Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965 (review)

This is an excellent narrative of the evolution of public and industry focus on industrial safety. It is subtitled "accidents and safety" because accidents played a very public role of focusing attention on particular problems (e.g., brakes, bridge design, rail failures, and explosions of hazardous materials). By looking at accidents and safety, Aldrich develops four key themes that he weaves throughout the narrative. Aldrich's economic analysis, much of which is contained in the notes and in thirty pages of appendices, provides data for his broader claims about the declining social costs, disasters, fatalities, injury rates, and the relationship between safety and profitability. Also, Aldrich's "essay on sources" is first rate.

The first theme is the evolution of the railroad technological network, which included the railroads, inventors, suppliers, engineering and trade societies, and the press. It was this technological network that improved railroad technology and solved production and safety problems. Second is the cultural construction of risk. The courts and popular press shifted responsibility from individual failings to organizational and social responsibility. The railroads increasingly undertook improvements (either voluntarily or coerced) as a moral imperative: because improvements were available, they should be used. This identification of risk is integrated with the technological network. As risks become identified, the network develops abatements. Third, Aldrich focuses on the processes by which improvements were integrated into the practice of railroading. Some changes were forced upon railroads through government regulation. Other improvements were adopted voluntarily as railroads responded to public pressure, knowing also that government regulation was an alternative. Aldrich develops this relationship into what he calls the "safety compact," an implicit agreement that if the railroads do not make the industry safer on their own then government will force the industry to become safer.

Last, the book discusses the economics of safety. As Aldrich explains, managers were never in a simple position of exchanging profits for safety improvements because improved safety also improved efficiency. For instance, better brakes, rail, and wheels all cut down on derailments and accidents, which meant higher overall speed and increased production. Nonetheless, lower-level managers and workers did see an adverse relationship between safe procedures and efficiency—or, in some cases, unions balked at managers' exhortations toward safety as mere "window dressing"—thus contributing to "agency problems." Agency problems were instances where individual workers were without oversight and felt the freedom to do their jobs in any manner they chose (trainmen would not protect the rears of trains, engine drivers used excessive speed, and station agents would allow trains to proceed without knowing the status of the track ahead). Overall, industrial safety required that workers and lower-level managers obey the rulebook. Thus, improved safety was a matter of improved information, managers gaining the knowledge that employees are doing their jobs according to the rules. This was done through inspections, statistics gathering, signaling systems, radio, and even pension plans. Furthermore, publicity efforts and building good will with workers (through programs such as "Safety First") contributed to reducing agency problems and technological fixes, such as block signaling, automatic train control, and CTC, removed much of the independence of the worker.

Other than the fact that Congress nationalized safety implementation in 1965, there is no compelling reason to end the narrative then. Demonstrating an adverse relationship between poorly guided economic regulation and improved railroad safety is a major theme in the concluding chapters. This theme, though, could perhaps have been more strikingly born out had the narrative been carried at least into the Staggers Era if not down to the present. Also, one wonders why Aldrich did not address such safety issues as on-the-job intoxication or the switch to just-in-time production. These are good topics for investigation which underscore the lop-sidedness of this book: too much on the nineteenth century (eight of the ten chapters deal with railroading to...