Trains

Before November 18, 1883, there was no such thing as a time zone. Every town set its clocks by local noon, which meant that when it was noon in Chicago it was 11:50 in St. Louis and 12:18 in Detroit, and a railroad crossing several states had to publish schedules against dozens of local times. Some stations hung three or four clocks.

The railroads fixed it themselves. They divided the country into four zones and switched over on a single Sunday that the newspapers called the day of two noons, because in the eastern half of each zone the clocks were turned back and noon happened twice. No law required it, no government body approved it, and Congress did not ratify the arrangement until 1918. A private industry rescheduled the country and everyone simply went along.

They did the same thing with track width three years later. Southern railroads ran on a gauge three inches wider than the northern standard, which meant freight had to be unloaded and reloaded at the boundary. On May 31 and June 1, 1886, crews moved one rail inward on more than eleven thousand miles of track over two days, working in shifts along the whole system. Photographs of gangs with bars and spike mauls working a line date from that.

The locomotive portraits in the archive follow a convention worth recognizing. Builders like Baldwin photographed every engine they delivered, always in three-quarter view from the front, always broadside-lit, usually against a plain wall or a blank sky, with the crew standing in fixed positions. These were catalog records rather than art, and the sameness is the point — it lets you compare one machine to another. They are also, incidentally, the most detailed record of nineteenth-century industrial design that exists.

The depot is the other great subject and it carries more social history than the trains do. In thousands of towns the station was the only public building that connected to anywhere else. The telegraph came in there, the mail came in there, and the whole town turned out for arrivals. Photographs of a small-town depot with twenty people standing on the platform for no obvious reason are showing the local entertainment.

Pullman deserves its own note. George Pullman built sleeping cars and rented them with staff attached, and he hired almost exclusively Black men, many of them formerly enslaved, as porters. By the 1920s the company was the largest single employer of African Americans in the country. The job carried steady wages and a uniform and required absorbing constant indignity, including being called George by passengers who did not bother with names. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized in 1925 under A. Philip Randolph, became the first Black-led union chartered by the American Federation of Labor.

For dating photographs, the smoke tells you a great deal. Steam ended fast — the major roads went from almost entirely steam in 1945 to almost entirely diesel by 1960. Water towers, coaling stations and roundhouses with turntables all belong to the steam era and were demolished quickly once they were useless, so a photograph containing one is almost certainly pre-war.

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