It must have been fun trying to get a train in the 1830s and 1840s: no information on train arrival or departure time was initially available, no timetables, no signs announcing arrival or departure, so while the railroad were compelled to provide some sort of basic sustenance for their passengers at the “depots” - given the lengths of the train journeys and before the “newsbutchers”, as they were called, the men and boys who walked the length of carriages selling such things as sweets and tobacco, started up, leaving passengers otherwise to starve - there was no announcement as to when the train was leaving again, and seats could not be reserved. This then necessitated bolting down the (not exactly wholesome) food and legging it to the platform in the hope of gaining a seat, leading to rather a lot of cases of indigestion and that sort of thing. But hey, at least these people had a terminal.
States had to fight to get the railroads to put up any sort of depot, as in general they seemed to be happy enough to take passengers at the first departure point and dump them at the terminus, without stopping in between. The kind of thing we call today “express services”, except it was to be every one. Now consider the position of the hapless station agent. He was the face of the company at the depot, the man who sold tickets, dispatched the trains and looked after the passengers (as best he could), and as is always the case, he was the one who faced the wrath of those passengers when circumstances entirely outside of his control delayed trains, or when anything else went wrong. The conductor, on the other hand, was far from the smiling (or unsmiling) functionary who would go around asking for tickets, and checking same. No, this man was more of a drill sergeant, keeping a watch on the passengers, disciplining their children if they go out of hand (how that was carried out I can only imagine!), settling disputes and keeping control of his own people. He also sold tickets. Ah yes, tickets.
Well now, the thing about tickets on the American railroad was that from the start, rather like almost everything else including railway gauge and mode of transport, there was little if any uniformity. Some tickets were sold at the ticket office (if there was one) some were sold on board. Tickets ranged from being coloured pieces of cardboard to metal discs, and, which might seem amazing to us today, none of them were numbered, so it was easy to scam people and pocket the money while handing over bogus tickets, or even none at all. This practice was called “knocking off”. Right. As I mentioned, a ticket did not guarantee you a seat, merely passage on the train, and if you got on with a false one, issued due to no fault of yours by a scheming, unprincipled conductor, then tough. You’d have to buy a real one or get kicked off the train.
This practice was so widespread that an honest conductor taking over from a dishonest predecessor would face the kind of opposition and resentment that might attend the election of a union boss who wasn’t interested in kickbacks, or a new police chief who refused to take bribes. Someone trying to “do the right thing” could put all the chancers and scammers under a glaring spotlight they would rather avoid, and so when Harry French took over as conductor on the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company in the 1890s, he was warned that if he didn’t keep up the accepted practice of knocking off he would make many enemies. He ignored the warning though and sure enough, due to his honest dealing with passengers and with his employers the railroad was suddenly taking in much more revenue that it had done up to then.
The railroad was delighted, but the scammers were not, and even the ticket agents became Harry’s enemies, as they got no commission on tickets they sold, but due to his honesty were suddenly having to issue a lot more than they had been before. But there were more serious aspects of French’s job on which he expounded in his book,
Railroad Man, such as the time he got involved in a bank robbery. Having heard of three men who had robbed a bank in Roslyn, Washington, and had shot one of the cashiers dead, French noticed a warning on the wire, intended for the sheriff’s office, that they expected the desperadoes to cross at Arlington, which was his route. And so they did. The robbers got on his train, and French, noting their suspicious behaviour, telegraphed the sheriff’s office at the next stop, advising him that he had the robbers on board and that the sheriff should come loaded for bear, as it were.
Though expecting that he and his crew might be the next victims of the raiders, French waited in the luggage car with a gun belted on, ready for trouble, but when the train reached its next stop some passengers told him the three hoodlums had jumped, and the sheriff was disappointed when the train rolled into the station. The men were eventually caught, and French, known to have spent so much time with them on his train, was asked to identify them. He agreed - whether the fact that there was a two thousand dollar reward for bringing all three men to justice figured in his decision or not, I leave it to you to decide, though I feel he was a public-spirited man and would have made the identification in any event - and went with the detective to see if these were indeed the men who had ridden on his train that day.
They weren’t.
Despite the fact that they had been indicted as suspects, these were the wrong men. French knew them well, and told the detective they were not the same men he had seen on the train. Delighted, the defence lawyer agreed that the three men were being framed, and told French his testimony had “removed the noose” from around the neck of one of the men, who had already been wrongly convicted of being the one who shot the cashier. The prosecutor was enraged, but there was nothing he could do. These men were innocent, and released. Some months later, the real robbers paid the ultimate price when they were shot during another attempted robbery, and one of them, believing himself to be dying, confessed that they three were the ones who had held up the bank in Roslyn.
There was, sadly, no happy ending for French though. Infuriated at losing his third of the reward money, the two grand he would have split three ways with French and his baggage man (who was nervous and jumpy and s
hit-scared, and had identified the men as being the robbers without really looking too closely, and probably blinded by the promise of more money than he could have made in years), the detective conspired to have the conductor fired, which he was, over the alleged theft of… thirty-six cents.
Health and safety was all but unknown in the early days of trains, at least in the USA. People would sit wherever they pleased: in the caboose, in the luggage car, even in the locomotive itself. They would sit on the roofs of the carriages (imagine their surprise when a tunnel came along!), hang their arms and legs out of windows, and jump on and off the train whenever and wherever suited them. Many a passenger was left behind when they headed off to answer a call of nature at a scheduled stop, only to come back and find the train had left without them! There was no organisation, no counting of passengers, no warnings that the train was moving off, no way to ensure everyone was back on board. Truly, in at least a figurative sense, the wild West.
For a long time, they did what they liked: cursed, fought, abused the conductor, refused to pay for their passage. Believe it or not, it took state legislature to afford the conductor - or captain as he was initially known - the right to throw people off who had not paid, or refused to pay, or paid the wrong fare. Even the authority to issue tickets had to go through court. What the railroads were thinking I don’t know: how can you expect to make money if you can’t compel your customers to pay for the service you offer?
The first conductors seemed to prize politeness above all other aspects of their job. Eben E. Worden (a somewhat appropriate name, given how the conductor had to marshall and placate the passengers) was by all accounts a small, slight man with impeccable manners, and was the first conductor on the Erie Railroad, therefore we can assume the first conductor on a passenger train in America. Whether the job was too much for him, or due to other considerations, he only lasted two years in the position, dying two years after he retired, in 1844, of consumption (Tuberculosis). His replacement could not have been more different.
Henry “Poppy” Ayes (1800 - 1880)
A huge, bluff teddy bear of a man, Ayres (affectionately known as “Poppy”) started work with the Harlem Railroad as a conductor and then moved to the Erie in 1842 on the retirement of Worden. His appointment initially was opposed by friends of John S. Williamson, a man who had been expecting the post when Worden was assigned, and on his departure could see no reason why he would not be his replacement. But Ayres shone so in his job that he became a legend among railroad workers, and passengers, and became part of the history of the American railroad.
Surprisingly perhaps, he wasn’t even a native of the state, but came from Boston; nevertheless, he made himself a confidante and friend of everyone he came in contact with (Williamson’s and his friends aside, I imagine) and there are many stories and anecdotes of his kindness and professionalism. One such relates the tale of an old lady who left a precious family heirloom, an ancient umbrella, on a steamboat and as she was returning on the train realised it was left behind, and burst into tears. Having ascertained the problem, Poppy Ayres assured her he could get it for her by the telegraph, in just a few minutes. The telegraph was entirely new then, and people had only the vaguest ideas about how it worked - probably seemed a little like magic to them, being able to send, and receive, messages to and from miles away - so Poppy must have decided to have a little gentle fun with the lady.
He knew from experience that when the steamboats were checked after passengers had alighted, stewards would forward any item left behind to the baggage car of the train, and of course this is where he found the old lady’s umbrella. Producing it with a theatrical flourish, he amazed her, she believing it had somehow magically travelled there by telegraph!
A less enlightening story runs about a man who, having travelled to his destination via various trains on the one ticket, was told by Poppy that he couldn’t travel on his, as it had been “punched” already. The man refused to budge and was put off the train. He then took Poppy Ayres to court for throwing him off the train (in which Ayres was only doing his job, following company policy) and was awarded 250 dollars against him. Judges, huh? Then there’s the story of how, it would seem, he invented the emergency cord to be pulled when the train had to be stopped. At least, he was the first in America to work out the idea, and possibly the world, I don’t know.
How it went was this: when passengers became belligerent or refused to pay the right fare, had no ticket or for some other reason Poppy saw the need to eject them from the train, there was no way to signal the driver. So he set up a length of twine and ran it up to the engineer’s cab at the front, connecting it to a piece of wood. When he wanted the train to stop he would pull on the string, the wood would be raised and the engineer would know to stop. Except, at first, he didn’t. Not that he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to take orders from a conductor! So said Jacob Hamel, and he ignored the bell pull twice, cutting the twine so as not to be bothered. Poppy warned him if he cut it again, they would duke it out when the train arrived at its destination. And so he did, and so they did, and Hamel, refusing to come down out of the cab and face the much burlier conductor, received a punch that knocked him from the cab. After that, he paid attention when Poppy Ayres wanted him to stop the train. Ayres worked for the Erie for over thirty years, hardly making a single enemy, and passing into the history of both that railroad and American railroads in general.