Why was Rock Island called a granger road, but Santa Fe wasn't?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
21

Why wasn’t Santa Fe a granger? 'Cause it ran from Chicago clear to (and directly) Los Angeles and (indirectly to) the Bay Area. This “all-the-way” attribute of its route system made it THE pre-eminent transcon* of its day.

Other roads cited by Murphy Siding:

– UP and NP (and GN, not mentioned) were transcons, not grangers. Carried some grain, to be sure, but they were in it “for the long haul.” (I know–bad pun).

UP was the perfect gatherer of overhead traffic from Chicago to Southern California (via its won rails), the Bay Area (via a friendly Ogden-SP connection), and the Pacific Northwest (own rails, again).

GN and NP competed against each other and UP and (sort of) MILW (see below for added detail) for transcon traffic moving via Chicago and Kanas City to the Pacific Northwest. Together, they originated more farm products than UP, but it was their transcon traffic that kept them solvent.

– SSW served as an extension of parent (98 percent owned) SP, itself a transcon, not hardly a granger.

– MoP derived much of its revenue from its extensive Gulf Coast chemical traffic. Hardly farm product-dependent. Call

22

Thanks for the long reply. It made for interesting reading. I have to wonder if NP made more money hauling grain than hauling transcon traffic? Old system maps of N.D. show NP branchlines smothering the northern half of the state.

If I go back to RailwayMan’s definition of a granger, it’s, more or less,: a railroad that derived a lot of it’s traffic by hauling grain to Chicago, and not very profitable. In that sense, it almost sounds like a derogatory phrase. It’s kind of like refering to the ‘sisters of the poor’. You’re not saying anything bad about sisters, or the poor, but it still doesn’t sound complementary.

23

Problems with hauling grain. 1) It is seasonal – it gets harvested, and if there is no provision for its storage near its point of harvest, it must be transported to elevators near huge processing centers (Minneapolis, Kansas City, etc,). Lots of cars are needed to protect the traffic at its peak, and, just like a field that goes uncultivated for a year or two, tend to lie fallow for the rest of the year. This means a lot of capital tied up doing nothing. Whether a railroad owns or leases the cars, this is bad news. More recently, farmers have opted to store their harvested product near their fields, and when the combination of market price plus transportation costs

24

Aricat again; I did Google granger railroad.C&G Merriam define granger railroad as one which primarily earns its revenue by carrying produce of farmers and grangers; circa 1913. It lists the following railroads as grangers.Chicago & Alton, CB&Q,Rock Island, Milwaukee Road, and last but not least C&NW. It did not say if this included the Omaha. Omitted M&StL and CGW. Does this settle the debate, I don’t think so. All of us sometime in the future could meet somewhere in Iowa and try to settle this over a beer. This is why it is fun to be a railfan!

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billio: I wonder, if you’re looking at grain shipment from an old-fashioned viewpoint? Where I live, southeastern S.D., BNSF seems busy with grain trains almost year round. If I owned a railroad, I’d look into how I priced grain traffic in a recession. With excess hoppers, locomotives and manpower sitting, would it make sense to drop my rates, in order to make my customers more competitive, in order to get some hoppers rolling? It seems logical to me, that this would at least add something to the bottom line, even at lower rates.

What’s the old saying? “We have to pay the heat and lights anyway, we might as well try to recover some of our other (fixed) costs”.

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I guess I agree with most thinking here. A “granger road” is a midwestern road or RR company that starts out from a big city and then branches out westerly into the wheat (or other grain) fields. I think the term had more salience when it was easier to define granger roads as northern-Midwestern – partly from the seasonality of wheat (though corn isn’t much better), partly through there being no real competition to freight RR’s in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – unlike today, when many elevators that keep working with trucks, even in places where the rail line has been ripped up. Partly, too, through the extra political moxie people from Nebraska north and Iowa north exercised over rates – in fact, that was one of the chief reasons The Grange, the organization, got started. If a railroad’s lines don’t go to a Pacific port, then it’s more likely to be tagged a granger road.

I think the term “granger road” itself is of major interest historically, but it would do a RR analyst very little good as a term he could hang his hat onto today. What’s changed? As Murph said, the grain trucks and trains show more of a steady movement today, not the explosive seasonality of everyone wanting haulage RIGHT NOW. With that comes less of a “do or die” ethic on the RR’s trying to turn an annual profit on freight moved largely just a few weeks during the year. And as I mentioned above, railroads are mighty handy things to have around but quite a few growers seem to be functioning well without them. And, (sniffle) there aren’t half-a-dozen-plus U.S. railroads out of Chicago that feature passenger trains that go all the way to the Pacific Ocean either through their own line or as an alphabet (think of CB&W). Of course, IM is the big deal these days. To the extent that the word “granger” may not serve present needs, the term “Transcon” (or a close version) does serve

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Interesting discussion, but I think some of the semantics here falls short of the origin of the term.

In the true sense granger roads have nothing to do with grain trains, etc. The CNW was an authentic granger before the Civil War. So was the Aurora Branch, which later grew into the CB&Q. And the CB&Q on its own trackage starting in 1862.

The CNW railroad – then known as the Galena and Chicago Union – dead-ended at the town of Turner, now known as West Chicago. No transcon, just local service, and starting in 1848 a connection with the Aurora Branch RR.

Stations were set up at intervals along the way (where towns eventually formed) and a 6-day a week morning train into Chicago stopped and picked up full milk cans brought in by area farmers, their fresh vegetables, passengers and freight (the morning “milk run”). A late afternoon outbound dropped off passengers, freight, Chicago newspapers and the empty cans. Few of the towns had grain elevators, if any (Lombard comes to mind, but I don’t know what year it was built).

Shoot, the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin also ran a morning milk train into the city that also carried freight.

When grains were fianally harvested in the fall, the storage was done at huge elevators along the Chicago River or in the port down at Lake Calumet for loading into freighters. Those ports are where great exchanges of food, manufactured goods and raw materials were exchanged with lake boats, which travel

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The first use I can find of the term is 1861. A that time it referred to railways targeted by state legislation to regulate rates and terms of service, under pressure from the Patrons of Husbandry (aka the Grange). Many states had active Grange movements including Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, California, Oregon, Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, but only in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois were such proposals carried forward into law. In other states such as Kansas and Nebraska the Grange was in contrast encouraging railway construction into the 1870s, and only in the late 1870s and early 1880s did some of these states roust themselves to seek railway regulation.

However, there was no specific list of “granger roads” published any time in the 1800s that I can find. By 1900, in Railway Age and other works such as Kennan’s biography of Harriman, there is casual reference to the six Iowa Roads as Granger Roads – these are the roads connecting to the UP at Council Bluffs with reasonably direct routes to Chicago – IC, C&NW, CB&Q, CM&StP, CGW, CRI&P. But these references are not restrictive, they simply list these roads as “Granger Roads” not as “the Granger Roads.” Some later railway historians such as Klein and Stover chose to drop CGW and IC from this list for reasons I cannot locate. Perhaps IC because it was more of a southern road than an Iowa road, but CGW is if anything more of an Iowa road than C&NW, CB&Q, CRI&P, and Milwaukee Road.

By the 1920s, flipping through Railway Age, the term is fuzzily expanded to include any railway in the prairie and plains states west of Chicago whose fortunes are closely linked to the income of farmers. This includes, variously, such roads as the Katy, FW&D, and Soo.

Some later sources attempt to apply a strict definition, but offer no basis for why certain roads are included or excluded.

RWM
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I think billio raises a good point about where the grain was going…granger roads are/were generally hauling wheat only as far as Minneapolis, Chicago or Kansas City for milling, not shipping it to the east or west coast.

Also as a couple of people pointed out, railroads like GN, NP, ATSF, UP would be considered transcontinentals. It’s a loose distinction, but it’s kind of a matter of ‘what do you think of first’ when someone names a particular railroad??

For example, if I say “iron ore railroad” you probably think of the Missabe or Great Northern / Burlington Northern, not the Soo Line - although the SOO did in fact haul considerable iron ore in Minnesota (in a joint operation with the NP) and Upper Michigan.

Same way when I say “Appalachian coal hauler” you would think of Norfolk & Western or the Clinchfield, not New York Central - but the Central did have a couple of lines going into West Virginia and did haul a fair amount of coal.

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When the C&A was being built, they had a ‘station’ about every 5 or 6 miles, the distance a farmer could haul grain or whatever to a shipping point, and return home all in a day’s time.

When the branch of the IC connecting Kankakee IL with the spine line was built, stations were spotted about that same distance from each other. You’ll find the same thing along IC’s spine line (although most of is gone now - you might find nothing!),

The IC kept expanding its lines; the C&A didn’t. But they started out quite similarly, perhaps as grangers?

Art

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Unlike the term “Class 1,” which had a definite meaning, right down to specific numbers, the term “granger” seems to be a generalization, applied to those railroads which primarily catered directly to the agricultural community.

As already mentioned, some roads weren’t known for certain types of traffic. IC also handled a lot of coal, but like NYC, probably wouldn’t be in most people’s top railroads listed as coal haulers.

I think we can agree that most railroads probably fit within several such general classifications. What’s at question here is how a railroad is thought of primarily. I would submit that in light of that, the roads we’ve identified as “grangers” probably fit that bill, while others, like ATSF fall more into the category of “transcon.”

[2c]

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Not too many railroads back in the day that did not handle a lot of coal. Milwaukee Road, CB&Q, MoPac, Frisco, T&P, Santa Fe, C&NW – all had very sizeable coal businesses. But rail enthusiasts don’t often know that, because they tended to not travel to or be in places such as Boshoke, Oklahoma, or Dawson, New Mexico.

RWM

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Uneducated guess is that granger roads originally were railroads that served farmers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in the 1870s. This is a long post quoting an entire chapter of a book. Please don’t anyone feel obliged to read it. – Mike

The Agrarian Crusade, a chronicle of the farmer in politics by Solon J. Buck (1920)

Chapter IV. Curbing The Railroads

Though the society of the Patrons of Husbandry was avowedly non-political in character, there is ample justification for the use of the term “Granger” in connection with the radical railroad legislation enacted in the Northwestern States during the seventies. The fact that the Grange did not take direct political action is immaterial: certainly the order made political action on the part of the farmers possible by establishing among them a feeling of mutual confidence and trust whereby they could organize to work harmoniously for their common cause. Before the advent of the Patrons of Husbandry the farmers were so isolated from each other that cooperation was impossible. It is hard for us to imagine, familiar as we are with the rural free delivery of mail, with the country telephone line, with the automobile, how completely the average farmer of 1865 was cut off from communication with the outside world. His dissociation from any but his nearest neighbors made him unsocial, narrow-minded, bigoted, and suspicious. He believed that every man’s hand was against him, and he was therefore often led to turn his hand against every man. Not until he was convinced that he might at least trust the Grangers did he lay aside his suspicions and join with other farmers in the attempt to obtain what they considered just railroad legislation.

Certain it is, moreover, that the Grangers made use of the popular hostility to the railroads in securing membership for the order. “Cooperation” and “Down with Monopoly” were two of the slogans most commonly used by the Grange between 1870 and 1875 and were in large part resp

34

I think all the questions will be answered here. Doesn’t have much to do with agriculture, just litigation

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/MILW/message/62008

Maybe he can be persuaded to post it here…

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A passage in The North American Railroad, it’s origin, evolution, and geography, by James Vance has this to say about The Milwaukee Road:“…perhaps the most prosperous of the grainger roads that carried wheat from the northern plains to shipping points on the Great Lakes.” To me, that doesn’t seem correct. NP, GN, CBQ, CNW and even SOO seemed to have more lines into wheat country than The Milwaukee Road. Which of the grainers hauled the most wheat and more grain, back in their heyday?

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The key word here is “wheat” and not “corn.” Overlay the wheat regions of the northern plains onto the granger roads: These are the major wheat regions of the northern plains per USDA:

  1. Hard Red Spring: Eastern 2/3s of North Dakota, northwestern Minnesota, far northeastern Montana (GN, NP, Soo, MILW)

  2. Durum: The northwestern 1/3 of North Dakota and a little bit of northeastern Montana (GN, Soo)

  3. Hard Red Winter: Central-Western South Dakota (MILW, C&NW)
    Everywhere else on the northern plains the dominant row crop is corn/soy with a little bit of barley and milo.

But I think the sentence can be read a little too literally. It’s doesn’t say “the Milwaukee Road was the most prosperous granger of the northern plains because it hauled most of the wheat traffic” (causal). It says “the Milwaukee Road was perhaps the most prosperous that carried wheat.” (correlative). In other words, Vance is just using “wheat” and “northern plains” as descriptive characteristics.

By sheer coincidence I have the ICC tonnage stats for 1963 here on the table tonight. Not a “heydey” year perhaps, but servicable. Total wheat carloads hauled by the Northwestern Region Class 1s that year are:

  1. DW&P - 45

  2. Soo Line - 17,748

  3. C&NW - 18,411

  4. CGW - 3,824

  5. CMStP&P - 34,187

  6. DM&IR - 4

  7. GN - 63,302

  8. GB&W - 19

  9. LS&I - 0

  10. MN&S - 87

  11. NP - 38,060

  12. SI - 89

  13. SP&S - 12,241

Central Western Region:

  1. AT&SF - 97,812
  2. CB&Q - 50,664
  3. CRI&P - 50,999
  4. UP - 83.589
    For what it’s worth …

RWM

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Re: It’s doesn’t say “the Milwaukee Road was the most prosperous granger of the northern plains because it hauled most of the wheat traffic” (causal). It says “the Milwaukee Road was perhaps the most prosperous that carried wheat.” (correlative).

Yup! - a.s.

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Wasn’t there an article in TRAINS a few years ago that wrote about the wheat in Minnesota? Or was that just a discussion I had with my husband?

So, if the wheat hauling railroads were “grangers” were their names and/or associations associated with the railroads that hauled corn and/or livestock?

tina

39

100 or so years ago, most all the grain in South Dakota and, at least eastern Minnesota was usually wheat. I think corn didn’t come on strong until after the depression.

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Thank you. The most simple understandable answer I’ve seen yet. The Grangers never sued the Santa Fe, as I recall mostly because it was a late-comer and mostly ran through Granger territory rather than serving it. I was going to refer everyone to

Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929

by Gordon. It has several chapters on and around this subject. Rates for Iowa farmers shipping grain a few tens of miles were higher than stuff being shipped to the coast. Being a granger railroad was not a flattering nor desirable thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Passage-Union-Railroads-Transformed-1829-1929/dp/1566632188/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243478700&sr=1-1