Life on a Locomotive
Originally published in 1971 this reprinted 219 page hardcover book chronicles the life of Buddy Williams, a C&NW locomotive engineer working in Wisconsin during the late steam era. $34.95 postpaid.
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can fault, if not the accumulation of wealth, at least the flaunting of it, as per J.P. Mor- gan’s extended trips to Europe on high-end shopping sprees for rare works of art. There were efforts to curb excesses, such as the landmark Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which the author says lacked “clarity;” failing, for example, to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable “restraint of trade.” A narrow division among the Supreme
Court justices early in the 20th century ulti- mately played a key role in determining how America’s transportation system would emerge by century’s end. That issue and an- cillary concerns were at the center of a law- suit against the railroads by the T.R. “Teddy” Roosevelt administration. At the center of the litigation was Northern Securities, a “holding company” for Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads. Harriman vs. Hill portrays the govern-
ment case as weak. And it was. Many years later I lived in Montana, served by both of those rail lines, and indeed they were “paral- lel,” but they are also located many miles apart on east-west trackage. Their interests were mostly in different spheres serving dif- ferent cities. The legendary jurist Oliver Wendell
Holmes voted with the majority and for the government, but on what he saw as a thin but intractable technicality of the law (Sound familiar, 21st century readers?). Jus- tice Holmes castigated both his majority col- leagues, at one point implying they were swayed by their dislike for J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill. Interesting that Morgan would soon be-
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come a one-man Federal Reserve Board be- fore there was the real one, and arguably averted economic catastrophe in the process. Hill was the founder of the Great Northern. His legacy as “Empire Builder” is acknowl- edged today in the name of an Amtrak pas- senger train that traverses the Northwest on the old GN track. As for Teddy Roosevelt, Justice Holmes
(who also occupies a favored place in the his- tory books) made comments from the books that seemed to reflect his reported private description of the 26th president as a “pretty unscrupulous politician.” Several days later when the justice was at the White House, he was treated with very cold courtesy. From that court decision, the witch hunt
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was on. Non-stop railroad bashing would fol- low for a half century. To compound the of- fense, says the author, “they showered public subsidies of money on railroads’ competitors [highways, waterways and airways] and de- prived the railroads of their ability to decide how much money they could charge for their service.” The newly-created ICC and other federal
bodies micromanaged the railroad industry whereas their newer competitors benefitted. “Trucks became faster, bigger, more efficient, with pneumatic six-cylinder engines. . . and semi-trailers loaded on flatbed railroad cars. Then came container shipping and the fed- eral interstate highway system. . . The final indignity was that rack trucks, not railroads ended up hauling most of the new cars.” So how did our transportation system end
up as the mess from which we today are try- ing to extricate ourselves? Well, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rrrrrrest of the story!” Wes Vernon is a Washington-based writer and veteran broadcast journalist.
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