America the Ingenious

It was a fantastical idea, but only a natural extension of those grand projects, the Erie Canal and the transatlantic cable (see pages 9 and 71), that were putting the East Coast at the center of the Atlantic world. But Congress deadlocked on whether to build a “southern route” for the railroad or a “central route” from St. Louis to San Francisco.

The central route was cheaper and ran through more promising land, but it had one enormous impediment: the double-ridged granite walls of the Sierra Nevada, which climbed to seven thousand feet in just twenty miles, its river canyons too steep for the two-hundred-feet-per-mile rise that was the best any locomotive of the time could manage.

They weren’t high enough to stop the engineer who built the first railroad west of the Rockies, Theodore “Crazy” Judah, so nicknamed for his monomania about finding a pass through the mountains on a grade a locomotive could manage. After four years of searching in the wilderness, Judah found one, the notorious Donner Pass, and started plying San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington for backers.

In Washington, Judah found President Abraham Lincoln, who was not too busy winning the Civil War to neglect his own sweeping vision of the country’s future. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 was a complement to his Homestead Act of the same year, which virtually gave the country’s vast western lands to those who would work them. The Railroad Act picked two companies, one starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and working west, the other starting in California and working east, to build the transcontinental road, backing them with land grants and government bonds.

In California, this meant the legendary “Big Four” storekeepers, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, who would do much to build modern California—at a hefty profit. Forming the Central Pacific Railroad with investments of a mere $1,500 apiece, they built a wagon road, while demanding greater subsidies and kicking Judah off the governing board when he demanded action. Crazy Judah stormed back east, determined to find backers to buy them out and, in a brutal irony, contracted yellow fever while crossing the Isthmus of Panama and died in his wife’s arms at the age of just thirty-seven.

The venality on the other end of the road was even worse, an orgy of financial perfidy by the newly minted Union Pacific Railroad that set off repeated Wall Street panics and corrupted many of the nation’s leading politicians. By the end of 1865, the Union Pacific had laid only forty miles of track.

Once they did start to move, though, both companies performed prodigious feats of engineering, working without anything resembling modern construction or earth-moving equipment. Cutting through the Sierra Nevada was done mostly with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, one-horse dump carts, and hand drills. Central Pacific workers carved fifteen tunnels through the granite, with progress slowing at times to just two or three inches a day. Most of the Irish immigrant workforce drifted away, lured by hopes of finding gold or silver.

They were replaced by ten thousand Chinese. Despised by white Californians, subjected to special “permission” taxes and regularly attacked and lynched, the “Celestials” were usually paid about half the amount of white laborers on the railroad and had much of the rest of their pay seized by the Chinese “trading companies” that had smuggled them into the United States in the first place. They averaged just four-foot-ten and 120 pounds, but they proved to be wiry, tireless men who worked carefully and well. They were not afraid to work with a volatile new explosive, nitroglycerine, lowering each other down rock walls in gigantic baskets they wove themselves, drilling holes, pouring in the nitro, then calmly setting it off with a slow match. The building of the road was the process by which they became Americans. Before it was over, they had stood up to their bosses, staging a strike to win higher wages, and many would stay on in the land that had treated them so harshly.

Getting across the Great Plains was less dramatic but nearly as arduous, a project that involved hauling virtually all the fuel, food, water, and materials needed for ten thousand men across the prairie in transitory “hell on wheels” tent cities. Chief engineer Grenville Dodge and construction boss Jack Casement, a pair of tough Civil War generals, devised twenty-two-car work trains, providing everything from a canteen to bunk beds to a machine shop and a forge for the task. Workers on the Union Pacific filled out the melting pot of Americans building the railroad, with freed black slaves, Civil War veterans from both sides, thousands of Mormons, and more Irish immigrants.

Both sides raced to get to the designated meeting point at Promontory Summit, Utah, with the Union Pacific laying seven miles of track in a day and Central Pacific’s Chinese laying ten. The celebratory driving of the last “Golden Spike” on May 10, 1869, was as haphazard as everything else involved in building the Transcontinental Railroad—presidents of both companies missed on their first tries—but was a quintessentially American accomplishment, done in a headlong fashion, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes venally, but with a vigor and an audacity that would amaze the world.

The railroad companies would pay off the government with interest. They would haul mail and military personnel for free, bring farmers’ goods to market and new immigrants to the West, and tie the country together. They would also serve our trade with the reborn nations of Asia, just as Asa Whitney and others had foreseen. The American rail freight system they pioneered remains the best and busiest in the world, pulling the wealth of nations over the same route that Crazy Judah discovered.

the genius details

As soon as the “Golden Spike” was driven in, a telegraph message reading only “DONE” was sent to both coasts, setting off a national celebration.

The longest tunnel through the Sierras had to be dug through 1,659 feet of solid rock at the Number 6 Summit on the Donner Pass, at an elevation of 7,554 feet above sea level. Even with nitroglycerine, it took almost two years to complete.

Eventually, 80 percent of the 13,500 workers on the Central Pacific side of the job were Chinese. An estimated 1,500 died cutting their way through the Sierras.

By 1876, it took just eighty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes to get from New York City to San Francisco by the Transcontinental Express—only eleven hours and thirty minutes longer than it takes passengers on Amtrak today.

Between state and federal land grants, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific received a total of 279,693,500 square miles of land.

The total investment of capital needed to build the railroad was over $100 million in 1860 dollars, or at least $3 billion in today’s money.

This state of affairs badly irked Alexander Cassatt, a gentleman horse breeder, yachtsman, and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad (and brother of the American painter Mary Cassatt). The “Pennsy” liked to call itself the “Standard Railroad of the World,” but somehow its wheels still could not turn in New York City. A rail bridge across the Hudson would have to be twice the size of the Brooklyn Bridge and would cost an estimated $100 million. Building a tunnel below the Hudson had led to a grisly disaster in 1880 that killed twenty men. Running steam-powered locomotives through tunnels for that long a distance held grave risks in any case.

By 1901, though, electric traction motors had revolutionized underground railroading (see The Electric Underground: Building the New York Subway), and Cassatt boldly decided to close both gaps—to build a series of tunnels that ran from New Jersey under the Hudson, then straight on through Manhattan, and under the East River to Long Island. He turned to New York’s intrepid “sandhogs,” the veteran construction workers who had been burrowing through every sort of mud, rock, and dirt since they’d started working on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1872—and who are still doing so today. They labored under the most difficult and dangerous conditions conceivable and were one of the very few integrated workforces in America at the time: African Americans, Irish, Italians, and others, all together in the brotherhood beneath the ground.

For the Hudson River tunnels, they had to blast and drill their way through 5,940 feet of the hardest traprock, from the Bergen Hill, New Jersey, tunnel portals to Weehawken—work that required constant and dangerous dynamite blasting. For every ten cubic yards of rock removed between Bergen Hill and Weehawken, workers used a foot of hardened drill steel and almost thirty pounds of dynamite. One hundred men, working on each of two ten-hour shifts, could still make only two to seven feet of progress a day.

At the same time, men were working from the bottom of the Weehawken shaft, seventy-six feet below ground, to build the two single-track tunnels under the Hudson. A small army of workers swarmed around the shaft entrance, manning machine and blacksmith shops (where they would repair, sharpen, and even redesign tunnel-building tools), an engine room, and a boiler room with three five-hundred-horsepower boilers, fueling the deafening air compressors that kept pushing in pressurized air and preventing cave-ins. Utilizing the new “shield method” of construction, shifts advanced behind a pair of massive iron cylinders. The men would literally push and jack the cylinders through the riverbed silt, squeezing the mud through the cylinder’s apertures like sausage, then shoveling it up. Behind them, more men flanged together cast-iron and steel shells, twenty-three feet in diameter, covering them in two feet of reinforced concrete, building the tunnel walls as they went.

A similar operation was proceeding under the Hudson from the West Side of Manhattan. Here the sandhogs blasted their way fifty-eight feet down, through Fordham gneiss, the bedrock of skyscrapers, before pushing their own shield forward. Theirs was at the same time a more delicate operation, as they had to avoid unsettling foundations or rupturing the water or gas mains under the roughly five blocks they had to traverse between the front of the planned Pennsylvania Station (see The New Cathedrals: America’s Train Stations) and the river. But on September 10, 1906, a year ahead of schedule, the two shields of the north tube were halted within ten feet of each other to make sure they aligned. They did, to within one-sixteenth of an inch, in the 14,575-foot tunnel. “The shields met, coming together rim to rim, like two gargantuan tumblers,” historian Lorraine B. Diehl would write. The New York sandhogs celebrated by passing a box of cigars through their cylinder to their New Jersey brethren.

Much work remained to be done. The East River tunnels were much shorter but more complicated, passing alternately through gravel and boulders, then the solid rock of a glacial ridge. Plagued by strikes, mistakes, and difficulties with maintaining air pressure, the East River project saw two men killed in a blowout that shot forty feet of water in the air. Dynamite that was set off prematurely in Long Island City killed three more. Once they were out from under the river, more problems awaited. Not only did these sandhogs, too, have to navigate the complicated underworld of Manhattan, from First Avenue to Seventh, dodging pipes and mains, but they also discovered a long-covered stream by Kips Bay that everyone had forgotten about—leaving the workers soaked with water. More seriously, a loose boulder killed two more men, and the constant dynamite blasting left a number of citizens seriously injured, many windows smashed, and everyone’s nerves frayed for months.

Cassatt had gone to extraordinary lengths to look after his men, including onsite doctors and clinics, the provision of all the hot coffee they could drink, and heated lockers that dried their wet clothes—measures thought to help against “the bends,” the painful and often deadly change in blood composition that came from working too far under the earth. Even so, twelve died in all from the bends, blowouts, dynamite accidents, and other mishaps.

The East River tunnels were finally finished in January 1908, the crews there passing to each other a toy train and a rag doll through the cylinders—the first “train” and the first “lady” to pass through the tunnel. That May, the entire magnificent series of tunnels was completed, connecting the entire country by rail once and for all.

But there was still one sticky problem: the tunnels under the Hudson were moving.

General Charles W. Raymond, chairman of the Pennsy’s board of engineers, had reported the problem in the spring of 1906. It vexed Cassatt, who ordered vice president Samuel Rea and chief engineer Charles Jacobs to investigate. By 1907, Jacobs, measuring the movement of the tunnels with recording gauges, had the stunning answer: the tunnels were rising and falling with the tides.

Raymond felt the railroad should deal with the problem by drilling immense metal screw piles through the tunnels and down to the bedrock—something that had been planned from the beginning of construction. Rea, who had also studied the tunnels for two years, feared that screwing the tunnels to the bedrock might rupture them in the tides. Cassatt would have made the decision—but worn down by heart disease, worry over his grand project, and the flukish death of a beloved daughter, he had died in December 1906.

The final decision fell to Rea—who decided not to use the piles but to let the tunnels rise and fall with the tides. Over a hundred years of use have proved him right.

the genius details

Crews of twenty-four men worked at each shield in three eight-hour shifts. The average rate of progress in each heading was about eighteen feet per day.

The portions of the tunnels that ran under the Hudson River were 6,100 feet long. They required the excavation of nearly 190,000 cubic yards of material, 67,000 tons of iron and steel, and 57,000 cubic yards of concrete.

The Manhattan & Hudson Railroad reopened and completed a smaller, previously failed tunnel for a commuter line between New Jersey and New York, before the Pennsy completed its tunnels in 1908. This eventually became the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train.

Its inspiration? “About 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man,” was how the architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable would describe it.

The main hall, with its vaulted, coffered ceiling that had so astonished Wolfe, was taken from the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla, but other influences were plucked from here and there, up and down the centuries: the thirty-five-foot-high Doric columns of the station’s exterior, inspired by the colonnade Bernini had used to enclose the Piazza di San Pietro at the Vatican in the seventeenth century. The steel-and-glass roofs, and train concourses, from the new Gare du Quai d’Orsay in Paris. The porticoed carriageways inspired by Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. The shops and waiting rooms were clad in pink Milton granite and honeyed Travertine marble—the same stone used to build Hadrian’s Tomb, the Roman Coliseum, and the Basilica of St. Peter’s over the ages, a rare marble that glows more beautifully the more it is rubbed by the passing humanity. These profound spaces were lit through lunette windows, held up by Corinthian and Ionic columns and festooned with statuary, huge clocks, and enormous wall maps of the great nation through which the Pennsylvania Railroad roamed.

It was the work of a nation bold and confident enough to borrow the creations of a dozen other civilizations, and to imbue them with a purpose and an energy all its own.

Just across town—in the same city, and the same decade, it would inspire in turn something perhaps even more lustrous. If Penn Station was vast enough to hold the sound of time, Grand Central Terminal was where time began, where America’s first official clock was installed once the country was first divided into four official time zones—times imposed on a continent by a people who now traversed it more quickly than the progress of the sun.

If it was smaller than Penn Station, Grand Central was a good deal more passenger-friendly, its adornments at least as beautiful with its friezes of winged train wheels, statues of Greek gods, electric chandeliers, the famous opal clock in the middle of its main room, and the breathtaking cerulean blue celestial map on the 120-foot-high ceiling of its Grand Concourse.

Uses built upon uses. Set in the heart of Manhattan, Grand Central was a frenetic transportation hub, a “monument to movement.” When it was built, it was a central node not just of intercity rail lines but also of subway, trolley, and elevated rail lines, soon to be bisected by cars running right through it—wheels within wheels. Park Avenue itself was an invention of the terminal; once an open train ditch, it was covered over when the trains were converted to electricity and transformed almost instantly into one of the wealthiest and most coveted addresses in America. Around the great edifice would spring up “Terminal City,” its own cluster of major hotels, office buildings, and residences, spurring a building spree in the area that would come to include the Chrysler Building, probably the most exquisite skyscraper ever constructed.

Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal were the most magnificent buildings ever constructed to that point without reference to king or church, built and used by the free citizens of a free country. And they remain vital nodes of travel and commerce. Nearly one hundred million commuter train passengers a year today use Grand Central Terminal, a new all-time high. The old Pennsylvania Station served a record 109 million passengers in 1945, or almost 65 percent of all intercity rail travel at the time. Today, an estimated five hundred thousand commuter and intercity passengers a day, or 182.5 million a year, use Penn Station, making it the busiest transportation hub in North America, with a higher traffic share than New York’s three regional airports combined.

Yet they were not unique. Visit almost any midsize city or even town in America between the wars, and you were as likely as not to see a masterpiece when you stepped off the train. Forth Worth, Texas, a city of less than 200,000 before World War II, boasted not one but two brilliant showcases, the late-Victorian, neoclassical Santa Fe Station and the towering art deco Texas and Pacific Station. San Antonio, with just over a quarter million souls by 1940, had three, the Katy, Mopac, and Sunset stations, each of them a Mission-style gem.

Nearly every American architect worth his salt tried his hand at a train station. Most of what they produced were Beaux-Arts beauties, but they encompassed pretty much every known style of design. Even in the smallest towns, train stations tended to be little jewels of craftsmanship: the charming Rhinecliff Station in New York, built cunningly up the side of a cliff along the Hudson River; Durand Union Station in Michigan, with its terrazzo floor, marble wainscoting, and Château Revival turrets; Kentucky’s Colonial Revival beauty in Maysville. They reflected the care and pride of people who believed they were somebody, no matter where they might happen to be.

“Each station functioned as did the main gate on a medieval town: it was the welcoming portal to that community, and it was meant to impress, comfort, and reassure the visitor . . . ,” wrote Ed Breslin and Hugh Van Dusen in America’s Great Railroad Stations. “All embodied America’s love of, and genius for, commercial excellence. Whether built on the scale of a small chapel, a substantial church, or a monumental cathedral, all of these stations personified and reflected America’s secular spirituality fueled by the belief that life could endlessly be enhanced by aesthetic beauty, industrial might, technological know-how, and creature comforts while traveling in style with alacrity from one point on the compass to another.”

The end of the fifty years or so of the great station-building era would come in the late 1930s with a grand finale: Los Angeles’s coolly gorgeous Union Station, a combination of art deco, Mission Revival, and Spanish Colonial styles that seemed as if it had been built as a set for a hundred films noir (which, in the end, it was), and Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, completed in 1933, which really doesn’t look quite like anything else ever built in this country. Its marble and concrete facade resembles a sort of gigantic art deco radio, with a clock set in the middle. Inside, its main rotunda flowed with sunlight in the daytime, and glowed at night, and nestled in its apex was the largest semidome ever built in the Western Hemisphere, crowned by a brilliant aquamarine half-ocular glass and surrounded by ever-widening rings of color, as if someone had brought the planet Saturn down and tied it to Cincinnati.

Every need of the traveler was anticipated, right down to toy shops, baths and showers, and a newsreel theater, and everywhere one looked, there were murals showing the rise of the city and the progress of the nation. Every surface one’s eye or hands or shoes came in contact with—from the Carrara glass toilet partitions in the bathrooms to the cork floor tiles to the hand-cut wallpaper to the leather-cushioned seats and zebrawood veneers—was something new and elegant and enthralling. And why shouldn’t it have been? For it was built for the people.

the genius details

The total area of the Cincinnati Union Terminal was 287 acres, including what would be lavish gardens, fountains, and curved drives for cars, taxicabs, buses, and trolley lines to reach the terminal and turn around.

F. Winold Reiss created two massive paintings for Union Terminal that were turned into two glass color mosaics, each 22 feet high by 110 feet long. They depict the history both of Cincinnati and of American transportation.

Pierre Bourdelle’s flourishes in Union Terminal included his mermaid murals, on either side of the newsreel theater screen; aluminum structured seats with soft leather cushions; a bookshop shaped like a train observation car; a men’s lounge with railroad motifs and “zebrawood Flexwood veneer”; and depictions of the sun, the moon, and the planets dangling from the ceiling of the toy shop, among many others.

His timing could not have been worse. The Burlington was a tired, crumbling line that had lost 60 percent of its passengers since 1926.

But the major railroads were beginning their long conversion from steam to cheaper diesel, or even electric power. They tested their engines and cars in wind tunnels, dropping fuel consumption by 40 percent and ratcheting up top speeds. They hired such leading industrial designers as Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Otto Kuhler, William B. Stout, Ralph H. Upson, and Henry Dreyfuss—incredibly versatile artists whose work in many fields was changing the whole “look” of America.

This was usually to make the new trains look new, in art deco, or art deco’s late stage, Art Moderne or Streamline Moderne—French ideas that Americans would take to phenomenal new heights. It was a style that adapted beautifully to the immense scale of the machine age.

“Brute force can have a very sophisticated appearance, almost of a great finesse, and at the same time be a monster of power,” wrote Loewy of the sleek, stylish CGI locomotive, capable of 8,000 horsepower, that he helped design.

It was true. Their fluted, stainless steel skins made the trains seem fast. The Zephyr engines sported cowls like the helmets of ancient Greek warriors. Dreyfuss and Loewy’s bottle- and shark-nosed locomotives and Bel Geddes’s serpentine creations look futuristic to this day. Engines and cars alike were now streaked with brilliant, supergraphic bands of black, maroon, light gray, orange, red. They were painted in bright yellow and brown, blue and gray; lettered in gold; decorated with chrome fins. The Seaboard Air Line trains, from Richmond, Virginia, to Miami, looked like a spectacular tropical sunset on wheels. The name “Air Line” on a train was no coincidence. The railroads drew on the most popular designs of their rivals, planes and cars and even dirigibles, which borrowed freely from them in turn.

Inside their passenger cars—and in many of the ticket offices and the stations that served the new trains (see The New Cathedrals: America’s Train Stations)—was an amazing consistency and sophistication of design. Travelers were treated to the newest, most appealing materials and decorations, including Montel metal, Bakelite, cork, polished aluminum, Formica tops, steel seats and tables, inset ceilings, sans serif lettering, and silk drapes. The streamliner trains set new standards in comfort, with roomy observation cars, air-conditioning, soft lighting, and cushioned seats replacing the old red-plush chairs that previous passengers had stuck to on hot days. They offered some of the best public dining anywhere in America, available at almost any time of the day or night, served on real china with glassware, silverware, and fine linen napkins.

“Although galleys had barely room to flip a pancake, the cooks turned out an extraordinary range of dishes,” wrote historian Bill Bryson. “On Union Pacific trains, for breakfast alone the discerning guest could choose among nearly forty dishes—sirloin or porterhouse steak, veal cutlet, mutton chop, wheatcakes, broiled salt mackerel, half a spring chicken, creamed potatoes, cornbread, bacon, ham, link or patty sausage, and eggs in any style—and the rest of the meals of the day were just as commodious.”

The public came flocking back; the Zephyrs alone sparked a 26 percent increase in passenger travel. Millions of Americans paid to see the sparkling new trains even before they came on board, crowding the Chicago and New York world fairs and train stations all over the country, where Ralph Budd and his fellow rail executives had smartly put them on display. Though their heyday would glimmer only a little longer than those other fantastically beautiful creations, the Yankee clipper ships (see The Original “Skyscrapers”: The Yankee Clippers), the streamliners would leave an indelible impression on all who rode or saw them.

the genius details

The first streamliner train, beating the Burlington Zephyr out of the yard by two months, was the Union Pacific’s M-10,000.

Also a revolutionary design, the M-10,000 had three cars that together weighed only eighty-five tons; a traditional ten-car steam-powered train weighed one thousand tons.

In 1919 Ralph Budd became the youngest head of an American railroad at age forty, when he took over the Great Northern Railroad. He oversaw the cutting of the 7.8-mile Cascade Tunnel through the Cascade Range in central Washington. It was the longest rail tunnel in America at the time and is still one of the longest in the world.

By the late 1930s, the Zephyr’s design, as the PBS documentary Streamliners noted, “could be found on everything from toasters to tractors and corsets to coffins.”

The streamliners’ power, speed, and efficiency proved to be a tremendous advantage to the United States during World War II, with trains carrying 97 percent of all troops and 90 percent of all military freight.