Railroad Titans

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

What follows, is a list of “Railroad Titans” from a July, 1998 article in Trains Magazine, written by William B. Parker:

  1. James J Hill (Great Northern)

  2. Cornelius Vanderbuilt ( New York Central)

  3. J. Edgar Thomson (PRR)

  4. Collis P. Huntington ( Central Pacific)

  5. William C. Van Horne (Canadian Pacific)

  6. J. Pierpont Morgan ( Railroad Bankroller)

7 Edward H. Harriman (UP & SP)

  1. D.W. Brosnan (Southern )

  2. William Butler Ogden ( CNW)

  3. W. Graham Claytor, Jr. ( Southern/Amtrak)

Near misses: L.Stanley Crane, George Gould, Herman Haupt, Cyrus K. Holliday, Edward P. Ripley&Victor Morawetz, and the Van Sweringen brothers.

That’s as close as I’ve found to a book on rairoad giants.

2

I would have liked to have seen Perlman on the near misses list. Perhaps Heineman as well.

3

Baffling to me the thinking that would leave Jay Gould and Downing Jenks off that list, or would almost include the Van Swearingens

I don’t one can meaningfully compare railroad leaders in the pre-regulation, regulation, and post-regulation eras. I think one should have three lists. I don’t think the list necessarily fills to 10, either. As far as my own arbitrary decisions, only those who caused positive change and only U.S. railroads. The fools and scoundrels can go in a different list. Canada is a very different case because of the different politics and social characteristics, and deserves its own list.

My choices in no particular order:

Pre-regulation/early regulation:

Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, Edward H. Harriman, James J. Hill, John Murray Forbes, J. Edgar Thomson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Alexander J. Cassatt, John W. Garrett, Henry Villard

Regulation:

Downing Jenks, Ralph Budd, Alfred E. Perlman, John Kenefick, D. J. Russell, D. W. Brosnan, Daniel Willard, Edward P. Ripley, W. Graham Claytor, Robert R. Young, Julius Kruttschnitt, Benjamin Heineman, Larry Provo.

Post-regulation:

Rob Krebs, Ed Burkhart, James Hagen, Mike Haverty

Then you have financiers who caused immense change such as Daniel Drew, J.P. Morgan, Philip Anschutz, but they’re not really railroaders.

4

Mr Hadid,

How about Herman Haupt ?

5

Haupt was an engineer and demonstrated impressive leadership acumen and organizational talent during the Civil War and during execution of his many projects. But it is difficult to compare engineers to CEOs because the skills are so different. It’s like trying to decide which is the better athlete, Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods. On the other hand engineering skills transcend political boundaries much more readily than CEO skills.

Some great railroad locating and construction engineers along with Haupt:

Grenville Dodge, William Hood, Maj. A.B. Rogers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, A.M. Wellington, Albert Fink, J.H. Strobridge, John F. Stevens.

Bridge and tunnel engineers are a separate specie, as are mechanical engineers. My apologies that I am so uneducated on railroads overseas that I know little of the great engineers of the continent, Britain, Australia, Russia, India, China, and Japan.

6

What!? No mention of Richard A. Harlow?

Who else could have started up a poorly planned, poorly financed, and poorly built (albeit with a reasonably gentle profile) regional railroad with no land grants, aka the Montana Railroad, stave off bankruptcy twice while major railroads bit the dust all across the nation, keep JJ Hill from foreclosing on his line for three years after, then manage to sell his line to the new Milwaukee and pay off all his debts, and soon after become vice president of the Milwaukee?

7

I missed Haupt on the original post near misses. [D)]

Perhaps locomotive builders could be called Railroad Titans as well.

Baldwin, Woodard and Dilworth are names that come to mind.

8

As well as Samuel Vauclain, Ross Winans, Richard Trevethick, George Stephenson, Herbert William Garratt, Anatole Mallet.

9

The author of that article apparantly didn’t think too many modern day railroaders fit the desription. He also didn’t think there was a place for “corporate pilagers”, as he called them, like Jay Gould, and Uncle Dan Drew.

I think we could all add some names of more recent vintage railroaders. His criterion was “a North American rail magnate or chief executive must have built-and left- a positive,enduring legacy to the railroad industry”

10

The remark about “not including corporate pillagers” gives away the author’s breathtakingly shallow, priggish, and sententious understanding of railroad history. He could not be more wrong. Fifty years ago Julius Grodinsky, the most incisive historian of U.S. railroads to date, came to a very different conclusion about Jay Gould. In 1986 Maury Klein, the best railroad historian of recent years, re-examined Gould and came to similar conclusions. Where’s Mr. Parker been? Not expanding his horizons, apparently.

To quote Edward J. Renehan Jr. of the Fordham Institute,

"1957 saw publication of Julius Grodinsky’s insightful but obscure Jay Gould: His Business Career, 1867-1892. Intended primarily for a readership of academic business historians, Grodinsky’s somewhat-dry volume presented the first well-reasoned, well-researched account of Gould’s process for fortune-building. Not concerned with coming to any judgment as to Gould’s morals, Grodinsky dispassionately analyzed the financier’s day-to-day business dealings. In doing so, he revealed two Goulds. One was the highly imaginative, ruthless, and easy-to-vilify Wall Street operator who used brilliant but sometimes-dark methods to gain control of firms. The other was a detail-oriented owner of companies who painstakingly consolidated dying railroads and transformed them into highly profitable mega-lines."

Mr. Parker is a classic Whig historian, concerned that the young get proper lessons in order to respect the way we do things, because we know better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

It’s the sort of thing you get when one doesn’t delve deeper into railroad history than Lucius Beebe potboilers and The Golden Book of Railroads.

S. Hadid

11

Murph,

There’s a lot of reading on these links,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_in_rail_transport

Even MWH is listed, but I don’t see Perlman, Heineman or Hunter Harrison.

12

Were there any non-railroaders, such as regulatory chiefs, that had a major impact on the railroading industry?

13

Joseph Eastman was probably the most interesting of the ICC commissioners.

Jesse Jones, Reconstruction Finance Commission, articulated the value of building a railroad industry independent of Wall Street, industrial corporations, and speculators, and had a vision of America and railroads that was far-sighted and powerful. Without his vision and leadership at the RFC, World War II would have lasted longer and been far more costly, and railroads would have been wrecked.

William McAdoo of the USRA.

Certain presidents had an unusually large affect, notably Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Jimmy Carter.

S. Hadid

14

I’ll admit that I haven’t read anything about Gould that ever put him in a very good light.

15

Gould was never one to concern himself with public image. Reiticent, shy, soft-spoken, and rather unattractive, he was easier to portray as villain to a public seeking concrete answers to their woes rather than grapple with the complexities of fundamental structural inequities. The public loves to be pandered to and loves people who concern themselves with image. Style usually wins over substance, and good looks help too. You still read people sniggering about Eleanor Roosevelt’s homely features and in rapture over Jacqueline Bouvier’s glamour, long after both have exited the stage. I wonder how many people in the U.S. would really prefer a monarchy, and their continuing infatuation with supernatural superheros is dismaying.

There is very good railroad history written in the last 20 years and today but you have to look for it, because it’s not found at hobby shops, swap meets, or in the advertisements in Trains Magazine. The railfan community is by and large disinterested unless it has color photos and repeats the same old mythology.

Some of the best recent rail history, all unpopular or unknown to most of the railfans I know:

Working for the Railroad, Walter Licht

The North American Railroad, James Vance

Unfinished Business, Maury Klein

S. Hadid

16

I’ve got a copy of Vance’s book, made for a good read. He gave quite a bit of attention to the effect of geography on the location and operation of railroads, understandable as he was a professor of Geography at Cal (might have been interesting taking one of his classes when I was at Cal).

Hilton has a couple of good books on the history of interurbans and narrow gauge railways, both have a lot more text than photographs.

17

Vance’s specialty was the geography of transportation. Along with Harold Mayer it’s difficult to find anyone who more profoundly influenced the science in recent years. Vance’s North American Railroads was received with fury by the railfan press because he slew sacred dragons. I guess the rejoinder to that foolishness is that I see the book in the office of many of the chief and assistant chief engineers, railroad economists, and rail strategists I work with. If you had a choice who to influence, who would it be?

Hilton’s books are valuable reference material but more comfortably fit in the category of encylopedia than history. History requires more than just an accountancy of facts.

S. Hadid

18

Mean MWH? Bit of a stretch to put him on a “titans” list, but he’s OK.[:-,]

19

Mr Hadid-

Would you put the Van Swearingens on the list if they had successfully merged the Erie, Pere Marquette and NYC&StL into the C&O, and turned it into a strong heathy railroad ?

I can’t think of any names associated with GE, such as Dilworth and Kettering. Was there, or is there, a key figure that could be singled out for making GE a success ?

(D&RGW steam question)

(Thanks Jay)

20

A clarification: Rail Titans is the name of the article that contains the list in my first post. MWH is listed in the People in Rail Transport list. [;)]