Railroads - Part III of III
"…There Goes the Train" Part III of III
by Dr. Paul Loatman, Jr., City Historian
By the mid-1920s, although Mechanicville’s railyards had expanded significantly, the competition from motor trucks threatened to undermine the financial viability of freight railways. Passenger traffic was a significant factor for the B&M and the D&H, but both lines earned their bread and butter by hauling freight. Thus, a major step toward restoring the B&M’s competitive edge (and the local D&H operations which fed off of it) began with the installation of the car-retarder switches in the Mechanicville reclassification yards in 1925.
B&M President George Hannauer co-invented the retarder switch, a train brake laid on a track which controls the speed cars can reach when being reclassified into new freight trains. The innovation permitted faster switching in less yard space and at less cost because in one stroke, it removed the need for brakemen to ride boxcars over the hump to their destinations among newly made-up trains. The retarders spaced cars in a more orderly fashion and controlled damage to freight (and car riders). Indeed, the dangers of manual car-breaking cannot be exaggerated: so many men were killed performing that task in local yards in the late19th and early 20th centuries that Mercury editor, Farrington Mead, requested that the County Coroner’s office be moved to Mechanicville to save him the trouble of being called here so often to sign death certificates for dead railroaders.
However, innovation was a double-edged sword: the retarders immediately reduced the local workforce by 50%, while at the same time, they increased switching capacity by 40% and made Mechanicville the third largest classification yard in the United States. In 1923, it took 25 hours to reclassify a boxcar from one freight to another train; two years later, the task took only 10 hours. At this time, 1,100 men worked on the railroads (900 of them for the B&M), and the city’s population was nearly 10,000, almost double what it is today. However, the new retarder system had a strong negative impact on the local economy, cutting the B&M’s payroll in half. This was cushioned somewhat by the line’s abolishing the seven-day work week for machinists, boilermakers, and electricians, making them among the first railroaders to work only five days weekly, but boom times for railroaders were now a thing of the past.
For the next three decades, railroad employment remained steady between 500 and 600 here as both the D&H and B&M modernized their rolling stock by replacing steam with diesel engines. The new engines were more economical and easier to keep in repair than steam engines which sometimes required days rather than hours to repair. Diesels also had no need for coal-shoveling firemen on board the engines, but since these jobs had long been customary, railroad brotherhoods were reluctant to see the superfluous positions abolished, leading to drawn-out battles with management while fending off charges of "feather-bedding," protecting job positions which the railroads claimed were no longer needed. Years later, the advent of the diesel has left a different mark on our community. Ironically, when our city finally acquired railroad property a decade ago which it had long coveted, it found itself burdened with an ecological "brown field" saturated with diesel fuel and other chemical residue which limits the property’s use. The century-long hope of getting the property on city tax rolls is yet to be realized.
The D&H had longer ties here, but a rockier relationship with the local government and less employment impact than the B&M. The D&H, as we have seen, established connections with Mechanicville when it leased the old Saratoga & Rensselaer Railway in 1870 and then acquired the Saratoga & Whitehall the following year. The northern branch of the D&H, although small, always turned a profit, and when it hooked up with the Hoosac Tunnel road in 1879, greater efficiency was achieved among railways in northeastern New York and western New England.
The D&H cushioned itself against the economic fluctuations that affected most railways because of its success in selling coal, a product which accounted for over 50% of its shipping tonnage through the World War I era. Between 1916 and 1925 (lean years for most railroads) the D&H went into the red only once. Indeed, this occurred in 1923 when the Railway Age Gazette reported that a four-month long strike by D&H miners at Carbondale negatively affected its bottom line. The company maintained dividends of between 7 and 9% right through the worst years of the Depression and did not come into serious straits until 1943, when the Interstate Commerce Commission granted permission to the railroad to refinance its indebtedness over the next twenty-five years. By then, significant changes in the national economy had pushed railroads to the brink economically, and both the D&H and B&M found themselves in the hands of federal bankruptcy receivers by the end of the 1960s. The completion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s swung the balance of power in transporting freight to motor trucks which could deliver goods door to door, not simply railyard to railyard like trains. This road network also encouraged the abandonment of central cities and the development of suburbs, while the popularity of the automobile eroded the passenger base which had been a regular source of railroad income. Recent hopes of reviving commuter service from Saratoga through Mechanicville to Albany may be threatened by a lack of public interest. While most people agree that restoring rail service to Albany is a good idea, they are not prepared to surrender the convenience of the automobile. Shortsighted government policies imposed decades ago also complicated matters. Rather than be taxed on their unused trackage, lines tore up idle rails to reduce their assessments. This not only wasted funds which would have been better spent on capital investment; it also means that relaying these tracks will cost tens of millions of dollars to replace.
Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan often tried to establish their populist connections with voters by bragging that they had been raised so near the railroad tracks, they could "hear the whistle blow" of passing trains. Many of us today still live near the tracks, but we hardly ever "hear the whistle blow." Attempts to revive the railroads in the 1980s by Guilford Transportation foundered among labor-management disputes, leading to a strike which the company attempted to break by hiring "scabs." Inadequate financing helped to doom the effort, so that today, we witness the incongruity of an occasional Canadian Pacific train chugging quietly among our local weed-infested unused trackage over which thousands of cars once rolled every day.
For older residents, one of the most disturbing hallmarks of Mechanicville’s recent decline into a post-industrial economy arises from the darkness and quietude surrounding the old railyard. Like a lighthouse guiding storm-tossed seafarers, for decades night travelers could follow the glow of the sky above the local yards from afar to direct them home where they could be serenaded to sleep by a symphony of banging box-cars throughout the night. For some, the peace and quiet which settled over the area since the closing of the yards in the 1980s has been deafening enough to disturb sleep patterns.
Railroading became such a part of everyday American life that we borrowed its terminology to describe our daily routines. Whether "cannon-balling’ at "full-throttle" with a fireman "stoking the engine" on a "double-header," or just "bringing up the caboose" on a "dead-header," no one has to worry about "living on the wrong side of the tracks" where they "can hear that lonesome whistle blow" anymore. There’s nobody left to "punch your ticket," and God knows where "Casey Jones" has gone when you really need him. As for me, I’m "gettin’ on board" before "the train pulls out of the station" and someone tries to "ride me out of town on a rail." Conductor – hold that train!