Out of Steam: Dieselization and American Railroads, 1920–1960 (review)

As a youngster growing up in central Indiana in the 1950s, I watched without fully comprehending the conversion of the Pennsylvania Railroad from steam to diesel. Now, thanks to Jeffrey Schramm’s highly detailed study of the dieselization process across the United States, I understand much more fully the many dimensions of that epochal technological change. Looking back, I wish that I myself had more fully appreciated the significance of the impending disappearance of steam power from the tracks of the mighty enterprise that once immodestly described itself as the “Standard Railroad of the World.” Yet, when it came to the process known as “dieselization,” as Schramm’s book makes clear, no single pattern describes the conversion that took place between the late 1930s and late 1950s. Executives’ perception of the new diesel technology, together with a railroad’s physical size and geographical location and the nature of the markets it served, all played a role in the process.

Indeed, the heart of Out of Steam is a company-by-company exploration of how and why the conversion process took place. For the Santa Fe, which traversed many miles of desert terrain between Chicago and the West Coast, the conversion was a logical response to geographic challenges, and the railroad was one of the early converts to diesel locomotives. At the opposite end of the chronological spectrum was the Norfolk and Western, a railroad firmly rooted in the coalfields of Appalachia. To convert the railroad to diesel power seemed like a sellout of its most influential shippers, the coal companies of West Virginia and elsewhere. Indeed, until the old technology’s demise in the late 1950s the Norfolk and Western maintained a fleet of the finest (and arguably the most beautiful) steam locomotives in North America. Some of the same reasoning prevailed earlier on the Pennsylvania, which served so many coal mines in its eponymous state.

Because Schramm chose to provide readers a lengthy series of rail company case studies for various regions of the United States, there is some inevitable repetition in his analysis. Yet by organizing his book this way, he is also able to illustrate the complexity of the twenty-year conversion process and reveal how managers of individual railroads came to make their choices. As his many case studies make clear, the perceived advantages that tipped the scale in favor of dieselization were by no means the same for all railroads.

Schramm’s book naturally invites comparison to another scholarly study of the dieselization process, that being Albert J. Churella’s 1998 From Steam to Diesel. In fact, the two studies are nicely complementary and can both be read for information and instruction. Schramm tends to focus on the individual railroad companies, while Churella provides more information on the locomotive manufacturers and clearly explains why none of the Big Three steam locomotive builders—Baldwin, American Locomotive, and Lima—successfully made the transition to diesel production. In fact, the industry’s tradition of crafting individual steam locomotives to meet the often idiosyncratic demands of buyers worked against them in terms of mass production of diesels, something at which the diesel-manufacturing subsidiary of General Motors excelled.

Out of Steam is a worthy addition not only to the scholarly studies of American railroad technology, but also to the general history of twentieth-century America. It will most likely appeal to readers already at least somewhat familiar with the history of American railroads. Readers less familiar with the subject would probably have benefited from the inclusion of a series of rail company maps, a notable omission given the importance of American geography to Schramm’s study. That is a minor quibble considering the wealth of useful information that Out of Steam provides.