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.Until the advent of the telegraph, which was first used in the 1850s, there was no means of communication between drivers and dispatchers who occasionally made mistakes by sending two trains on a collision course.The other risk was when a train broke down, putting it in great peril as the dispatcher may well have sent out others in its wake on a time-interval basis, which required the rear of broken-down trains to be protected quickly by the train crew with warning flares.These all too frequent early accidents were often later portrayed in silent films as deliberate, with villains trying to arrange ‘cornfield meets’ by nobbling the dispatcher and issuing false orders to steal from the wreckage.A less perilous but irritating aspect of early train travel in the US was delay caused by the paucity of passing loops.The single sections of tracks had centreboards halfway between passing loops and the railroad rule was that the first train to get to that midpoint would have priority, and the other would have to reverse.This led to disputes between enginemen, and even passengers were known to join in, over which train should go back.11Once the first line, the Baltimore & Ohio (mentioned in chapter 1), had been completed, there was some delay before a concerted rush towards building railroads occurred, replicating an almost universal pattern in the major economies.The nation was watching and it took the Baltimore & Ohio three years to build up passenger numbers to 300 per day.It almost seems as though every country and its population required a collective taking of breath before embarking on constructing major rail networks, perhaps because people were aware of the irreversible changes that would entail.Unlike the railways in Europe, which linked existing communities, those in the USA had a far more ambitious role – spreading development and ‘civilization’ across the vast continent – although many early railroads did start out with the far more modest ambition of merely trying to reach the next town.Within a couple of decades, once the real potential of this invention had been realized, ambitious schemes for a transcontinental line, which had been the dream of some of the very early pioneers, soon sprang up.As the author of the preface to a history of the US railroads puts it eloquently, ‘while railroads in Europe were commonly the servants of established communities, in America railroads were often their creators’.12 Quite simply, as another historian Stewart H.Holbrook, sums up, ‘the main achievement of the railroads was to help enormously to build the United States into a world power and do it well within the span of one man’s lifetime’.13 There were, too, more practical obstacles: the mountains and, particularly in the early stages, the vast rivers that traversed the country and forced many early railroads to be built from one river crossing to another, obliging passengers and freight to transfer to a boat to continue their journey.Several railroads were built as competition to the canals, providing faster transport for passengers and for a time, a series of eight railroads interspersed with sections of canal, speeded up the journey for passengers between Albany and Buffalo, but this must have made life difficult for anyone with substantial baggage to carry.Once the success of the Baltimore & Ohio and other early lines seemed assured, railroad promoters popped up throughout the eastern seaboard, pushing plans for an intense network of railroads.The early 1830s were a period of experimentation and testing, but by the end of the decade the rapid growth of the railroad was in full swing and would continue till the end of the century.More often than not these early promoters struggled to raise the capital even though the advantages of rail seemed all too obvious in an age of few alternatives.As in Britain, there had been a canal boom in the twenty years preceding the opening of the railroads, but waterborne transport was slow, expensive and subject to paralysis at times of cold weather.The turnpikes were barely worthy of the name, mere dust roads prey to the elements, and the railroads therefore represented a major improvement in transport.It would take time, though, for the railroads to achieve domination [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]