pittsburgh to Youngstown, Ohio, via the Ohio and Beaver River valleys. At Youngstown the P&LE would connect with both the Atlantic & Great Western Railroad (soon to be part of the Erie Railroad) and the Vanderbilt-controlled Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway. The LS&MS was especially important, since Vanderbilt's New York Central system not only reached the growing ore and coal ports of Lake Erie but, like the Pennsylvania, fanned into the Midwest; the LS&MS itself extended west to Chicago, with Vanderbilt-affiliated connections to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. While there was an LS&MS route from Youngstown to the west via Ashtabula, Ohio, the A&GW/Erie formed a shorter, more direct link with it at Cleveland, and in the future the P&LE and Erie would work closely together on Pittsburgh-Cleveland services. The Erie also reached Cincinnati and, beginning in 1880, Chicago over its own line.

After an inauspicious start, the P&LE's promoters approached William H. Vanderbilt and had little difficulty rousing the 56-year-old Vanderbilt's interest. In 1877 he bought a large bloc of P&LE stock, and thanks partly to his backing, construction went quickly. By January 1879 the railroad was finished to Youngstown. Although not yet a majority stockholder (that came in early 1883), Vanderbilt nonetheless quickly came to dominate the new railroad's affairs, including the decision in 1878 to extend the railroad up the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers from Pittsburgh to Connellsville, Pennsylvania. More on that soon.

There things stood in late 1881, when Vanderbilt, having successfully breached the Pennsylvania Railroad's sacred citadel from the west, now surprised everyone by showing signs that he was striking east from Pittsburgh toward Philadelphia, roughly paralleling the Pennsylvania's key trunk main line. And he looked serious. A Vanderbilt agent had quickly but quietly acquired an obscure, inactive company called the South Pennsylvania Railroad, and surveyors were dispatched into the mountain wilderness with a daunting job. They were supposed to find a practical rail route through a part of the state deemed the most difficult for any form of transportation, much less what was intended to be a heavy-duty trunk line.

THE BACK STORY

In picking up the South Pennsylvania's corporate charter and its negligible other assets, Vanderbilt and his allies bought into a legacy of doomed dreams. Until then the history of efforts to build a rail route across Pennsylvania's "southern tier" had been long and notably unproductive, if not downright dismal.

The first try came in 1837, when the new Cumberland Valley Railroad opened its line through the broad valley between Harrisburg and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and began setting new goals. One ambitious idea was to build west from Chambersburg to Pittsburgh, and gathering political support from communities such as Bedford and Everett, the CV managed to persuade the state to survey a route. The state in turn hired a 37-year-old Danish-born civil engineer, Hother Hage, to run the first railroad survey between the Susquehanna River and Pittsburgh in 1837-38. Hage, who came to the United States in 1819, had worked on building the Pennsylvania state canal system and had become chief engineer of the pioneering West Feliciana Railroad in Louisiana in 1835. A year later he was back in Pennsylvania as chief engineer of the Franklin Railroad, which was to form the southern extension of the Cumberland Valley from Chambersburg to Hagerstown, Maryland, and the Potomac River at Williamsport.

Using the Cumberland Valley Railroad at Chambersburg as his jumping-off point, Hage's route totaled 240 miles between Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, with three tunnels needed to keep ruling grades at 1 percent—considered at the time the maximum practical for steam locomotives. (Steam power was already proving that it could handle steeper inclines, but 1 percent remained an ideal for eastern lines from then on.) But his serpentine 240-mile line, compared with 155 miles over the existing turnpike (now U.S. Route 30), along with his estimated cost of $11.3 million discouraged any further action toward incorporating a railroad, much less attempting to build one.

Hage's survey had hardly gone onto the shelf before a far more comprehensive study was commissioned in 1839. At that time, Baltimore—Philadelphia's rival port to the south—was building a railroad to the Ohio River, and Pittsburgh was one of its goals. Pennsylvania, however, had been inclined to the more traditional and proven canals, particularly since much of its early trade was carried on along the Susquehanna River system. When Philadelphia merchants first pressed for a trans-Allegheny route to the west, the state had complied with what became a supreme miscalculation—an unwieldy chain of railroads, canals, and inclined planes linking Philadelphia with Pittsburgh. Ten rope-operated (later cable) inclined planes, with intermediate locomotive-powered level stretches, were necessary to hurdle Allegheny Mountain between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. Fully opened in 1834, the Main Line of Public Works, as it was called, seemed to combine the worst features of each form of transportation. The canals were slow and were shut down during the winter months, and the transfer of goods between railroad and canal and between canal and inclined planes was laborious, awkward, and expensive. (Some sectionalized canal boats were built that could be carried on the inclines, but these were hardly an ideal solution.)

Not surprisingly, Philadelphians quickly fell out of love with this mongrel and pressed hard for a direct rail route to the west to compete with the Baltimore & Ohio's yet-uncompleted line to the Ohio. Thus the state put Charles L. Schlatter to work in 1839 surveying the most feasible rail routes west to Pittsburgh. Like much else in the United States at the time, civil engineering was a young profession, and it is not surprising that young men quickly rose to senior positions; at 32, Schlatter was five years junior to even Hother Hage. Beginning at age 20 working on the state canal system, he had graduated to surveying the Girard Estate coal lands, followed by locating a never-built railroad on the Trenton & New Brunswick Turnpike in New Jersey. By the time Schlatter started, an all-rail route was in place between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, so his survey starting point was fixed on the Susquehanna River at the state capital. One of Schlatter's junior engineers on the job, by the way, was another youngster, a recently arrived German immigrant named John A. Roebling, later the world-renowned bridge builder.

Schlatter made his report in January 1842 and concentrated on three possible routes: a "southern route," which started near Shippensburg, on the Cumberland Valley Railroad's line from Harrisburg, and mostly followed Hage's earlier survey; a "middle route," basically following the Juniata and Conemaugh rivers (already the route of the canals), with a single mountain crossing near Hollidaysburg; and a "northern route" along the Susquehanna to Lock Haven and then variously using the Bald Eagle Valley and Clearfield Creek. It was really no contest; he judged his middle route the clear winner, and within a few years it became the foundation for the Pennsylvania Railroad's surveys. Equally unsurprisingly, he deemed the daunting southern route the worst, involving three major mountain summits (the highest at 2,677 feet, compared with 2,200 for the middle route) plus several lesser ones. Prophetically, though, Schlatter did propose a hard-surfaced road over this route.

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Excerpted from The Railroad That Never Was by Herbert H. Harwood Jr., George M. Smerk. Copyright © 2010 Herbert H. Harwood, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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