When Change Rode Through On Steel Rails

“Passage To Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929” by Sarah Gordon (Ivan R. Dee, 403 pp., $30)

In “Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929,” historian Sarah H. Gordon writes, “it was a coming of age to board the train and leave home alone for the first time” and not just for the solitary traveler, she suggests, but for American society as a whole.

The train was the engine for an emerging mass society and for national unity, says Gordon, who teaches American history at Quinnipiac College and the Tikvah School in Connecticut.

In the century covered by Gordon’s book, small-town America became a metropolitan society and the “station house and train car became the somewhat chaotic meeting ground between traditional local and individual considerations.” Racial segregation varied by region, allowing blacks to ride with whites on some railroads, especially in the West. There were “day cars” where everybody could smoke, and “ladies cars” where no one could - and from which male passengers were sometimes barred. These local variants, Gordon says, represented attempts to impose “a social order which reflected established customs of the region through which the train travelled.” But in the act of travel itself, “nationalities, races, sexes and economic levels were mixed with few immediate controls on their behavior.”

A particularly rich chapter records advice given to female travelers - admonitions to be “wary of conversation on personal matters” and “to lower your veil and turn from him” if a man “seems disposed to be impertinent.” This was important, Gordon says, because in the mass society of the railroad “those of dubious reputation might maintain a place alongside those of unimpeachable morals, partly because class identification aboard a train could be purchased with the right suit of clothes, the right luggage and the right sort of accommodation.”

The other theme Gordon develops is the role of the railroad in unifying the nation. Even the designation of the principal station in many cities as “Union Station” reflected this goal, as well as the fact that such stations were used by more than one railroad. (Boston, of course, has resisted this trend to this day, with its North Station, built in 1893 for the Boston-Maine line, and the separate South Station, built in 1899 for the New York-New Haven-Hartford and the Boston-Albany lines.) And it was a General Time Convention, composed of representatives from the railroads, that established a system of standard time in 1883.

Gordon’s account ends as the railroads began their steady - and in her view, inexorable - decline. For all their promise, she writes, the railroads could not transform the small-town America from which they still provided an escape.