More than a century before the 1978 dumping of 31,000 gallons of chemicals in 14 low-income North Carolina counties gave birth to the environmental justice movement, the construction of the western railroads epitomized environmental injustice.

In Empire's tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Manu Karuka writes about what he calls “railroad colonialism,” that is, “territorial expansion through financial logics and corporate organization, using unfree, imported laborers, blending the economic and military functions of the state, materializing in construction projects across the colonized world.”

In short,

• The railroads relied on exploited immigrant labor for their construction, often offering foreign workers a loan for passage to the United States, and “work on arrival amounted to a kind of debt peonage that put low-wage workers at the mercy of contractors,” according to Richard White’s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. A hatred of contract workers led to Sinophobia: “It was the roughly 180,000 Chinese who emigrated to the United States between 1849 and 1882 who came to be the ideological embodiment of worker declension — supposedly inferior men who became the tools of an oppressive corporation.”

• The railroads severed Native Americans from their land, with the government granting rights of way through Native American territories and, as stated by White, conquering them. White quotes Congressman Charles Francis Adams saying, “The Pacific railroads have settled the Indian question.”

• The building of the railroads meant new markets for bison hide, kicking off a frenzy of bison slaughter. At the end of the Civil War, the southern herd numbered roughly 6 million, and by 1897, that number was effectively zero, White wrote. Even worse, only 1 in 5 hides ever reached the market, and tens of thousands of carcasses rotted on the southern plains. The defeat of the Lakotas in 1876-77 escalated the slaughter of the northern herd, leading to a slaughter that White says was “as thorough as it was economically inconsequential.”

These stories have been documented in several histories of the building of the transcontinental railroad, and recent scholarship has attempted to tell them more fully, including Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, as well as various articles, interviews and digital exhibits on the impact of the railroad on Native Americans.

In Railroaded, White outlined the economic and environmental damage wrought by the rail companies, questioning not whether the western railroads should have been built, but whether they should have been built at a time in history when there was no demand for them. His conclusion is clear:

“In the late nineteenth-century United States, Canada, and Mexico without the extensive subsidization of a transcontinental railroad network, there might very well have been less waste, less suffering, less environmental degradation, and less catastrophic economic busts in mining, agriculture, and cattle raising. There would have been more time for Indians to adjust to a changing world. The conditions that twentieth-century Indians faced would have been more like those the Navajos faced, with their reservation intact and a functioning economy, rather than those that the Lakotas faced, with their reservations subdivided and allotted and their attempts to adjust thwarted. There would have been less bloodshed and slaughter. There would have been fewer rushes and collapses, fewer booms and busts. Much of the disastrous environmental and social history of the Great Plains might have been avoided. The issue is not whether railroads should have been built. The issue is whether they should have been built when and where they were built. And to those questions the answer seems no. Quite literally, if the country had not built transcontinental railroads, it might not have needed them until much later, when it could have built them more cheaply, more efficiently, and with fewer social and political costs.”

The human and environmental toll of the building of the western railroads was tragic, if not horrific. Just as environmental justice today focuses on the correlation between pollution and race and poverty, the disastrous effects of the premature building of the railroads were felt primarily by Native American and immigrant people.

In a speech delivered at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner called the American frontier “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” The idea that the frontier shaped American democracy has come to be known as Turner’s Thesis.

At the end of his 27,000 mile trek on Amtrak, Terry Pindell ponders this thesis and whether it accurately captures American history, especially in light of the building of the railroads. In Making Tracks: An American Rail Odyssey, he writes an alternative:

There are things going on here — have been for two centuries — that constitute a radical new cast of the dice in the human condition. But neither can one deny the overwhelming continuity of an imperial conquest that reveals itself in the network of rails themselves as well as all of the contemporary images of economic exploitation that threaten to subdue the very spirit of the west. Did the west conquer America, or did America conquer the west?

The railroads, Pindell implies, are an embodiment of European values and technology imposed on the American landscape — at great expense to the land itself and those who had lived here for thousands of years.

American railroads: senselessly built, and senselessly dismantled

Fast forward to the middle of the 20th century, and a new environmental injustice displaced the railroads: massive investments in highways, which tore apart and destroyed countless low-income urban communities while encouraging more and more carbon emissions.

During this era of rapid highway investment, the number of passenger-miles driven on American highways skyrocketed from nearly 1.3 trillion miles in 1960 to nearly 4.5 trillion by 2015.

In the meantime, our rail system suffered decades of decline and can no longer move people efficiently.

When reflecting on the state of American passenger rail — often in comparison to Europe or East Asia — many Americans tend to lament that the United States is just “different” in terms of population density, geography and personality — as if high-speed rail doesn’t run through the Pyrenees and the Alps.

I have heard and read many times:

• “Our cities are too spaced out.”

• “America is a car culture.”

• And, my favorite, “trains were better before the government ran them.”

All of these arguments ignore key facts from our history, namely, that our government neglected the railroads while putting massive investments into airports and highways.

The railroads didn’t just fall into decline. We made decisions that sent them into decline.

As far back as 1959, more than a decade before the creation of Amtrak, the problem and its causes were clear. In April of that year, Trains magazine ran a cover story, “Who Shot the Passenger Train.” In it, longtime Trains editor David P. Morgan wrote,

“The passenger train is not dying of old age, it was shot in the back.”

In the more than 60-year-old piece, Morgan writes arguments that hold true today, namely that Americans subsidize air and automobile travel, while expecting train travel to survive on its own:

“The totals involved are staggering — an investment of 4 billion dollars in civil airports, almost 1.4 billion spent to date on the Federal airways system, and 441.3 million disbursed since 1938 in direct airline cash subsidies. From 1921 through 1955 Government has financed more than 93 billion dollars’ worth of pavement construction and maintenance. It is difficult to do battle with such amounts when your weapon is a railroad plant currently worth 27.8 billion dollars after depreciation, of which only a minor element is allocated to passenger service.”

Among Morgan’s prescriptions for the future as the nation entered the 1960s:

“Equal treatment” does not mean either subsidy or no subsidy, featherbedding or no featherbedding, tax forgiveness or taxes period. It simply means that whatever the community deems proper treatment of one mode of transport — whether in regulation, taxation or employment practices — must be accorded to the other carriers as well.

None of that was heeded, and today, very little has changed.

Amtrak and ongoing inequities in funding

In Amtrak, America's Railroad: Transportation's Orphan and Its Struggle for Survival, railroad historians Geoffrey H. Doughty, Jeffrey T. Darbee and Eugene E. Harmon call the 1956 creation of the interstate highway system — a $25 billion authorization that amounts to $239 billion in 2020 dollars — the fatal blow to passenger train service:

“Overall the system was unraveling in a vicious downward spiral: as ridership declined, service declined further in the number of trains available, the routes served, and the amenities offered on board—all of which further discouraged ridership.”

That downward spiral reached an unsustainable low in the late 1960s, and the government had to take action. With the Nixon administration adamantly opposed to nationalization or subsidies, the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, authorizing $40 million ($257 million in 2020) to pay for Amtrak’s start.

Today, Amtrak receives roughly $1.9 billion per year from the federal government. In contrast, the federal government alone spent $46 billion on highways in 2019.

Consider the following expenditures, cited in Amtrak: America’s Railroad:

• Williston, North Dakota, opened a $273 million airport in 2017, financed with $106 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, $55 million from the state, and $112 million from bonds supported by airport revenues. In 2020 it was served by one airline offering one flight per day to and from Denver.

• A study from the Harvard Kennedy School, identified $35.78 billion of state highway and vehicle costs (55.78 percent) out of a total of $64 billion expended in the Bay State through 2019. Of that $35.78 billion, just a third was covered by user charges. The balance fell on every family at an average rate of $14,000 per year, regardless of whether a family owned a vehicle.

The authors concluded:

Few people today understand that when air and bus lines show a profit, it is only because substantial public funding and hidden subsidies let them avoid the full costs of providing their services.

The rising toll of carbon emissions from transportation

These investments in automobile and airline infrastructure have brought us unsustainable carbon emissions, fueling the warming of the planet.

Citing data from BEIS/Defra Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors, the BBC compared average carbon emissions per kilometer traveled on various forms of transportation:

• Domestic flight: 133g (+121g of secondary effects from high-altitude, non-CO2 emissions)

• Long haul flight: 102g (+93g of secondary effects from high-altitude, non-CO2 emissions)

• Car (1 passenger): 171g

• Bus: 104g

• Car (4 passengers): 43g

• Domestic rail: 41g

• Coach: 27g

• Eurostar: 6g

On the contrary, an investment in rail travel, which is cleaner and can be more efficient than car or air travel, could be an investment in environmental justice. One can travel by train for just a fraction of the carbon footprint of air travel or car travel.

Railroads, once a symbol of environmental injustice, are now key to a greener, safer future.

In Allies of the Earth: Railroads and the Soul of Preservation, historian, preservationist and former president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers Alfred Runte makes the case that while railroads began as conquerors of the landscape, they now encourage us to respect the land.

Among his points:

• Train tracks were built in harmony with natural features.

• Highways bulldozed nature.

• Railroads helped to concentrate industry and development.

• Highways threw all land open for sprawling development.

• Trains build a relationship with the landscape and affirm community.

• They helped establish our national parks, especially Glacier National Park, which is still accessible via Amtrak’s Empire Builder.

Passing through the landscape is not a waste of time; it is an education. In short:

“We should remember that trains were an invention that turned out right for life and for landscape. … The land would ask for trains.”

Passenger rail in the United States, however, needs investment.

The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021 includes $66 billion for Amtrak, the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Funds will be used to address Amtrak’s repair backlog, modernize its fleet and reduce trip times.

This will help make passenger rail more comfortable and a somewhat more efficient — but will not be enough to create true high-speed rail in this country.

When you consider that China has built more than 20,000 miles of high-speed rail and has a train that can reach more than 370 miles per hour — while the fastest Amtrak Acela trains reach 150 miles per hour in a few sections of the Northeast Corridor — it is clear that we have a long, long, long way to go.

In the meantime, for those who have the time and the ability, riding Amtrak’s slow trains can be a fulfilling travel experience.

⮕ Reality Check: I know I have painted a pleasant picture here of traveling by rail in the United States, but there are drawbacks. Continue ahead to read more about them before planning your own trip.

Bibliography

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