"The Peril of the Broken Rail": The Carriers, the Steel Companies, and Rail Technology, 1900-1945

The insidious character of these fissures is a most disquieting feature of the case.

—James Howard

Can we do it? Well I guess. Reduce the failures? Yes, yes, yes.

—Max H. Wickhorst ¹

On 25 August 1911, Lehigh Valley Train Number 4 left Buffalo, New York, pulled by two engines, both of which had about 50,000-pound axle loads. As it approached the Manchester yard, traveling about twenty-five miles per hour, the train broke a rail near the bridge spanning the Canandaigua outlet and pitched the last nine cars over the embankment and into the stream. Twenty-nine people were killed and sixty-two injured. The rail that broke was manufactured by Bethlehem Steel in December 1909, 90 pounds to the yard. Since the block signal had showed clear, the rail was not broken before the train had arrived. Yet it shattered into seventeen pieces—less than a year after it had been put in place.

The wreck of the Lehigh Valley was one of the Interstate Commerce Commission’s (ICC) first investigations under the authority granted to it by the Accident Reports Act of 1910. The commission engaged James Howard, an engineer-physicist at the National Bureau of Standards, to study the break. Although minimally educated, Howard had spent thirty years as an engineer of tests at the Watertown Arsenal before arriving at the bureau in 1910. There he had investigated metal fatigue in rails and locomotive axles, as well as the stresses sustained by rails in track. He was well known to the carriers and a respected member of the engineering community. He concluded that the Lehigh Valley fracture resulted from an internal transverse fissure (fig. 1), a result of metal fatigue caused by the rolling action of high wheel loads. Track inspection could not discover transverse fissures and, Howard warned, “the possibility of an epidemic of wrecks is not altogether a remote one.” He called for a thorough investigation of the “actual fiber stresses” in rail and concluded, ominously from the railroads’ perspective, that “the remedy does not consist in increasing the weight of the rail, but in diminishing the intensity of the wheel pressures.” ²

Figure 1.

A typical transverse fissure with the nucleus clearly visible. This one caused a wreck on the St. Louis & San Francisco near Victoria, Mississippi, in 1925. (Interstate Commerce Commission.)

Howard identified transverse fissures at a time when the carriers were already beset with a host of other rail failures. A rash of rail breaks and accidents had erupted about the turn of the century, but by 1911 their solution seemed assured, the result of a host of improvements in manufacturing and the shift to heavier, better-designed rail. The transverse fissure in the Lehigh Valley incident, by contrast, represented a novel form of fracture. It was undetectable and therefore highly dangerous, and Howard’s conclusion that it stemmed from excessive wheel loads thrust at the bottom line of American railroading. Discovery of the origins of transverse fissures would involve international research efforts by steelmakers, railroads, and government agencies over nearly twenty-five years, and require important discoveries in metallurgy.

These efforts to reduce rail failures provide insights into early-twentieth-century corporate research and the nature of technological puzzle solving. As other writers have emphasized, the interaction of producers and consumers has been central to the evolution of steel technology. In the first decade of this century, the carriers took the lead in reducing rail failures, sharply improving testing, inspection, and data gathering. These seemingly pedestrian activities in turn motivated important product improvements not simply because they tightened quality control but also because they stimulated important innovations. But while such procedures proved highly effective in reducing many forms of rail failure, they were insufficient to solve the riddle of transverse fissures, which required joint research on both rail metallurgy and track stresses.

Such coordination proved to be difficult, in part because both steel and railroad industries had a strong economic interest in forcing the other to...