In the early 1870s the Central Pacific sometimes hooked freight cars with fruit, salmon, and silk and, on their return, with oysters onto passenger trains. By then the Union Pacific demanded that all cars on a passenger train be equipped with air brakes.
Towne to CPH, Feb. 19, 1873, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 5.
By 1891 75 percent to 80 percent of the Northern Pacific freight cars had air brakes.
Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, 130-38, 280-85.
Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails, 114-15.
Fast freight lines also used air brakes.
Mahl to CPH, Jan. 12, 1889, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 47.
Adams to Rastus Ransom, March 26, 1886, UP, PO, OC, vol. 34, ser. 2, r. 29.
White, American Freight Car, 541.
White, American Freight Car, 528, 530, 539, 543-45.
Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails, 114-15.
Henry Cabot Lodge, "A Perilous Business and Its Remedy," North American Review 154 (Feb. 1892): 189-95.
Seung-Wook Kim, Accident Risk and Railroad Worker Compensation: An Historical Study, 1880-1945 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Georgia, 1988), 4-5, 38, 45, 48-49, 50.