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

In newspapers, magazines, penny-dreadfuls, early newsreels, and silent movies, the train accident looms larger than any other image of dangers associated with the machine and the new industrial age. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch and others have shown, fear of intense mental and bodily shock haunted the nineteenth-century imagination. Collapsing bridges, which Mark Aldrich discusses in depth in this pioneering study, symbolized the possibilities and threats of the most advanced material culture the world had ever seen. Landslides, leading to derailment, underscored the fragility of relationships between obstinately uncontrollable nature and an increasingly mechanized society.

Most studies of railway accidents have focused on large-scale and sensationally shocking miscalculations and mishaps. Such events have long been memorialized in an arcane and specialist literature sporting titles like "Great Train Disasters" and "Memorable Derailments in the Midwest." Aldrich admits to a long love affair with all things to do with the railroad; however, in this study he is concerned with weightier matters. One of the onerous tasks he has set himself—the construction of a statistical inventory of all kinds of rail-associated accidents in the United States between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s—is daunting indeed. The findings, and fine detail of methodologies used and assumptions and back-projections brought into play, are presented in a series of appendixes; succinct overviews, summarizing trend, cause, and spatial aspects, are included in the main body of the text.

Aldrich's three main sets of sources—material dug out at the collections of the Hagley Museum and Library and other repositories, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and figures from a sample of individual though unrepresentative states—begin at different dates, give priority to different kinds of accidents, and were collected for different reasons. The author says that his conclusions should be taken with a pinch of salt, but he is overmodest. Careful scrutiny suggests that these findings will not be rapidly or easily refuted. Throughout the period between the late 1820s and the 1870s, single-track American railroads—undercapitalized, overly dependent on inferior track work, often lacking basic signaling equipment, and overburdened with astonishingly dangerous freight carriers—were greatly more threatening to life and limb than their British counterparts. As zealously antiregulatory advocates of the industry explained, the aim was less to please "aesthetes" than to build as rapidly as possible at minimum reasonable cost.

The British safety record, which features heavily both in Aldrich's text and appendixes, clearly provides the best available yardstick against which to evaluate the American experience. Nevertheless, greater attention might have been paid to Continental Europe, and particularly to France and Belgium. Early sections of Aldrich's study contain intriguing non-British-derived reaction to the American system, but this comparative dimension is not sustained in later sections of the book. Most observers expressed incomprehension at the apparent absence of even a modicum of regulation. However, in the mid-1850s, Francis Galton told the British government that the American system—or nonsystem?—was well fitted to the needs of the American people. "[A] rough and ready cheap railway . . . entails increased cost for maintenance," he argued, "[but] is preferable to a more expensive and finished line" (p. 13).

Aldrich himself identifies elements of state intervention during the dark days between the 1830s and 1870s. At the same time, he casts doubt on the commonsensical assumption that enforced, across-the-board introduction of technical best practice would necessarily have reduced the toll of death and injury. He also argues that, during the early and mid-nineteenth century, economic considerations—and particularly the heavy cumulative costs associated with compensating accident victims—gradually forced the industry to embark on the long road toward improved safety. This would involve interaction between the industry and state and federal government, the gradual replacement of bootstrap by scientifically based technical knowledge, increasing realization that accidents sapped profits, and a major cultural shift—already identified by Thomas Haskell—toward a...