The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858. Various
are the direct evils of high speeds; there are also indirect evils, which are full as bad.
All trains in motion at the same time, within a certain distance of the express, must be kept waiting, with steam up, or driven at extra velocities to keep out of the way.
Where the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that the risks of failure in "making time" must be much greater than at reduced rates; and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain the time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A single example will be sufficient to show this.
A train, whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour, having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it in order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles per hour; and a train, whose prescribed rate of speed is forty miles per hour, under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to sixty miles per hour. In the former case it would probably be accomplished, whilst in the latter it would more probably result in failure,—or, if successful, it would be so at fearful risk of accident.
However true it may be that many of our large roads are well, some of them admirably, managed, it is none the less a fact that the greater portion are directed in a manner far from satisfactory,—many, indeed, being subjected to the combined influence of ignorance and recklessness.
Many people wonder at the bad financial state of the American railroads; the wonder is, to those who understand the way in which they are managed, that they should be worth anything at all. It is useless to disguise the fact, says a writer in one of our railroad-papers, that the great body of our railroad-directors are entirely unfit for their position. They are, personally, a very respectable class of men, (Schuylerisms and Tuckermanisms excepted,) —men who, after having passed through their active business-lives successfully, and after retirement, are, in the minds of some, eminently fitted to adorn a director's chair. Never was there a greater mistake. What is wanted for a railway-director is an active, clear-headed man, who has not outlived his term of activity. We want railway-directors who know how to reduce the operating-expenses per mile, and not men who oppose their bigoted ignorance to everything like change or improvement, who can see no difference between science and abstract ideas. It would seem that the only question to be asked with regard to the fitness of a man for being a director is—Is he rich and respectable? If he has these qualities, and is pretty stupid withal, he is in a fair line for election. We tell our railway-readers, that, if they desire to make their property valuable, and rescue it from becoming a byword and a reproach, they have got to elect men of an entirely different stamp,—men of practical experience, in the best sense of the term, who have intelligence enough to know and apply all those vital reforms upon which depends the future success of their undertakings,—the men of the workshop, the track, and the locomotive. And we shall yet see the more intelligent of them taking the place, at the directors' board, of the retired merchants, physicians, and other respectable gentlemen, who now lend only the names of their respectability to perpetuate a system of folly that has reduced our railroad-management below contempt. As at present constituted, our boards are a very showy, but very useless piece of mechanism. The members attend at meetings when they feel just like it, and sign their names to documents and statements which have been prepared for them by others, without much knowledge of what the contents are; their other duties consisting chiefly in riding over their own and connecting roads, free of charge.
Why should railway-directors work for nothing for the stockholders? Ah, Messrs. Stockholders, you little know in reality how fat a salary your directors make to themselves, by nice little commissions, by patronizing their favorite builders of locomotives and cars, and by buying the thousand and one patents that are so urgently recommended! Do you carry your broken watch to a blacksmith or to a stone-mason to be mended? Neither, we think. Why, then, do you leave the management of a work which engineers, machinists, carpenters, masons, and men of almost every trade, have spent time and care upon to build, to the respectable merchant, lawyer, or banker, who thinks the best road that which has the softest cushions and the most comfortable seats on which to ride?
Railroad-building, remarks a late writer, (Mr. Whiton,) may be divided into three periods,—the first, the introductory, in which roads were a sort of experimental enterprise, where the men who labored expected to be paid for their time or money, and were willing to wait a reasonable time for the expected profit. Second, the speculative period, when men were possessed with an unhealthy desire for fortune-making, and, not content to wait the natural harvest of the seed sown, departed from the sound and honest principles of construction and management; trying, at first, by all sorts of pretence and misrepresentation, to conceal, and last by legislation to counterbalance, the results of their ignorance and of their insane desires. Railroads were compared, as an investment, to banks; and it was even supposed that the more they cost the more they would divide; and tunnels, rock-cuts, and viaducts were then as much sought after as they are now avoided. Shrewd and intelligent business-men, who had made for themselves fortunes, embraced these ridiculous opinions, and seemed at once, upon taking hold of railroad-enterprises, to lose whatever of common sense they before might have possessed; and even at the present day these same men have not the manly honesty to acknowledge their errors, but endeavor to cover them up with greater.—The third period is that of reaction, which embraces the present time. To a person unacquainted with the management of railroads, to see a body of men, no one of whom has ever before had anything to do with mechanical operations, assembled to decide upon the relative merits of the different plans of bridges or of locomotives or cars, upon the best means of reducing the working-expenses of a machine of whose component parts they have not the slightest idea, of the most complicated and elaborate piece of mechanism that men have ever designed, might at first seem absurd; but custom has made it right. It is generally supposed that the moment a man, be he lawyer, doctor, or merchant, is chosen director in a railroad enterprise, immediately he becomes possessed of all knowledge of mechanics, finance, and commerce; but, judging from past experience, it appears in reality that he leaves behind at such time whatever common sense he perchance possessed before; otherwise why does he not follow the same correct business-rules, when managing the property of others, as when he accumulated his own? A man who should show as much carelessness and ignorance, when operating for himself, as railway-directors do when operating for others, would be considered as a fit subject for an insane asylum.
When railroads are built where they are needed, at the time they are wanted, in a country able to support them, by permanent investors, and not by speculators, and are well made by good engineers, and well managed by competent men, whose interest is really connected with the success of the enterprise, then they will pay, and be railroads indeed. But so long as money is obtained on false pretences, to be played for by State and Wall Street gamblers on the one hand, and ravenous contractors on the other hand, they will be what they are,—worthless monuments of extravagance and folly.
"Experience keeps a dear school," says poor Richard, "but fools will learn in no other."
Let not the reader think for a single moment that we have no appreciation of the labors of a De Witt Clinton, or of a Livingston, —that we at all underrate the services of the Eastern capitalists who render available the public-land grants of the West, whether to build ship-canals or railroads. We have the highest respect for that talent without which our Western lands would still be left to the buffalo and the deer, and the gold and silver of Europe would remain on the other side of the Atlantic. These capitalists are the mainsprings of the system; but we should no more apply their energy and skill to the detailed operation of so mechanical a structure as a railroad, than we should attach the mainspring of a watch to the hands directly, without the intermediate connecting chains and wheels.
Not less incompetent for the construction of railways, than are the directors for the management of the completed roads, are at least one half of the so-called engineers in America. Obliged to complete no course of education, to pass no examination, they are at once let loose upon the country whenever they feel like it, to build what go by the names of railroads and bridges, but are in reality traps in which to lose both life and money. Indeed, any man (in the United States) who has carried a rod or chain is called an engineer; while the correct definition is, a man who has, first, a thorough knowledge of mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry,—second,