History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad

Introduction to the New Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION The original edition of this book appeared exactly thirty years ago. In that year of 1972, Richard M. Nixon was president and made a historic visit to China. That same year he gained reelection by a landslide and five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. George M . Wallace of Alabama seemed a serious threat for the Democratic nomination until he was shot by a would-be assassin and suffered partial paralysis. Two separate teams of astronauts spent record periods of time on the moon. A stone-age tribe, the Tasadays, was discovered living in caves in the Philippines. Mark Spitz captured seven gold medals at a summer Olympics blighted by the tragic deaths of eleven Israeli athletes. Hurricane Agnes devastated the East Coast, and a strike delayed the opening of the baseball season by thirteen days. The Dow Jones industrial average soared beyond one thousand for the first time ever. Life magazine ceased publication, and All in the Family dominated the television ratings. W h e n this book appeared that busy year, the Louisville &c Nashville Railroad was still one of the major systems of the South—a proud company with a proud history, although its future as an independent road seemed uncertain. Today the central fact about the L &c N is that it has ceased to exist as a corporate presence and has become the property of historians and railroad buffs. Its disappearance is hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, railroads have followed a consistent pattern of being absorbed by x i v I N T R O D U C T I O N ™ THE NEW EDITION other, usually larger roads until only a handful of lines bearing their original names survive. In this respect the railroads proved a harbinger of things to come, as they did in so many other areas of American life. During the twentieth century the business landscape of America, once crowded with familiar signposts of individual, family, and corporate firms, has seen vast numbers of them swept into the vortex of merger or failure. The pattern for railroads followed a course that has become all too familiar in modern times. Small local lines, often bearing the names of their terminuses, joined with connecting lines to form longer roads under a new name. In Darwinian fashion the newly extended line usually acquired or built additional mileage or found itself absorbed by a still larger company. Gradually this tangle of older roads and newly built mileage coalesced into a system occupying a territory well beyond that served by any of the original lines. Where once a town or local area identified with "its" railroad, the blanket of identity now extended over a wide region served by a still-expanding system. Town after town that had once been a proud terminus found itself a way station on a line to somewhere else. At an even later stage, entire systems began to swallow one another, creating mega-systems, until now only a handful of giants dominate the rail landscape. Scattered about them are clusters of smaller local lines, many of them cast aside by the giant systems or resurrected from the scrap heap of past failures. Since the early twentieth century, this process of consolidation has also been one of attrition as the American rail system shrunk in size as well as in number. At its apex in 1916, a total of 1,243 rail companies of all classes owned 254,251 miles of line. By 1994 only thirteen Class I railroads remained, and the mileage owned had declined to 132,000.1 Lost in the shuffle of this massive consolidation and contraction was any sense of local identity among most of the survivors. The L 8c N's own history exemplifies this pattern to the last detail. Born as a child of the commercial rivalry between Louisville and Nashville, the road's original route was plotted less by engineers than by the lottery of which towns cared to contribute to the construction of the line. The main line opened in October 1859 and soon underwent the ordeal of the Civil War, from which it emerged with the road intact, the treasury full, and an alert management eager to press its advantage over the prostrate roads of the defunct Confederacy. By 1875 it had secured control of a line to M e m phis and another through the rich iron and coal regions of Alabama...