Train Time

Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape

John R. Stilgoe

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780813926681
• eBook ISBN: 9780813930503
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Unlike many United States industries, railroads are intrinsically linked to American soil and particular regions. Yet few Americans pay attention to rail lines, even though millions of them live in an economy and culture "waiting for the train." In Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape, John R. Stilgoe picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Corridor left off, carrying his ideas about the spatial consequences of railways up to the present moment. Arguing that the train is returning, "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States," Stilgoe posits a future for railways as powerful shapers of American life.

Divided into sections that focus on particular aspects of the impending impact of railroads on the landscape, Train Time moves seamlessly between historical and contemporary analysis. From his reading of what prompted investors to reorient their thinking about the railroad industry in the late 1970s, to his exploration of creative solutions to transportation problems and land use planning and development in the present, Stilgoe expands our perspective of an industry normally associated with bad news. Urging us that "the magic moment is now," he observes, "Now a train is often only a whistle heard far off on a sleepless night. But romantic or foreboding or empowering, the whistle announces return and change to those who listen."

For scholars with an interest in American history in general and railroad and transit history in particular, as well as general readers concerned about the future of transportation in the United States, Train Time is an engaging look at the future of our railroads.

WHISPER

Greenbush waits quietly now. Building after building stands empty. Asphalt and gravel parking lots catch the autumn sun but house no cars. Blue and red machinery stands abandoned, and here and there birds fly in and out open doors and windows. Temporary metal fencing snakes around some lots, its gates punctuated by modest white signs lettered in black. Across the adjacent salt marsh seagulls soar, their movement enlivening the fringes of a district so quiet that their cries echo from inland. Only a rare car cruises Driftway Street. Sunlight strikes deep into the woods at the heart of the industrial area. Much of the undergrowth has been slashed down. Mature trees remain, but for the first time in decades daylight blasts beneath the demolished highway overpass, revealing the soot-smudged granite blocks of its abutments. Old sofas, piles of shingles, lawnmower engines, pallets, and bottles poke above the fallen branches; the boatyard is bereft of boats. Slanting sunlight and frost-dropped leaves reveal paths winding toward the coffee shop, liquor store, and post office beyond the littered woods. The white signs announce condemnation and imminent destruction. The railroad is coming. The railroad is coming back.

Opened almost tentatively in the 1840s, the coastal route of the Old Colony Railroad served towns settled two centuries earlier. Steam locomotion technology supplanted the little packet vessels that connected Hingham, Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, and Plymouth with Boston, and it soon supplanted the tiny steamboat too. The parallel coach line along the former highway likewise succumbed, although modest competitors began short-distance, right-angle service linking inland villages with the coast-hugging railroad. Regular rail service altered everyday life, and in time the landscape focused on the tracks. Businesses moved from harbors and estuary wharves to trackside, and as shipping withered, the railroad opened its many drawbridges less and less frequently. By 1900 fishermen growled about spans permanently down, and farmers knew the salt-marsh-crossing railroad as a dike protecting inland fields from gale-driven tides. The railroad seemed almighty, carrying not only commuters and summertime tourists to Cape Cod but almost all the mail and freight that moved along the coast. Its route was more enduring than any public road: it was the permanent way.

Twenty years later the railroad company had begun to suffer from the widespread use of automobiles moving along paved roads, and by 1939 it had abandoned the track south of the marsh, ripped up ties and rails, and turned over the weed-grown remnant of permanent way to abutters and municipal government. Greenbush became a terminal, not a way station. The New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Company, having acquired the Old Colony by merger, erected a roundhouse, turntable, water tank, and other facilities for turning, storing, and servicing steam locomotives, and built a coach yard south of the overpass it had already installed to alleviate grade-crossing danger. Every evening the yard filled with long trains of dark-green coaches, soon pulled by diesel-electric locomotives that made the expensive roundhouse and most other service facilities superfluous. As late-1950s commuters chose to drive to Boston over newly built highways, the company struggled to maintain track, trains, and profit. When vandals burned an estuary trestle in 1959, the company gave up for good, abandoning passenger service the very next morning. A day or two later the passenger trains rumbled away from Greenbush, making their way to Boston by a roundabout route south and west of the smoldering trestle. For a while a weekly freight train arrived to serve the Greenbush feed mill and a handful of other bulk-commodity industries, before it too disappeared, never to return. No ceremonies marked the abandonment of railroad service.

Weeds and scrub and finally trees masked the railroad right-of-way. Small manufacturing businesses located on the former train yard after the roundhouse burned, but beyond the concrete-block structures and parking lots the trees grew taller by the year. The railroad right-of-way shrank from coach yard and roundhouse site to a narrow strip of land running across the municipality of Scituate and other townships too.

Town governments did nothing with the land acquired by default. Hikers and shortcutting teenagers made a narrow footpath down the center of it, almost precisely halfway between the locations of the long-gone rails. In the early 1980s intrepid mountain-bike riders discovered the right-of-way as a secret route free of interruption and connected with gigantic Wampatuck State Park, itself a former naval ammunition depot once serviced by a spur of the Greenbush route. Cross-county skiers followed the mountain bikers in winter, and joined with bicyclists and hikers to remove the occasional fallen tree that blocked the narrow path. The detritus of railroad operations—switch stands, twisted rails, signal boxes, and other debris—they skirted, and they took special care crossing bridges officialdom neglected. A ribbon of woods ran all the way to East Weymouth, where an active railroad rematerialized at the junction of Conrail and the Fore River Railroad, the latter a short line serving the city of Quincy. At this junction the woods ended, and hiking became trespassing, and dangerous too.

Railroad restoration often begins beneath aging highway bridges, when contractors arrive to start replacement efforts.

No English word properly designates the overgrowing of the abandoned right-of-way. Such a word might help explain why even users of the right-of-way did not truly see it in a way that made and makes it real. Neither wilderness nor bewilderment connotes a place overcome by wilderness. Because English lacks the concept Germans know as Ortsbewüstung, meaning the re-wildering of a specific place long before shaped by people, the users—and abutters and casual crossers too—did not realize the right-of-way any more than did local government authorities. It existed merely as a trail through leaves, somehow distinct from all space and structure through which it sliced, yet also a part of the larger scene.

As memory of the train faded, the path became as well used as the rocky landing in a nearby salt marsh built in the eighteenth century by the prosperous owner of a sailing packet. The packet is long gone from human memory and figures only in obscure local history pamphlets, but the packet landing is now a pleasant fishing and picnicking spot almost universally accepted as “natural.” Only the experienced mariner, fisherman, or longshoreman sees its piled rocks as a perfectly sited docking spot, or notices that the tiny pile-driver barge and tug still working the estuaries tie up at it despite its lack of wharf equipment. The packet landing is a good place to touch a workboat to shore, as pleasure boaters sometimes learn when they see a workboat there, or when they need to touch land themselves without problems of tide and current. But so overgrown is the landing that it masquerades as a natural hummock linking estuary, salt marsh, and abutting woodland.

The overgrown right-of-way is bewildered, if one translates the German starkly. Ortsbewüstung designates the bewildering of a place, something that jars English speakers accustomed to thinking of people as bewildered by all sorts of circumstances, including being lost in wilderness. Almost certainly a product of the Black Death, the mid-fourteenth-century plagues that killed up to two-thirds of the population in many German-speaking regions, the concept involves nature slowly overwhelming land abandoned by people. Whole villages returned to forest, grass grew in desolate city streets, and well-traveled roads became greenways, used enough to keep down brush but not enough to destroy grass. Generations of Germans after the Black Death understood nature, and especially forest, as something that only continuous effort keeps at bay. They expected to find ruins deep in forest, and their folk tales often involve children and other wanderers discovering a decrepit cottage or gingerbread house or castle surrounded by dense woods. Despite a terrific death toll from the plagues themselves, the English never formalized a similar understanding. North American colonists accepted the notion that settlement meant carving landscape from wilderness, and that wilderness never overwhelmed the carvers.

Twenty-first-century Americans prove prone to thinking of wilderness in national park terms, or else as something “good” endangered by people. Simple visual encounters sometimes disturb such casual thinking, but rarely for long. Everywhere east of the Appalachians, hikers find stone walls in woods and sometimes cellar holes or still-standing stone and brick chimneys. Obviously people once lived where the hikers hike, but many hikers fail to grasp that the remnants are the detritus of abandoned agricultural enterprise. No one builds stone walls in woods. The walls took form as linear rock piles made by people clearing land for plowing, and proved secondarily useful as fencing. Modern farmers hiking or hunting across such regions can look at the base of the walls and tell from the mounding of soil which side of the wall faced the field plowed last. But most explorers in the woods are not farmers, and they pay no more attention to the mounding of soil along walls than they do to the age and species of trees in the forests, the way brooks flow along channels dug two centuries earlier, or to the traces of a road abandoned a century ago. They cannot even find the well on a long-bewildered farm.

Landscape historians and foresters characterize such territory as afforested, not reforested, meaning that the woods appeared out of neglect rather than by deliberate planting. In the final analysis, however, most Americans care little for such nuance. Only at sundown on a winter night, when the afternoon walk has lasted a bit too long, do the darkening woods take on a wilderness aspect. When big, cat-nourished coyotes appear at the edge of the suburban woodlot, people stare at a raw wildness they decide belongs in some national forest. Genuine wilderness exists everywhere away from the great agricultural regions of the Midwest and High Plains, even if it is wilderness returned.

When pushed, most Americans grudgingly admit they distinguish between woods and forest: the one is defined by well-known surrounding roads and is pedestrian in scale, while the other is amorphous in shape, vast, and penetrable only by well-equipped hikers. They may know that a dense swamp lies beside the interstate highway, but they neither trek across the swamp nor know much about its constituent elements, including the homeless people rumored to inhabit it. Americans tend to think of wilderness in terms of remote national parks; it is unlikely that many spend much time pondering the sharks in urban harbors, or the fact that the eastern states were 80 percent open land two centuries ago and three-quarters afforested now. They do, however, know a gentle walk when they walk it, and railroad rights-of-way, usually almost dead level, make for relaxing walking indeed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Thoreau commented that he crossed active railroads as though they were cart paths in the woods. By 2000 the Greenbush line had become less wide than even a cart path, and it had become its own woods to boot. Its crossing gates and signals long removed, its highway-crossing rails buried in asphalt, it appeared as a momentary blur of green to motorists speeding across it. Except for old-timers and for a few active walkers, runners, and bicyclists, the right-of-way merged with other forested land, becoming green scenery.

But no municipality designated the Greenbush line as conservation land, recreational space, or anything else. Legally, the right-of-way, all its trees, and the path along its centerline were nonexistent. Abutters encroached upon it, dumping brush and rubbish there, but sometimes extending lawns and gardens into it and even erecting buildings upon it. Municipal authorities, when apprised of such activity, acted suitably if not always aggressively; after all, they knew that the ill-bounded right-of-way was municipal property, if property held for unspecified use. But most of the time, no one but hikers noticed the encroachments into the ribbon of woods, and if they did, few knew the precise boundaries of the old right-of-way.

However, occasionally there walked, among the bikers and hikers and skiers, people enamored of railroad history. Almost always male, usually but not always middle-aged or older, the men often walked in pairs, printed or sketched maps in hand. Their cars left behind at some former grade crossing, or the parking lot of a train station converted into a liquor store or hair-styling salon, they walked slowly, searching for the ruins of the railroad itself.

Everywhere they found them. Some stood out so clearly as to be unmistakable. For example, the salvage companies never removed the six-foot-high metal relay boxes that sheltered signal mechanisms. Spaced at what appeared to be random distances from each other, the silver boxes seemed impervious to rust, and made good landmarks for walkers negotiating the green tunnel. Other ruins lay underfoot. On some, hikers stubbed toes: lengths of rail escaped removal, as did thousands of rail spikes and steel tie plates. Anyone scuffing the leaves on either side of the footwide path almost immediately uncovered something metal, often something heavy sinking into the soil around it. Downslope from the embankment snaking through swamps lay rotting wooden ties escaped from the tie-removal machine, and forty-foot lengths of rail mislaid in the early nineteenth-century track renovation. Skewed at all sorts of angles were fallen telegraph poles, some toppled by the Great Hurricane of 1938 and never retrieved by repair crews erecting new ones. Anyone walking the right-of-way was bound to see some artifacts of rail road.

But only the discerning few noted other ruins. Far out in the salt marsh, where the right-of-way is merely a narrow embankment crowned with poison ivy and other halophytes, the concrete bases of the drawbridge signals remain, swathed in vines. In the dense swamps, the right-of-way embankment broadens where it once supported two parallel tracks, and a few feet from the path lies ballast pitched slightly differently from that a few feet away. In a woods a mile north of the swamps, a massive switch stand lies toppled away from the path, almost invisible in fifty years’ worth of fallen leaves. Such ruins attracted the scrutiny of railroad buffs looking for evidence of sidetracks to long-gone industries or junctions with branch lines.

These ruins offered information available elsewhere only in fragmented format. Unlike that compiled by government agencies, railroad company information was and is largely private, and railroad companies—especially those collapsing into bankruptcy, reorganization, and nullity—have no legal obligation to keep much of their documentation. Between the 1920s and about 1980, railroad abandonment and bankruptcy often meant the immediate destruction of masses of documentation. Long after such destruction, inquirers found themselves examining physical evidence for answers to questions originating in simple curiosity sparked by bits of information in old newspaper clippings, photographs, or local tradition. Audubon Society folk enjoyed watching birds along the abandoned right-of-way, and delighted in piecing together some understanding of ecosystems, especially avian ones. The railroad historians walking among them enjoyed a similar pleasure, one focused on gaining a broader understanding of how the railroad actually worked.

Railroad historians bifurcated in the 1920s. By far the more powerful group continued work begun in the 1860s, perhaps even earlier. Largely academic and grounded in business schools and departments of economics, it dealt almost exclusively with the financial end of railroading or with the juxtaposition of railroad finance and government regulation. This group battled within itself, some scholars arguing in favor of increased government regulation and others attempting to demonstrate that regulation led to higher rates, lower profits, and poor service. The group split in other ways as some writers focused on regional matters, some emphasized the history of individual railroad companies, and others attempted to draw international comparisons. Today, economic historians mine the work the group produced. Almost without exception, however, the business-focused group ignored the other group, which coalesced in 1921 as the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society.

Technological transformation of railroad equipment, physical plant, and operations occurred so rapidly in the years just before World War I that a group of interested observers determined to preserve the early technical history of the industry. At first the loose-knit group focused on the early steam locomotives supplanted not just by more massive successors but by electric-powered engines. But then the society quickly began to assemble documents pertaining to the nascent everyday operation of railroads, especially during the Civil War. Within a few years it had extended its focus to railroad building west of the Mississippi and had begun classifying railroad operating information. Around 1930 it began analyzing both technical innovation and operating procedures.

Until after World War II, the newer group worked essentially academically too. The society accepted new members only upon submission of a monograph on some phase of railroad history and two photographs of steam locomotives. But during the Depression it began to attract a spectrum of other railroad-industry-focused people ranging from photographers, to collectors of lanterns, telegraph instruments, and other industrial antiques, to those determined to preserve entire pieces of rolling stock. By the time the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Company abandoned the line south of Greenbush in 1939, the society had become a powerful force in preserving documents and artifacts from Depression-era bankruptcies.

The supplanting of steam locomotives by diesel-electrics in the 1950s brought the second group to national prominence simply by expanding its numbers. However staid and methodical its core membership might have been, the society welcomed a burgeoning group characterized as “rail fans.” Nostalgia for vanishing steam locomotives suffused these newcomers, almost entirely men who saw the demise of steam-powered railroading as the end of an era in which they had come of age. Aficionados may have seen the steam locomotive as symbolizing values—especially the freedom to travel—for which they had fought in World War II. The diesel-electric locomotive often seemed a product of a rapidly changing economy and a harbinger of excruciating changes in mining, heavy manufacturing, and other traditionally male-dominated industries. Thousands of men joined the rail fans in stopping the family car at grade crossings and dragging little children up to the tracks when a steam locomotive chugged or blasted past.

The children, especially boys, fit into the larger concatenation of hope and nostalgia and worry as consumers of toy trains, especially those made by Lionel and Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Whisper
• 2. Necklace
• 3. Sidetracked
• 4. Resort
• 5. Threshold
• 6. Express
• 7. Fast Freight
• 8. Bulk
• 9. Transfer
• 10. Overhead
• Conclusion
• Note On Sources And Names
• Bibliography
• Index