TICKETS, PLEASE
On board as passenger trains went off the rails
My dad’s older brother, Arthur, spent most of his career working for railroads. But not in a conventional operating capacity. He was an economist, and although he loved traveling by train, his job was to convince industrial firms to locate their manufacturing facilities along corridors served by the railroad.
Initially, he did so for the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad in the Midwest, and later for the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad here in Western Pennsylvania.
The culmination of his P&LE work, a 1961 opus called “Region of Opportunity — Industrial Potential Along the PittsburghYoungstown Axis,” runs to more than 1,200 pages. Together with its companion atlas, it was the definitive economic profile of Western Pennsylvania at that time.
Beyond their economic importance, which remains essential, railroads have been a subject of folklore, song and metaphor for generations of Americans. So it’s easy to get drawn into the romance of railroads. “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Peace Train,” “City of New Orleans” and “Wabash Cannonball” are among the many familiar songs that bear witness to our ongoing fascination with rail travel.
But as far back as the 1950s, passenger railroads were already in serious trouble. The era in which abusive railroad monopolies essentially ran the U.S. economy had come to an end.
Heavy-handed regulation of the industry from Washington barred railroads from adjusting their rates or service schedules according to market demand without government permission. Pressure from powerful railroad unions compounded their difficulties.
One late afternoon in 1958, thanks to my uncle’s position with the P&LE, I was able to ride in the diesel locomotive of a commuter train from Station Square on the South Side to various stops east. Inside the locomotive was an engineer, who operated the train, and a fireman, whose work shoveling coal into the firebox had been made obsolete years before when steam engines were retired.
The station platforms that the train served typically alternated, left and right,
along the sequence of stops. When one was on the right, which is where the engineer sat, he would look back from his window for the stationmaster to signal that it was
OK to resume travel.
When it was on the left, the fireman would look behind at the stationmaster and, when the all-clear signal was given, he would tell the engineer “highball,” and the train would move on to the next station.
After our visit ended, I asked my uncle why they didn’t have a rearview mirror instead of a railroad employee to tell the engineer when it was time to go. He told me that looking behind was the fireman’s job, and that the union had barred the railroad from installing mirrors because they would take away someone’s livelihood. Even as a 14-year-old, I was surprised that someone would be paid to do the job that a rear-view mirror could do just as well.
Increases in the railroad’s labor costs resulting from these kinds of practices, combined with regulatory limits on fares and schedules, ultimately made passenger service a losing business proposition, leading to its collapse as a viable alternative to buses, cars and planes. The handful of passenger trains that were permitted to remain in service back then were typically run with overheated or underheated cars, allegedly as part of a strategy to make passengersso uncomfortable they’d never come back — an outcome that would help the railroads make the case to regulators for dropping their
money-losing passenger service altogether. And it largely worked.
But the freight trains’ success was everyone else’s loss. Although today’s Amtrak trains can offer a pleasant travel experience, a trip that would take four hours by car could easily take six or more hours by train. If you’re not in a rush, it can be a scenic and relaxing ride. But today, few people have the luxury of surplus travel time. Particularly if they have had the opportunity to ride trains in Europe or parts of Asia, where high-speed passenger rail is popular and widely available. In comparison, the experience of traveling by train in America is very disappointing.
Of course, over the years, there have been an assortment of ambitious highspeed rail projects. One, maglev, was proposed in the 1990s for various U.S. locations, including in Western Pennsylvania. But their projected costs have been astronomical while their political support has been weak. As a result, none of them were ever built. So it’s unlikely we will ever see passenger rail service here even approaching the level it has reached in many other parts of the world.
Uncle Arthur would not have been happy.