Only the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, the New York and Harlem Railroad, and the New York and New Haven Railroad...Grand Central Depot.
Posted on 01/17/2009 11:27:40 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
“Who is John Galt?” The words come from the mouth of a bum to Eddie Willers, as he walks down the streets of New York. Willers notes the un-maintained spire of a building, whose gold leaf has pealed off and never been fixed. It’s September 2.
Eddie enters the office of Jim Taggart, president of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad (“From ocean to ocean!”) to inform him that there has been another wreck on the Rio Norte Line. The track is shot, and people are giving up on using the line. Jim says that eventually there will be new track. “It’s a...temporary national condition.” Eddie points out that Orren Boyle of Associated Steel has failed to deliver rail for the past thirteen months. Jim forbids Eddie to approach Rearden Steel. The Phoenix-Durango Railroad is eating Taggart’s lunch, and Taggart is failing to serve Wyatt Oil, which has brought the Colorado oil fields back to life. Jim is furious that all Wyatt cares about is money and that his oil has “dislocated the economy of the entire country...How can we have any security or plan anything if everything changes all the time?”
As Eddie leaves Jim’s office, he notes that Pop Harper’s typewriter is broken and has not been fixed. Pop won’t requisition a new one because they’re substandard, and he recites a litany of bankruptcies and mechanical failures in New York. Pop doesn’t care any longer.
We first meet Dagny Taggart in the coach section of the Taggart Comet, not the sleeper section. (The description of Dagny no doubt matches what Ayn Rand wanted to look like; it’s the description of a movie star.) Dagny hears a brakeman whistling a tune that she recognizes immediately as something by Richard Halley, but a piece she hasn’t heard before. The brakeman mentions that it’s Halley Fifth Concerto. Dagny informs him that Halley has only written four concertos. (This is a significant plot point.)
After dozing restlessly, Dagny awakes to discover that the train has been shunted onto a siding at a red block signal for about an hour. The Comet has never been late before, but the crew doesn’t care. Their sole intent is to avoid blame for anything, and they want to wait for somebody else to take responsibility. Dagny orders them to move to the next block signal and stop at the next open office. At the crew’s insistence she agrees to take responsibility.
Arriving in New York, Dagny, with Eddie in attendance, tells Jim that she has ordered from Rearden, not Boyle, to rebuild the Rio Norte Line. Jim is furious but will not take the responsibility for canceling the Rearden order. He whines that it’s unfair to give all the railroad’s business to Rearden just because he produces on schedule. He is horrified when Dagny tell him that the order is for Rearden Metal, not conventional steel. “But...but...but nobody’s ever used it before!” Dagny then turns to Jim’s noble experiment of the San Sebastian Line which Dagny states will be nationalized shortly by People’s State of Mexico. Jim comes unglued. It’s more moral to spend money on an underprivileged nation that never had a chance than to spend it on Ellis Wyatt, who simply wants to make money. “Selfish greed for profit is a thing of the past.”
Dagny interviews Owen Kellogg of the Taggart Terminal Division in order to give him the top spot at the Ohio Division, replacing an incompetent who is a personal friend of Jim’s. But Kellogg won’t take the job, resigns from Taggart Transcontinental and nothing Dagny says can keep him on the railroad. When Dagny asks why, Kellogg answers, “Who is John Galt?” Thus the plot is set in motion.
New York and the Railroads
New York was a railroader’s nightmare in the19th Century. The Hudson River was an insurmountable barrier. Approaching from the west, the Pennsylvania, Reading, Baltimore & Ohio, Jersey Central, Erie, Lackawanna and Lehigh Valley railroads all terminated at Jersey City or Hoboken, and each railroad operated its own private navy to get people across the Hudson to downtown Manhattan. From the east, the Long Island Railroad ended at Brooklyn, and passengers for Manhattan took a ferry across the East River. Only the New York Central and the New Haven had direct access to New York into midtown’s Grand Central Station, a wooden structure built in 1871.
After the War Between the States, the Pennsylvania made two attempts to bridge the Hudson, one killed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the other by its exorbitant cost. A tunnel project was impossible using the technology available at the time. A coal-fired steam locomotive hauling a passenger train under the Hudson from New Jersey would arrive in New York with its passengers and crew dead from asphyxiation. This could cause problems with return business.
In 1899, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt visited Paris to see his sister, the famous impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, and while in Paris he dropped by the newly opened Gare du Quai Dorsai. This station had been built for electric railroading with an approach via a tunnel under the Seine. Cassatt saw the solution to his Hudson River problem.
Unlike the New York Central and the Great Northern, two railroads that were run under a cult of personality, the Pennsylvania Railroad was an arch-conservative company run by faceless gray men in Philadelphia who just happened to know how to run a railroad. It was the most financially successful railroad in America, and its bonds were as good as gold. The Pennsy never did anything without a lot of planning and advance work; the quality of the accountants in its Planning Department was legendary. In 1900, Cassatt acquired the Long Island Railroad, put the main stem on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue underground and electrified most of the system, causing its ridership to double.
In 1906, Cassatt announced that the Pennsylvania Railroad would build two tubes suspended in the Hudson River silt. These tunnels would carry electric trains powered by DC third rail, which would run from a location in the New Jersey meadowlands (Manhattan Transfer) into the new Pennsylvania Station in midtown Manhattan. This station would be designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White and would be modeled on the Basilica of Constantine and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, creating a true temple of the American railroad. This architectural monument opened in 1910 and was one of America’s great railroad stations until its demolition in 1963. Its replacement, Penn Station, is an underground warren sitting under the latest version of Madison Square Garden. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station created an uproar, was considered an act of corporate vandalism and was directly responsible for the movement to preserve America’s great railway stations.
With the opening of Pennsylvania Station, the railroad hooked the Long Island Railroad in by tunneling under the East River and also provided a connection to the New Haven Railroad via a high-rise bridge over the Hell Gate in Queens.
The Pennsy’s arch-rival, the New York Central, had a terrible accident in 1902 when two steam trains collided in the Park Avenue Cut, killing many. New York City banned steam trains on the island of Manhattan, and the New York Central was dragged kicking and screaming into the electric age, along with its partner, the New Haven.
Upset by the presence of a greater temple of railroading, the New York Central built a station to replace the 1871 wooden structure, which had become rather dowdy with age. Atop two levels of underground tracks would stand the New York Central’s temple of railroading, Grand Central Terminal, which opened in 1913. (Corporate egos!)
In Rand’s book, there is only one great railroad station in New York, Taggart Terminal, which has characteristics of both Pennsylvania and Grand Central. As a combination of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, it’s as though Nat Taggart created the Penn Central a century before 1968.
America and the Railroads
Today there are seven Class I railroads in North America: Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Kansas City Southern, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. Only the Canadian National is truly transcontinental, although the Canadian Pacific has achieved a degree of transcontinental status by purchasing trackage rights on the CSX in the US. The Kansas City Southern is more Mexican than American, and the remainder are large regional carriers. All were created by a series of mergers and acquisitions spanning nearly 150 years.
At the time of Rand’s book there were a vast number of Class I railroads, but none were transcontinental.
In Atlas Shrugged, there are two transcontinental railroads: Taggart Transcontinental dominates the northern half of the US and the Atlantic Southern dominates the south.
Railroad baron Nat Taggart founded his railroad in the 19th Century, and it was transcontinental in scope from the very beginning, not achieving that status by a process of slow merger and acquisition. This is a serious departure from railroad history. It would appear that after creating the Penn Central and buying a whole slew of other lines, Taggart created his own version of the Union Pacific to go transcontinental. Taggart did not rely on Lincoln’s government land grants for financing but did it the hard way, which makes his model the real life James Jerome Hill, the man who built the Great Northern. Like Hill, Taggart worked his way up from the bottom in railroading and was not a financial operator.
One story about Jim Hill might give an insight into Nat Taggart. Jay Gould had been using political leverage in DC to prevent Hill from laying tracks across Montana. So Hill charged into the Western Union Building in New York where Gould’s fortress of an office was located, lifted Gould bodily out of his chair and dangled him by the ankles outside his office window six stories above Wall Street until Gould agreed to call off his lobbyists. (They made ‘em tough in those days!)
Dagny Taggart and Richard Halley
Classical musicians and people who are heavily involved in classical music have a technique, called “dittersdorfing”, where they hear a piece with which they are unfamiliar and guess the composer. It is named after Karl von Dittersdorf, a contemporary of Franz Joseph Haydn, whose music sounds a lot like Haydn, but lacks Haydn’s facility with musical architecture.
In the book, there is no indication that Dagny Taggart had ever taken music lessons or that her interest in classical music extended beyond contemporary composer Richard Halley. Yet a brakeman on a train whistles a melody, and Dagny immediately recognizes it as Halley, but unpublished Halley. For an old classical music person like myself, this is a stretch.
Some Discussion Topics
Question for our members: Should this thread go up next Saturday or sooner? Give it some time for thought and get back to me.
When we get there, you'll like the people who populate the gulch. You'll meet them along the way.
In army terms, every good CO needs an XO. For every Dagny, there's an Eddie to keep things moving. I'm an Eddie Willers type, and I'd like to get in.
I really like the study of history, especially WWII. One thing that struck me in a show about D-Day was the comparison between the average allied soldier and the German soldier. During the invasion, the allied soldiers were given the responsibility to achieve a specific goal and given the freedom to improvise in achieveing that goal. The German soldiers missed opportunities to repel the invasion because they had to wait for orders from higher up and were more fearful of acting unauthorized than of allowing the invasion to gain a foothold.
When I read the book last summer, it was my first time to read it as a business owner. I think about the difference in the two sides on D-Day and I try to give my employees the room to innovate and the comfort of knowing that I am there to back them up if one of thier decisions goes bad.
In another post, someone said "don't ever let your boss think that you are smarter than him". I actually like it very much when one of my people proves themselves smarter than me... because I was smart enough to hire them.
The country had already begun falling apart when the book starts, it just hadn’t become all that apparent to the majority.
What bugs me is how the majority continue to be sheeple as they starve and their world collapses around them. Thats eerie and seems to be the case for realm life
Good to hear from you again!
I’m a little late to this party.
Are y’all accepting suggestions for the FReeper Book Club? If so, I’d suggest Animal Farm followed by 1984.
He’s not even been crowned yet and I’m seeing all kinds of parallels between nObama and Animal Farm.
The general reaction to anything falling apart was, "Who is John Galt?" ("Why bother? What can anyone do?") That saying became a mantra to cover everything, and it absolved the speaker from having to think.
The definintion of "sheeple" would have to include something about not thinking or being obligated to think.
In some respects, the passivity of the train crew is tied to an unwillingness to think critically.
They had just given up on anything ever getting better, and in so doing assured that nothing would get better
As I was reading about the hollow tree I couldn’t help but think about the state of California (who now cannot afford to refund overpaid taxes), and all the Jim Taggarts that helped Ca. (and soon - NY) get to this point.
There is no lack of Jim Taggarts out there.
” and a teacher coaching a sport is considered much more important than one that can, say, teach physics or calculus extremely well.”
a personal observation I’ve noticed regarding coaching and teachers.
There are some teachers who coach for the extra pay = you can tell right away by the quality of their team and win-loss record.
Then there are teachers who coach because they enjoy the kids - the athletics, and that particular sport.
Excellent coaches are usually excellent teachers too - and they have the respect of the kids when they are good at both.
“You can’t make the obvious decision and act on it because you have not been through their process. And they use their process to inhibit any progress.”
It sounds like something right out of a Dilbert cartoon.
Yes, it is like Dilbert. They try to gain power by controlling who is successful. But, they want liberal or useless things to succeed and block true innovation. I managed a product area where these people controlled the people assigned to my program and they dumped the worst on me. I got a broader definition for my group so I just hired from the outside (not relying on management staffing decisions) and grew the business for this customer from a few $100k projection to over $60M. These control freak managers hated me for succeeding even though it benefited them. They wanted to pick the winners and loosers and their winners were the Chucky Schumers and Barney Franks of my company. Head-to-head is the only way to go with these people.
One of my favorites, and so applicable.
Only the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, the New York and Harlem Railroad, and the New York and New Haven Railroad...Grand Central Depot.
The key is being able to find some way to take ownership of whatever you do, the equivalent of signing your name on your work.
I live in Maynard, Massachusetts about a half mile from the large mill that Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) called home during the boom times. That mill has one of the oldest continuously operating clock towers in New England.
I have lived here for more than 20 years, and didn't know much about it. They gave tours a few months back so my wife and I went in. It was great. It had this beautifully maintained mechanism with cogs and gears and took up as much real estate as a dining room table...when you looked at it, you got this oddly discordant simultaneous effect of high technology contrasted with the beauty of an antique.
But what struck me most was the table that the entire mechanism sat on.
It was a beautifully crafted wooden table with curvaceous victorian legs.
Nowadays, we would pour a concrete slab or build a metal bolt together table. But this was a beautiful, attractive and well built piece of furniture for this utilitarian device.
Someone was tasked to make a table, and they could have done ANYTHING. Nobody was going to go up to look at that clock tower mechanism and admire the table, they would all be looking at the mechanism. Everyone who I was there with was.
But the person who built that table built it as if anyone who looked at it for the next 200 years would appreciate that whoever built it cared for and appreciated his work.
And that was good enough for him.
Long ago I would have welcomed most any Freeper.
But the last year has taught me to be far more selective. And it IS my choice, after all.
Actually, Grand Central Depot was enlarged and renovated into Grand Central Station during 1899 - 1900. It was a virtually new building.
It's interesting to note that when the depot was built, there wasn't much in midtown Manhattan. Even Central Park was new and wasn't all that central.
And thanks for that photograph!
Ping to Chapter 1.
I think a lot of voters are in for a reality check in just a few days.
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