I’m currently reading To Hell in a Day Coach, a book published in 1967, by an author, Peter Lyon, who is growing old on me. This guy has written an anti-railroad book. Most everything is written from the perspective of " Ha! See! I told you so! " More and more, I find myself pausing, and thinking “hmmm…that doesn’t seem quite right”
According to Mr. Lyon, Jarvis Langdon Jr. , president of B&O, nearly single-handedly invented the unit train, and cut the price of shipping a ton of coal by $1.00. N&W saw what he had done, smacked their foreheads and said “golly! we could do that too!”, and lowered their coal rate by $1.25…PRR…$1.50…NYC…etc…
Hmmm…that doesn’t seem quite right.
As I’ve always understood it, the majority of N&W traffic was moving coal on a conveyer belt, between mines and tidewater. Isn’t that almost the definition of a unit train? Or did it really take them 100 years to figure this out?
That section puzzled me also. The time frame being described is the early 1960’s. However, there are lots of pictures and movie footage of what appear to be unit coal trains on the eastern railroads that date from the 1930’s forward. I suppose if you define a unit train as having one shipper and one destination, then the unit train was an invention of the 1960’s, but the idea of an entire train of one commodity is much older than that. For that matter, you have examples of an entire railroads (Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range for one) organized to move just one commodity.
“To Hell in a Day Coach” got panned by just about everybody who read it, including two poor reviews in the same issue of TRAINS. The author obviously had an axe to grind and was willing to play fast and loose with the facts to make his point.
That being said, unit train rates actually predate WW2, but they were quite uncommon and were generally applied in limited situations.
I suppose a Circus train could be consider as the first unit train.After they went from point A to point B and did not require any en route switching.
Also even back in the 30s/40s there was coal trains to power plants.These could be consider the first coal unit train…Then how about live stock trains? The list is endless on the possibilities of what constitutes the first “real” unit train…