Last Revised October 2000
Just walking into Baltimore's B&O Railroad Museum can be an extraordinary experience, like taking a journey down corridors of time that delve into layer after layer of American history. It's especially exciting for a chalk-in-the pockets teacher like me. While you cannot diminish the importance of other technologies and industries, there is something particularly powerful and pervasive about the influence of the railroad.
Cheaper to build and operate than canals, the railroad could go anywhere all year long -- and did so. On the eve of the Civil War, just two decades after the first carriage-like, horse-drawn cars rattled west out of Baltimore on strap rail set in stone, more than fifty thousand miles of track (most of it in the East and Midwest) provided the United States with its first infra-structure and its first billion dollar enterprise.
As the dominant business and economic institution in American life from the 1840's until well into the present century, the railroad attracted capital, stimulated industry, created markets, developed model metalworking, spread technical skills, pioneered modern management, redefined the nature and organization of work, shaped great labor conflicts, and led to the first serious attempts to regulate industry as a whole. A symbol of progress to some and dangerous source of corruption to others, the railroad underwrote cities, built towns, spawned suburbs and settled a continent -- profoundly altering the way in which Americans perceived space, time, and distance.
A railroad museum provides us with a tangible and visually arresting body of evidence about a technology, an institution, and a way of life that were central to the creation of the modern world as shaped by industrial capitalism. Today's focus goes beyond the traditional emphasis on nuts and bolts to tell the story of how ordinary Americans -- skilled mechanics and laborers and their families -- shaped the history of railroading every bit as much as the entrepreneurs and corporate moguls whose shenanigans have customarily dominated accounts of the railroads' conquest of the continent. Combined with modern museum design and interactive displays, this approach encourages the visitor to think about the broader historical context in which railroading became central to the modernization of the American economy -- with its profound effects on how people lived, worked, raised families, sought the material comforts the new industrial order promised -- and suffered from the terrible human cost it often exacted. This new approach energizes railroad museums, turning them into popular and accessible classrooms for pondering the impact of technology on American life.
Railroad preservationists are also developing exciting ways to let the trains tell their stories. Consider the story of the shift from steam to diesel locomotives. Here is a splendid opportunity for the historian to explain how all of the improvements in steam locomotives from the 1920's to the 1940's worked at the margin of the 10 to 12 percent efficiency inherent in the technology. Meanwhile, the diesel locomotive, pioneered in the 1920's but not widely adopted until after World War II, started out with a 30 to 33 percent efficiency and thereby became the accountant's machine, because it brought that 20 percent difference right down to the bottom line. By the same token, the diesel engine led to vast changes in the organization of work -- first visible on the shop floor and then later among road crews -- thus setting the stage for a long and complex series of labor-management disputes, some of which are still under negotiation.
Exhibits and artifacts also lend themselves to exercises in historiography. Take the case of two freight cars coupled together in the B&O Railroad Museum's roundhouse, one an iron boxcar built at the B&O shops during the Civil War, the other an iron "pot hopper" or coal car built in 1883. Both have the original link-and-pin couplers and handbrakes. These devices made early railroading enormously hazardous for the brakeman who had to climb over the tops of cars on a moving train and apply each brake by hand or stand between the cars and drop a coupling pin into a link -- day or night, in good or bad weather. At the same time the engineer, who could not see the brakeman, moved his engine toward the coupling with nothing for brakes but back pressure on the engine's cylinders.
A generation of business and economic historians whose studies once dominated the field might point out how those cars lowered the cost and increased the speed of moving coal and grain, thus making possible the exploitation of enormous resources in the West and opening up a vast market for iron, timber, and other industries. An earlier generation of progressive labor and political historians would see in that same equipment the story of how low wages and dangerous working conditions subsidized economic development and resulted in popular pressure for safety regulations in a fight led partly by a politically awakened and increasingly organized labor movement. Finally, a recent study of railroad work by Walter Licht suggests that, hazards notwithstanding, the railroad offered the first real possibility of a career built on experience and skill for the German and Irish immigrant brakemen who survived the rigors of the life to become superintendents, yardmasters, and trainmasters with the huge responsibility of running an industrial system spread across the nation.
The B&O Railroad Museum is by no means the only place where a whole new way of looking at railroad history and industrial heritage is blosoming. Interested tourists and students would be well advised to visit the Ellicott City B&O Railroad Museum or the Brunswick Railroad Museum -- to mention just two places where Maryland's railroad history is preserved and presented in engaging ways. Indeed, railroad preservationists throughout Maryland are pioneering a new history of American railroading, one that is both accessible and intellectually sophisticated. Across the state their message to the public is the same: "Welcome Aboard!"
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Last Revised October 2000