49. Romance of the Rails

Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal.

To make my next book more personal, I decided to write about my favorite subject: passenger trains. I’ve loved passenger trains since I took my first train trip, from Grand Forks, ND to Portland, OR when I was five years old. My love for passenger trains may seem to be at odds with my political stance that the nation should stop subsidizing Amtrak, but I don’t think it is right to ask for other taxpayers to subsidize my hobby.

In my private life, I expressed my love for passenger trains by helping to restore the SP&S 700 steam locomotive and several passenger cars; buying (but never really doing anything with) some model trains; collecting railroad memorabilia; building a library of hundreds of books on passenger trains and railroad history; and joining dozens of rail history societies and museums. None of these things were as satisfying as riding the trains themselves, so whenever I had an opportunity I rode tourist trains such as the White Pass & Yukon and Cumbres & Toltec.

Planning a book on passenger rail (including urban rail transit) was daunting because I knew, from my personal collection, that hundreds of books have already been written about this subject, and I wondered if I could find anything new to say. An economist named George Hilton, for example, had written policy books about both Amtrak and federal transit subsidies along with popular books about interurban railways, cable cars, and several individual railroads. That didn’t seem to leave much ground for me to cover.

Hilton’s books were useful histories, in the same way that Gridlock and American Nightmare included histories, but they didn’t tell personal stories. Moreover, I soon discovered a wealth of historic stories that weren’t told in the popular rail history books in my collection.

I started with John Stevens, the founder of Hoboken, New Jersey. Born in 1749, after the turn of the nineteenth century Stevens was upset when the state of New York decided to finance the Erie Canal, which he thought used an obsolete technology. To prove it, he built the first steam locomotive in America in 1825 and demonstrated its operation on some railroad tracks he built on his farm in what would become Hoboken. This was a surprise to me because most history books say that the first locomotive in America was imported from Great Britain in 1829. (Careful writers will say this was the first commercially operated locomotive.)

Stevens was right that canals would soon be obsolete. New York made money on the Erie Canal, but it and other states lost money on all subsequent canal ventures, partly because canals couldn’t compete with railroads. Stevens and his son, Robert Livingston Stevens, went on to found the Camden and Amboy Railroad (the earliest predecessor of the Pennsylvania Railroad), and for that railroad Robert designed the first T-shaped rail, which has been the model for nearly all railroads since then.

A couple of generations later, a distant cousin of the Stevens named John Frank Stevens was a civil engineer who located Marias Pass for the Great Northern Railway, which was my favorite railroad because it was the one I rode on when I was five. By fortunate coincidence, the Great Northern also happened to be the nation’s first transcontinental railroad built without any federal land grants or subsidies. I look a little bit like the railway’s founder, James J. Hill, and so I’ve portrayed him in living histories giving speeches he once made about conservation and transportation.

After the Great Northern was completed, Stevens became chief engineer for the Rock Island Railroad, and there he took on an apprentice named Ralph Budd, who had managed to graduate from college with a degree in engineering by the time he was 19 years old. When Theodore Roosevelt asked Stevens to take on the job of building the Panama Canal, Stevens took Budd with him. While Stevens was dealing with whether to build a sea-level canal or one with locks, he put Budd to work rebuilding the Panama railroad, whose smooth operation would be needed to finish the canal.

Stevens and Budd returned to the United States to help Hill, who was building the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (the future owner of the SP&S 700). Hill was known for keeping costs under control; when he was building the Great Northern, he had written an associate that “I find it pays to be up at the front where the money is being spent.” But he wasn’t up at the front of the SP&S construction project and costs had gotten out of control, so he put his friend Stevens in charge. Stevens, in turn, assigned to Budd the task of building the Oregon Trunk Railway to Bend, Oregon, and surveying an extension of that railroad into California.

Hill completed several railroads in his lifetime and never was much for grand ceremonies, so he didn’t have a Last Spike celebration for the Great Northern or the SP&S. But for some reason he decided to go to Bend to pound the last spike for the Oregon Trunk in 1910. While there, he was impressed enough by Ralph Budd to bring him back to St. Paul, Minnesota, and effectively turned him into an apprentice railroad executive. By this time, Hill’s son, Louis, had taken on the title of president of the Great Northern, but before he died in 1916, James Hill let some of his board members know that, when Louis got tired of the job, they should make Budd the next president.

Louis was more interested in building hotels in Glacier National Park than running a railroad. This was partly because Congress had so overregulated the railroads that his father had advised him to get out of the railroad business by the time he was 40. James Hill had purchased the forerunners of what is now U.S. Bancorp, and Louis continued to manage those while he sold all but one share of Great Northern stock, which he needed to stay on the railway’s board of directors.

As a result, Budd was only 40 years old when he became GN’s president in 1919. In that job, he completed the line from Bend into California; build a 7.9-mile tunnel under the Cascade Mountains to cover up John F. Stevens’ embarrassingly poor location of the rail line in Washington; and led two remarkable historical expeditions of the Northwest, for one of which he built a statue of his mentor, John F. Stevens, which may have been the first statue of a still-living person ever erected in the United States.

Passenger train ridership peaked just as Budd was made GN’s president, so one of Budd’s concerns was the decline in ridership in the 1920s. Other railroad presidents complained that newly formed bus companies were taking their riders, but Budd’s analysis found that ridership was declining just as fast on routes that had no bus competition as routes that did. He concluded the real competition was automobiles, but noted that the railroad was often required by the states to provide passenger service on branch lines where ridership was dropping the fastest.

He decided that buses were the answer, as they could provide the mandated service at a lower cost than the railroads. So he had the Great Northern buy a bus company called Northland Transportation and gave it enough money to buy other companies. Soon Northland had a nearly coast-to-coast network. It changed its name to that of one of the companies it bought, Greyhound.

In 1932, Budd became president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. Soon after that he attended the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, where he saw some of the first streamlined trains and one of General Motors’ first two-stroke Diesel engines. Budd put these ideas together to conceive the first Diesel-powered streamlined train. The train, which Budd named the Zephyr, was built by the Budd Company, which was started by Edward G. Budd. Ralph and Ed publicly denied they were related, probably because Ralph didn’t want anyone to think he was guilty of nepotism, but a historian later found they were cousins.

Budd also had the Burlington start a bus company, and to better compete with Greyhound he formed an alliance with bus companies owned by other railroads including Santa Fe and Missouri Pacific. This alliance was known as Trailways, meaning Budd was the catalyst behind both of the nation’s coast-to-coast bus brands.

Budd certainly wasn’t anti-passenger train. He ordered Burlington shops to create the first dome car in 1945. Due to their 360-degree views, domes are my favorite way to travel. Eventually, fourteen different railroads ordered dome cars constructed for their passenger trains, but Burlington had the largest fleet of any of them.

The Hill family continued to be involved with trains. In 1941, Louis Hill’s son Cortlandt was the financial backer for a company that designed the first pendulum passenger car, also known as a tilting car, which could go around curves faster than regular cars. Hill’s company built only three such cars, which were purchased by the Great Northern, Burlington, and Santa Fe railways, but the technology is now used in most high-speed trains.

When Ralph Budd retired from the Burlington at the age of 70, he was appointed by Illinois’ governor to chair the board of directors for the recently created Chicago Transit Authority. The CTA had recently purchased hundreds of modern streetcars, but Budd did an analysis and found that buses were a lot less expensive to operate than streetcars. He ordered that all streetcar lines be replaced with buses, and the new electric streetcars were converted to elevated railcars.

Meanwhile, Ralph’s son, John Budd, became president of the Great Northern in 1951. Budd became something of a hero to passenger train fans because he insisted that, as long as the GN provided passenger service, that they be “run well and a credit to the company” (as another GN executive once said).

The story of Ralph Budd and the Zephyr is well known among railfans, but these other stories were not. Budd’s role in replacing short-distance trains with buses; in promoting long-distance trains by publicizing history and scenery; and in overseeing the infant Chicago Transit Authority are largely forgotten.

I found it especially remarkable that I could tell most of the history of pre-Amtrak passenger trains with just these three families: the Stevens, Hills, and Budds, which in each case consisted of fathers and sons and in two cases a cousin and in the third a grandson. For urban transit, I only had to add Frank Sprague, who I called the Tesla of transportation. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague developed the first workable electric streetcar, the first workable electric rapid transit system, the first high-speed electric elevator, and the first system of positive train control, which he installed for Ralph Budd on a portion of the Great Northern Railway. For their work, John Stevens, Frank Sprague, and Ralph Budd were all awarded Fritz Medals, the highest honor accorded to an American engineer.

I decided to include photographs focusing on these stories in Romance of the Rails. I found an on-line photo of a replica of John Stevens’ original steam locomotive at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. As a part of my background research for the book I decided to ride Amtrak coast-to-coast on three different routes, and during one of my Chicago layovers I went to the museum to photograph the engine. Unfortunately, it turned out the Chicago museum had sold the replica to the Stevens Technical Institute in Hoboken, so I obtained a photo from them.

In all, the book had about 63 photos. There was an extra page, so instead of finding some random photos I drew a diagram showing all of the relationships between the Stevens, Hill, and Budd families, along with Frank Sprague. I’m sure most people glance at the chart and turn the page, but it shows an interesting set of connections over 150 years.

The photos were much more important than the chart for selling the book. I told Cato’s marketing department that some railfans would probably buy the book just for the photos. A week before the book was formally released, but after copies had been delivered to Cato, I was in DC to debate Jarrett Walker about the future of transit. One of the members of the audience was a former president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. I asked him if he had seen the book, which was on display outside the auditorium. He said he saw it but didn’t sound too interested in an anti-Amtrak book. I showed him the photos and he immediately got up and bought a copy.

The 11,000 miles I rode on Amtrak really weren’t necessary for the book, but I wanted to make sure that I couldn’t be accused of criticizing something I never used. I rode Amtrak hundreds of thousands of miles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time Amtrak replaced the equipment it inherited from the railroads with Amfleet and Superliners.

The old equipment had been designed to be as comfortable for passengers as possible as the railroads knew they were competing with airlines and automobiles. Many railroads used what were called Sleepy Hollow seats, which had been carefully designed to fit people of all shapes and sizes. The rest rooms were large to allow people plenty of room to change clothes, shave, put on make-up, and do other things in semi-privacy. Food in the diners was top notch and many trains also had café cars with lower-priced food for those who didn’t want or couldn’t afford white tablecloths and silver service.

For Amfleet and the Superliners, Amtrak apparently forgot about comfort. The seats were not designed for human bodies and rest rooms were often tiny, like on an airliner. The food grew progressively worse over the years as Amtrak shrank the number of cooks in the kitchens until most of the meals were basically microwaved. Where I once routinely rode Amtrak on my trips from Oregon to Washington, DC, I stopped riding it because it was no longer comfortable or interesting.

As I reported in several Antiplanner posts, Amtrak had only gotten worse by 2017. The average car in Amtrak’s fleet was older than the cars Amtrak acquired from the railroads in 1971. These cars were slowly deteriorating and Amtrak didn’t seem to care. The long-distance trains I was riding produced 40 percent of Amtrak’s passenger miles, while the Northeast Corridor and state-subsidized day trains each produced only about 30 percent. But, as the National Association of Railroad Passengers (now renamed the Rail Passengers Association) often complained, Amtrak treated the long-distance trains with disdain, something it operated only to get broad political support for its Northeast Corridor trains.

Amtrak claims that the Northeast Corridor makes money, but to make this claim it ignores depreciation and the tens of billions of dollars of maintenance backlog in the corridor. In the book, I demonstrated that all three groups of trains–the Northeast Corridor, state-subsidized trains, and long-distance trains–lose about the same amount of money per passenger mile. The Northeast Corridor earns a lot more revenue per passenger mile because Amtrak charges so much for the Acela and other first-class business. But the cost of maintaining the tracks used by most Amtrak trains is shared with freight trains, while there are few freights on the Northeast Corridor, so passengers have to pay the whole cost (which they don’t).

Soon after Romance of the Rails came out, it was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. I got my name on the cover of Trains magazine when I was interviewed by correspondent Fred Frailey (who has written several books about passenger trains). I later had a great time riding the Cumbres and Toltec with Fred. The book was negatively reviewed by a rail history journal I no longer subscribe to whose editor seems to believe that anyone who likes trains is politically obligated to support Amtrak subsidies.

I’ve been told that other Cato writers have asked Cato’s marketing department, “How do we get our books reviewed by the Wall Street Journal?” The answer, of course, is “tell stories.”