Small Talk 22 - Trains
At night, when you hear a train sound its horn, rumbling steel wheels on tracks, how do you feel? What is that emotion? You might be reminded of adventure, of leaving the mundane life and going someplace exotic. You might imagine the passengers, rocking gently in their seats, some reading some sleeping in dim yellow light, every soul carrying secrets. Conductors call out stops and take tickets, towns approach and recede, out the window the moon reflects on some unknown lake. Trains have a special power over our imagination, so they seem worth a little small talk.
You could argue that trains are the most consequential human invention in the history of our planet. Now, people argue all kinds of ridiculous things these days, but hear me out. In the early 1800s, it took about 25 days to travel by stagecoach from Iowa to San Francisco Bay. In 1869, you could make the same trip by rail in four days—and you could bring a lot of stuff. Around the world, trains enabled people to move great distances—and transport materials—in record time. The subsequent movement of people across continents, making cities, farms, factories, transformed Earth. When cars became popular, we could do it alone. Planes enabled us to do it even faster. But the industrialization of the world's interiors began with trains.
People have been dragging wheeled carts on tracks since the 1500s. In 1784, the Scottish inventor James Watts patented a steam locomotive and a few years later built the first working prototype of a steam-powered train. The first working steam railway was built for an ironworks in Wales in 1804, and modern rail transport really picked up steam after that. Americans were quick to adopt the new technology. By 1830, the Baltimore and Ohio (the B&O you may recognize from Monopoly) carried freight. By 1850, more than 9,000 miles of railroad lines connected towns in the eastern United States.
People had to solve so many problems—mechanical, political, financial—to make these rail networks feasible. Consider, for example, how far apart should the tracks be? If you're building locomotives and train cars, you need to know that width, or gauge. If you're laying tracks, you need to make them work for the trains. In the early days of railroads, there were many different gauges, and where these mis-matched lines met, workers had to unload cargo from one train and onto the next. By the 1830s, a standard gauge was set in England at 1,435 mm (or 4 feet, 8 ½ inches), and this is now the most common gauge used around the world. That width accommodated existing wagons pulled by horses on tracks at coal mines. There's a strong argument that a wider gauge would be better for modern trains, being more stable, but the standard lives on.
The late 1800s to early 1900s are sometimes called the Golden Age of Railroads, when art deco locomotives pulled opulent Pullman coaches, with lavish dining cars and luxuries like personal headphones that piped in radio. The legendary Orient Express traveled between Paris and Istanbul and offered polished wood and velvet furnishings, gourmet cuisine, and in some cases murder. It's hard to describe any mode of travel today as refined and comfortable as train travel in those days.
But sometimes our collective memory (that feeling we still get when we hear a distant train) obscures the grim reality of those 'better days.' A useful example is the American trans-continental railway, which enabled people to get across the west in four days. In 1862, railroad financier George Francis Train (that was really his name) proclaimed, “The great Pacific Railway is commenced.… Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years.… This is the grandest enterprise under God!” When the railway opened in 1869, there were between 30 and 60 million bison roaming the plains, hunted mostly by Native Americans and some pioneers. The railway promoted hunting bison from the trains, hosting 'Hunt by Rail' parties in which people shot bison from moving trains and left them to rot. One guy, Orlando Brown, allegedly shot more than 6,000 bison. By the end of the 1800s, only 300 bison were left in the wild, and native tribes were largely confined to reservations. Maybe not such a grand enterprise after all.
In the United States, passenger trains declined almost as quickly as they expanded. At the peak of rail transport in 1916, about 1 billion passengers traveled by train each year. In 2024, Amtrak carried about 33 million passengers. Passenger trains were largely replaced by automobiles on the interstate highway system, and suburban sprawl replaced the concentrated railway towns. There's also evidence that powerful corporations (GM, Firestone, Standard Oil) intentionally bought and jettisoned rail operations to feed their profits. But this wasn't inevitable progress--it didn't happen in much of Europe, where in 2023, 8 billion passengers made national journeys by rail.
Trains today are more miraculous than ever, and more freight is hauled in the United States by rail than ever before. The GE Evolution Series locomotive generates about 30,000 foot-pounds of torque (rotational power) and can haul hundreds of freight cars. By contrast, a semi makes about 1,800 ft-lb of torque. In light of current global crises, trains are looking like a pretty good idea. Rail transport produces about one-seventh of the greenhouse gasses as semi trucks hauling the same freight. (But for various complicated reasons, trucking is still generally cheaper, so.)
We could spend a whole Small Talk on high-speed rail, which is common in Europe and China and carries people at hundreds of miles per hour. In the US, the only serious effort for high speed rail is the San Francisco to Los Angeles project, which as of this writing is $100 billion short of budget with no deadline for completion. But this talk is getting too long already. I should let you go.
We return to the question of why we carry these feelings about trains. It's often captured in songs about trains, which are numerous and wonderful. Listen to 'Freight Train,' by Elizabeth Cotton, or 'I Often Dream of Trains,' by Robyn Hitchcock, or 'Orange Blossom Special,' by Johnny Cash.
Probably the most accurate term for that feeling about trains is nostalgia. That is, a sentimental longing for the past, for a mythical time when life was just... nicer. Nostalgia is something we need to handle very carefully. It can lead to delusional thinking and behavior—a belief in an idyllic past that never actually was. People buy nostalgia—they fight for it and they vote for it. In many ways, it's the ultimate con. But in small doses, like so many things, it can be a harmless comfort. All aboard.
Have a good one,
Kipling Knox
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