Wanted: more railroad biographies

One of the Facebook pages I check regularly is called “Railway Book Collectors and Readers.” Maybe you’ve seen it. The page is a place for railfans to compare notes on their personal libraries — often with photos of jammed, groaning shelves — as well as exchange information, opinions, and quips about what makes a good railroad book.

A discussion thread last week caught my eye. One of the page’s regulars, Kurt Bell, asked the group to name a subject or topic that apparently hasn’t been covered yet in a book, and should be. Kurt’s interest partly comes via his profession — he is the former librarian and archivist at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania and today is the railroad archivist for the Pennsylvania State Archives.

Kurt’s question struck a chord and within a couple of days he’d gotten a strong response. Among the nearly four dozen replies were wish lists that ranged across a predictable range of subjects: locomotives, short lines, economic history, small pieces of big railroads, and other topics often tending to the obscure.

Curiously for me, biography was barely mentioned. There were one or two suggestions, but they were far outnumbered by the other topics. And that’s a shame. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “There is properly no history; only biography.” 

Emerson’s words were timely for me because I recently finished writing a review of a fine new book, John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, by H. Roger Grant, the prolific Clemson University historian. My review will appear in the Fall-Winter 2018 issue of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society’s Railroad History.

I won’t upstage the R&LHS review by going into detail, but I got a lot out of the book. In so many ways, the arc of Barriger’s incredibly varied career traced the arc of the industry itself, from the 1920s right through to the 1970s. Get to know Barriger, you get to know railroading.

The Barriger biography was not Roger’s first. Earlier he authored one on Jervis Langdon Jr., the influential executive who had the top job at Penn Central, Baltimore & Ohio, and Rock Island. I asked Roger about the importance of these life stories, especially the need to approach them holistically. 

“What I discovered in writing about Langdon and Barriger is that a manuscript must be a life-and-times account of their careers. A biography cannot be told in a vacuum, and so research must extend beyond the subject’s own life.”

Sometimes those themes take the writer to unexpected and perhaps not altogether enjoyable places, one of many reasons why writing a biography can be an especially challenging project for an author.  

“In the case of Barriger, the role of his widowed mother had a major impact on this future industry leader’s world view,” Roger explains. “Edith Barriger needed to be described and explained. Authors must deal with subjects that might be of little or no interest to them, and ones that might be difficult to master.”                                                                                              

Difficult, indeed. People are infinitely more complex and contradictory than machines or corporate machinations. But even with those challenges, I find myself hoping more of our writers tackle biography. Otherwise, railroad literature is incomplete.

I’m sure you can think of some likely subjects for a book treatment. Here are a few I’d like to see:

• Louis W. Menk: The son of a trainman started out on the Frisco as a telegrapher and later, after a Harvard education, worked his way up to the corner office, becoming president in 1962 at age 44, at the time the youngest railroad boss in the land. Later stints at Burlington and Northern Pacific prepared him for his signature job, chairman and CEO of Burlington Northern. Historians attribute much of BN’s early success to Menk’s determined, consensus-building leadership.

• Alfred E. Perlman: The Penn Central bankruptcy forever stained Al Perlman’s career, which is a shame, because in the postwar era he was the prototype for the technologically adept railroad president. Educated at MIT and Harvard, he revolutionized railroad operations with his adoption of off-track MofW equipment, his championing of CTC, and his relentless cost cutting. Few acknowledged it at the time, but Perlman’s handling of New York Central was a vision of the industry to come.

• Donald J. Russell: Nothing could stand in the way of Russell’s drive to grow the postwar Southern Pacific, not a Tehachapi earthquake nor a snowbound City of San Francisco nor even the persistent pressure of its partner and rival Union Pacific. Russell’s leadership style intimidated underlings, but along the way he created perhaps the most diverse company in railroad history, with extensions into trucking, shipping, and pipelines. Not for nothing did Time magazine put him on the cover in August 1961.

• W. W. Atterbury: There were plenty of giants at the Pennsylvania Railroad — J. Edgar Thomson and A. J. Cassatt, to name two — but none eclipsed William Atterbury, who started out as an apprentice in the Altoona Shops in the late 1880s and by 1925 was president of the entire PRR. Atterbury presided over his company during its greatest period of industry hegemony and crowned all his achievements with the historic electrification project that survives today as the foundation of the Northeast Corridor.

• W. Graham Claytor Jr.: The great champion of Southern 2-8-2 No. 4501 and SR’s other excursion steam locomotives had a multi-faceted career. His record as president of both Southern and Amtrak are fodder enough for a good book. Throw in his heroic naval career — as the commanding officer of a destroyer escort, he bravely charged ahead to save some of the men of the doomed U.S.S. Indianapolis in 1945 — and you have a bio of a railroad executive like no other.

• Ross Rowland: Why not? Rowland has his detractors, but for the better part of 20 years, the steam impresario was the P. T. Barnum of railroading, devising grandiose projects nobody thought could work — until they did. Thus we had Nickel Plate 759 crossing half the continent with the Golden Spike Limited of 1969, or the spectacle of two years of the American Freedom Train, or C&O 4-8-4 No. 614 hauling coal along the New River in 1985. Bravo! (And, unlike the others on this list, Rowland is still available to be interviewed.)

This just scratches the surface, and as I sit here I realize it’s top-heavy with executives. There are plenty more figures worth exploring, including fascinating people who never made it to the executive suite. I’d love to hear some of your own suggestions here in our Comments section.