The Wrong Side of the Tracks

Train wrecks were shockingly common in the last half of the 1800s. Train travel was quite safe in the first half century of the 1800s. Trains didn’t go very fast and there weren’t many miles of track laid down. But around 1853, the number of train wrecks and people killed on trains suddenly rose sharply. Why? The spectacular industrial growth and westward expansion created a “perfect storm” for train disasters. Robert C. Reed explains inhis book, Train Wreck: “One of the major causes of the change from safety to danger was cheap construction. American railroads were very cheaply built. The Federal Government actually encouraged flimsy railroad construction through its land grant policy, which gave railroads land and loans only as mileage was completed. As a result, the government put a premium on speed in construction and length of track, not quality…Consequently, this cheap, hasty construction coupled with increased traffic and speed after 1852 produced a half century of frightful car...