The Iron Road in the Prairie State

Simon Cordery

Description

In 1836, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas agreed on one thing: Illinois needed railroads. Over the next fifty years, the state became the nation's railroad hub, with Chicago at its center. Speculators, greed, growth, and regulation followed as the railroad industry consumed unprecedented amounts of capital and labor. A nationwide market resulted, and the Windy City became the site of opportunities and challenges that remain to this day. In this first-of-its-kind history, full of entertaining anecdotes and colorful characters, Simon Cordery describes the explosive growth of Illinois railroads and its impact on America. Cordery shows how railroading in Illinois influenced railroad financing, the creation of a national economy, and government regulation of business. Cordery's masterful chronicle of rail development in Illinois from 1837 to 2010 reveals how the state's expanding railroads became the foundation of the nation's rail network.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Preliminaries
2. Development Delayed
3. Optimism Revived
4. Cultivating the Prairie
5. Financing Railroads
6. Civil War, Fire, and Expansion
7. Illinois Railroad Labor
8. A Kaleidoscope of Regulations
9. Panic and Innovation
10. Bridge Building and "Over-Building"
11. Excursions and Interurbans
12. Coal and Competition
13. Progressive Regulation
14. World War I and the 1920s
15. Depression, Dieselization, and War
16. Post-War Challenges
17. National Solutions?
18. Salvation
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Railroads
• Transportation
• General officer
• Rail transport
• General
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019127
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE
IRON ROAD
in the
PRAIRIE STATE
RAILROADS PAST AND PRESENT
GEORGE M. SMERK AND H. ROGER GRANT, EDITORS
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this volume .
THE
IRON ROAD
in the
PRAIRIE STATE
THE STORY OF ILLINOIS RAILROADING
S IMON C ORDERY
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Simon Cordery
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cordery, Simon, 1960- author.
The iron road in the Prairie State : the story of illinois railroading / Simon Cordery.
pages cm. - (Railroads past and present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01906-6 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01912-7 (ebook) 1. Railroads-Illinois- History. 2. Railroads-United States-History. I. Title.
HE2771.I4C67 2016 385.09773-dc23
2015022336
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For my fellow enthusiasts, Stacy and Gareth
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 Preliminaries
2 Development Delayed
3 Optimism Revived
4 Cultivating the Prairie
5 Financing Railroads
6 Conflagrations and Expansion
7 Illinois Railroad Labor
8 A Kaleidoscope of Regulations
9 Panic and Innovation
10 Bridge Building and Overbuilding
11 Excursions and Interurbans
12 Coal and Competition
13 Progressive Regulation
14 World War I and the 1920s
15 Depression, Dieselization, and Another War
16 Postwar Challenges
17 National Solutions?
18 Salvation
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Figure 0.1. The drama of steam: a TP W double-headed freight between Chatsworth and Piper City (1924). Author s collection.
PREFACE
The history of railroading in Illinois looks from a distance like an orderly sequence of events. The story, seemingly preordained, tells of rise, fall, and tentative renaissance. After a slow, parochial start-so the narrative goes-railroad technology improved and private capital flowed into the industry, which grew into a mighty transportation network, created a national market, and shrank time and space. But storms blew in when the omnipresent and omnipotent railroads alienated employees, customers, and politicians. Reined in by labor unions and government regulators, the railroads suffered a near-mortal blow as people shifted to cars, trucks, and airplanes after 1900. Political and economic pressure squeezed the industry until much of the track became redundant and had to be abandoned. Having redefined how people understood and interacted with the world, railroads almost disappeared. Revived by the elimination of harmful government regulations and saved from the burden of carrying passengers, a smaller but stronger industry entered the twenty-first century by providing vital arteries of commerce and environmentally sound alternatives to trucks and airplanes.
Though this sketch contains a grain of truth, it obscures the lived experience of railroading and the complex development of the industry. For those caught up in the actual events, the narrative arc was far from obvious and mostly imposed after the fact. Disruption, corruption, disaster, scheming, friction, and despair shared the landscape with optimism, dreaming, recovery, expansion, and excitement. Alternative avenues were frequently present, as was the unknown. Sudden and unanticipated developments caused changes of direction and emphasis across state and nation with local ramifications. The story is clear in retrospect, but the unpredictable, the random, and the tension of the time can only be appreciated by taking ourselves back into the railroad age.
The railroads did not appear out of nothing. True, they brought large numbers of people to the state, but they were not the only force for expansion. The population of Illinois expanded over 200 percent during the decade before the railroad spread across the state as the prairies opened to settlement. In the 1850s Illinois grew by 78.8 percent, and in the 1860s the population more than doubled, but the industry tapped into preexisting trends instead of creating them. The railroads did contribute to the urbanization of the state, with towns and cities growing in double digits every decade from the 1860s on, but even here widespread paving programs in the early twentieth century accelerated the process.
The iron road conditioned Illinois economically and socially, but not in a vacuum. The first tentative steps were taken directly into the abyss of a transatlantic depression, destroying early ambitions and wrecking the state s fiscal health and reputation. Prairie State railroads originated as local interests, and not until after the Civil War did they connect with a growing national system of railroads. Then Illinois became inextricably part of a global economy, sharing in its wealth but subject to its moments of calamity and recession. To speak of Illinois as an independent economic entity became impossible, and the railroads did more than any other business to tie the state into national and international marketplaces during the nineteenth century. Local control became a fiction as Illinois merchants and bankers partnered with and grew dependent upon their counterparts in other states and nations. Any possibility for autarky-the complete economic self-reliance dreamed of by many pioneers-vanished. 1
The topography of Illinois presents few challenges to railroad building and operation. Mostly flat, with many rivers and streams and almost no truly hilly terrain, the state occupies the territory in which the American railroad network reached its maturity. During the 1850s a dramatic upsurge in railroad building brought trains to every part of the state. Lines radiated out from Chicago; railroads through southern and central Illinois connected Indiana with Iowa and Missouri; and north-south routes linked Wisconsin with Kentucky. By 1880 most settlements of any size were within five miles of an operating railroad, a situation that held until about 1960. Only one of the state s 102 counties-Calhoun, a hilly peninsula trapped between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers-has never hosted a railroad. Railroads brought in settlers from southern and eastern states and from Europe to carve farms and towns into the frontier. Only the railroad could have carried the lumber, grain, and minerals those settlers and their successors exploited. The young state s remote villages and growing towns would not have existed without the railroads. During the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, railroads provided passage to a new life with new complications in Chicago, Peoria, Decatur, East St. Louis, and elsewhere.
Railroads were ubiquitous across Illinois and the Windy City remains the hub of the North American transportation system, though the separation of operations and financing means Chicago is no longer the home of major railroad headquarters. It is impossible to travel any distance in the state today without encountering railroads or their remnants. From massive yards full of freight cars and lively depots teeming with excited passengers to crumbling bridge abutments or the telltale hump of a disused trackbed, railroads are woven into the cultural and physical fabric of the state. Long-abandoned rights-of-way are still visible from airplane and satellite. The railroad industry shaped the political development, economic growth, and settlement patterns of the state. In return, its topography, politicians, and population have influenced the expansion of railroads across the United States.
Illinois railroading offers a study of railroad development in a microcosm. The costly and futile internal improvements projects imagined by exuberant legislators in Vandalia during the late 1830s found echoes across the young nation. After a decade of despondency, renewed enthusiasm and expansion in the 1850s were duplicated throughout the trans-Appalachian West. The first merger of the railroad age occurred in Illinois, and land grants pioneered by the Illinois Central would spur transcontinental railroad building. Government regulation growing out of lawsuits originating in Illinois in the 1870s and 1880s dramatically altered the relationship between industry and government. Periodic recessions- panics, as they were called in the nineteenth century-threw Illinois-based railroads into bankruptcy and receivership, allowing many to reorganize but forcing some to disappear.
Illinois railroads encapsulated national trends in the nineteenth century and experienced the growth and decline of the twentieth. When Little Grangers built across state lines into Illinois they illustrated one aspect of a new problem: too many railroads and not enough business in an era of competition from interurbans and, more dangerously, the internal combustion engine. The Good Roads movement tilted public policy toward automobile