Who owns railways

The state troops were almost useless, as in nearly all cases they fraternized with the strikers. All the national troops that could be spared from the Indian frontier and the South were ordered back to the centres of civilization. The regulars were welcomed by the frightened people of Chicago with cheers which those who heard will never forget. Armed guards were placed at all the public buildings of Washington, and ironclads were ordered up for the protection of the national capital.

Cabinet meetings were continuous. General Winfield S. Hancock was sent to Baltimore to take command, General Sherman was called back from the West, and General Schofield was ordered from West Point into active service.

Barricades, in French style, were thrown up by the voters of Baltimore. New York and Philadelphia were heavily garrisoned. In Philadelphia every avenue of approach to the Pennsylvania Railroad was patrolled, and the city was under a guard of six thousand armed men, with eight batteries of artillery. In the scene at Pittsburg, there was every horror of revolution. Citizens and soldiers were put to flight, and the town left at the mercy of the mob. Railroad cars, depots, hotels, stores, elevators, private houses, were gutted and burned.

As late as August 3d, the beautiful valley of the Wyoming, in Pennsylvania, was a military camp, traversed by trains loaded with Gatling guns and bayonets, and was guarded by Governor Hartranft in person with five thousand soldiers. These strikes, penetrating twelve States and causing insurrections in ten of them, paralyzed the operation of twenty thousand miles of railroad, and directly and indirectly threw one million men temporarily out of employment. While they lasted they cause greater losses than any blockade which has been made by sea or land in the history of war.

Non-sensational observers, like the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners, look to see the outburst repeated, possibly to secure a rise of wages. The movement of the railroad trains of this country is literally the circulation of its blood. Evidently, from the facts we have recited, the States cannot prevent its arrest by the struggle between these giant forces within society, outside the law. In the United States we used ,, gallons of petroleum last year.

It has come into such demand abroad that our exports of it increased from 79,, gallons in , to ,, in It goes all over Europe, and to the far East. The Oriental demand for it is increasing faster than any other. After articles of food, this country has but one export, cotton, more valuable than petroleum. In the United States, in the cities as well as the country, petroleum is the general illuminator. We use more kerosene lamps than Bibles. There are a few places elsewhere that produce rock oil, such as the shales of England, Wales and Scotland, but the oil is so poor that American kerosene, after being carried thousands of miles, can undersell it.

Very few of the forty millions of people in the United States who burn kerosene know that its production, manufacture, and export, its price at home and abroad, have been controlled for years by a single corporation, — the Standard Oil Company. This company began in a partnership, in the early years of the civil war, between Samuel Andrews and John Rockefeller in Cleveland.

Rockefeller had been a bookkeeper in some interior town in Ohio, and had afterwards made a few thousand dollars by keeping a flour store in Cleveland. Andrews had been a day laborer in refineries, and so poor that his wife took in sewing. It has refineries at Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York. Its own acid works, glue factories, hardware stores, and barrel shops supply it with all the accessories it needs in its business.

It has bought land at Indianapolis on which to erect the largest barrel factory in the country. It buys 30, to 40, barrels of crude oil a day, at a price fixed by itself, and makes special contracts with the railroads for the transportation of 13,, to 14,, barrels of oil a year. The four quarters of the globe are partitioned among the members of the Standard combinations. One has the control of the China trade; another that of some country of Europe; another that of the United States.

In New York, you cannot buy oil for East Indian export from the house that has been given the European trade; reciprocally, the East Indian house is not allowed to sell for export to Europe. The Standard produces only one fiftieth or sixtieth of our petroleum, but dictates the price of all, and refines nine tenths.

Circulars are issued at intervals by which the price of oil is fixed for all the cities of the country, except New York, where a little competition survives. Such is the indifference of the Standard Oil Company to railroad charges that the price is made the same for points so far apart as Terre Haute, Chicago, and Keokuk.

There is not to-day a merchant in Chicago, or in any other city in the New England, Western, or Southern States, dealing in kerosene, whose prices are not fixed for him by the Standard. In all cases these prices are graded so that a merchant in one city cannot export to another. Chicago, Cincinnati, or Cleveland is not allowed to supply the tributary towns. That is done by the Standard itself, which runs oil in its own tank cars to all the principal points of distribution. This corporation has driven into bankruptcy, or out of business, or into union with itself, all the petroleum refineries of the country except five in New York, and a few of little consequence in Western Pennsylvania.

Nobody knows how many millions Rockefeller is worth. Current gossip among his business acquaintances in Cleveland puts his income last year at a figure second only, if second at all, to that of Vanderbilt.

His partner, Samuel Andrews, the poor English day laborer, retired years ago with millions. Just who the Standard Oil Company are, exactly what their capital is, and what are their relations to the railroads, nobody knows except in part.

Their officers refused to testify before the supreme court of Pennsylvania, the late New York Railroad Investigating Committee, and a committee of Congress. Their great business capacity would have insured the managers of the Standard success, but the means by which they achieved monopoly was by conspiracy with the railroads.

Commodore Vanderbilt is reported to have said that there was but one man—Rockefeller—who could dictate to him.

Whether or not Vanderbilt said it, Rockefeller did it. The Standard has done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature, except refine it. In its organization was brought before Congress, and referred to a committee. A prominent member of the Standard, not a member of Congress, conducted the farce of inquiry from behind the seat of the chairman.

Another member of the company, who was a member of Congress, came with the financial officer of the company before the committee, and sustained him in his refusal to testify about the organization, its members or its relations with the railroads. The committee has never reported. The facts they suppressed must be hunted out through newspaper articles, memorials from the oil producers and refiners, records of lawsuits, reports of chambers of commerce and of legislative investigating committees, and other miscellaneous sources of information.

The contract is in print by which the Pennsylvania Railroad agreed with the Standard, under the name of the South Improvement Company, to double the freights on oil to everybody, but to repay the Standard one dollar for every barrel of oil it shipped, and one dollar for every barrel any of its competitors shipped. But Rockefeller, the manager of the Standard, was a man who could learn from defeat. He made no more tell-tale contracts that could be printed.

What influences he used to make the railroad managers pliable may probably be guessed from the fact that one quarter of the stock of the Acme Oil Company, a partner in the Standard combination on which heavy monthly dividends are paid, is owned by persons whose names Rockefeller would never reveal, which Mr.

Archbold, the president of the company, said under oath he had not been told, and which the supreme court of Pennsylvania has not yet been able to find out. The Standard succeeded in getting from Mr. Vanderbilt free transportation for its crude oil from the wells in Pennsylvania, one hundred and fifty miles, to the refineries at Cleveland, and back. This stamped out competing refineries at Pittsburg, and created much of the raw material of the riots of July, He has paid it back in rebates millions of dollars, which have enabled it to crush out all competitors, although many of them, like the Octave Oil company and the Titusville refiners, had done all their business over his road till they went into bankruptcy, broken by his contracts with the Standard.

He united with the Erie in a war on the Pennsylvania Railroad, to force it to sell to the standard all its refineries, and the great pipe lines by which the oil, like Croton water in the mains, was carried from the wells to the railroads. He then joined with the Erie and the Pennsylvania in a similar attack on the Baltimore and Ohio, which had to sell out to the Standard. So the Standard obtained the control of all the pipe lines and of the transportation, of everything, in fact as a witness said before the New York Railroad Investigating Committee, except the bodies of the producers.

Vanderbilt began, as did the Erie and Pennsylvania railroad kings, with paying back to the Standard, but to no other shipper, ten per cent of its freight bills. During the war against the Pennsylvania road to make it sell out to the Standard, the New York Central carried oil for less than nothing. Besides the other allowances, Mr. Vanderbilt paid the Standard through its alias, the American Transfer Company, a rebate of thirty-five cents a barrel on all crude oil shipped by it or its competitors.

When the oil producers, whom the Standard had cut off from all access to the world except through it, sought an exit through an out-of-the-way railroad and the Erie Canal, or down the Ohio River hundreds of miles to Huntingdon, thence by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to Richmond, and so to the sea, Mr.

Vanderbilt lowered his rates to the Standard so that it could undersell any one who used these devious routes. When the producers, June, , completed their own tidewater pipe line, miles long, to a junction with the Reading Railroad, obtaining in this way a direct connection with the seaboard, Mr. For ten cents Mr. Vanderbilt hauled for the Standard a barrel weighing pounds over miles, and hauled back the empty cars, at the same time that he charged forty-five cents for hailing a can of milk weighing ninety pounds for sixty miles.

So closely had the Standard octopus gripped itself about Mr. Vanderbilt that even at the outside rates its competitors could not get transportation from him. He allowed the Standard to become the owner of all the oil cars run over his road, and of all his terminal facilities for oil.

When Mr. Vanderbilt was questioned by Mr. Vanderbilt testified positively before the New York Investigating Committee that he knew nothing whatever about the American Transfer Company, its officers, or the payments to it. The Erie shipped only ten cars for outsiders in a whole year, and those were given by mistake. Although a public corporation and a common carrier, the Erie let the Standard sink hundreds of wells on its road-bed, and steal the oil of the neighboring wells.

After promising cars, of which it had hundreds idle, to independent shippers, the Erie withdrew them at the dictation of the Standard. One shipper had 10, barrels of oil brought down to the side of the track by pipe line to be put into cars promised him by the Erie. The agent of the Standard appeared and stopped the shipment. When this shipper told his story, months later, before the New York committee the oil had not been shipped, though meanwhile the market value of oil had gone down thirty per cent.

In giving the Standard special rates, rebates, and the like, the Erie followed the same course as the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads. When the Pennsylvania Railroad began its discriminations against the oil producers, they appealed to President Scott for equal rates with the Standard. At the interview they obtained after repeated solicitations, he answered their petition by recommending them to make a compromise with the Standard Oil Company!

He did not want, he said, to get into any trouble with that concern. He volunteered his personal services to mediate between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Standard. More American than he, they refused the proposed service. He refused to give them transportation or to let them put their own cars on the road, although they had been his heaviest customers in the years when the Standard was an ally of his competitors in one of the fiercest railroad wars ever waged between the trunk lines.

Vanderbilt, Mr. Jewett, and Mr. Vice-President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania, said under oath, in the Pennsylvania suit against his road, that he did not think this special allowance was any violation of the agreement.

But by it, as Mr. Patterson, of Titusville, said before the New York Investigating Committee, the Standard was able to sell refined oil at less than the cost of manufacture, and put its buyings of oil into the field, and crush out the business of any rival, by bidding this twenty-two and a half cents, or part of it, above the price any one not getting this rebate could pay. In the end the rebate came out of the unfortunate producer. After the Standard had used the rebate to crush out the other refiners, who were its competitors in the purchase of petroleum at the wells, it became the only buyer, and dictated the price.

It began by paying more than cost for crude oil, and selling refined oil for less than cost. The reality is a little different.

Yes, the franchise model has been temporarily suspended. But the likes of CrossCountry, First and Abellio will still be running our trains. The only difference is that the government is guaranteeing their income for as long as the coronavirus crisis continues. This is far from the change our railway needs.

And in fact, it shows the fundamental farce at the core of the privatisation project. When business is good, private companies rake in the profits. When business is bad, the government steps in and pays the private companies to keep doing what they're doing.

This is central to the design of privatisation of public services - profits are privatised, while losses are nationalised.

Rather than propping up a failing system through the crisis, the government should instead be bringing the railways into public ownership. Now the private rail companies are failing one after another. This is our chance to take back our railway! Keith Williams is carrying out the biggest review of the railways since Tell the government to put passengers first! We'll hold your data in accordance with our privacy policy and send you carefully chosen information about current and future campaigns, projects and appeals.

You can unsubscribe at any time. You don't get a choice about which train you take. As you're waiting on the railway platform, there's only one route and you can't choose which train company to use. So the idea that you're a 'customer' really doesn't help you as your fares increase, carriages get more crowded and the train companies rake in the profits at your expense. Bring our railway into public ownership now! Grant Shapps and Keith Williams: bring our whole railway into public ownership!

Help us win this campaign and others for people not profit. Branson's Big Bailout Cutout Railways. The treatment isn't working Rail Fare Savings graphic Railways. Latest news. Comments 4 Closed. Popular Newest Oldest. Jul 17, am. Is PTI running a transparent and honest government? Only time will tell! Recommend 0. Jul 17, pm. There is no other person available? Railways make money on the freight component We the people. Jul 18, pm.