The Vehicle of Oppression

It is said that capitalism is the vehicle of oppression. If this is true, then the train must be the vehicle of the vehicle of oppression.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was an outlet of violence, caused by the horrible conditions the men running the trains worked in. Railroad work in 19th century America was a dangerous affair, and considerably more so than that of their British contemporaries. Fatality rates among American railworkers were twice those of British ones, a consequence of a preponderance of freight traffic rather than passenger.(1) Especially in the midsts of economic turmoil, the dangers and low wages of a railroad job were bound to produce discontent.
Workers were not the only ones endangered by trains. Train wrecks were uncomfortably common occurrences, and often made cover stories. For example, and 1876 bridge collapse in Ohio took the lives of 86 passengers.(2) All these mounting deaths would eventually force the federal government to create regulatory legislation. Combined with new technologies like better brakes and couplers, policies like the 1893 Safety Appliance Act would come to drastically decrease fatalities on the rail.(1)

Part of the reason workers were so expendable was the tendency of railroads to hire from immigrants. Among the first such workers were masses of Irish immigrants who served as cheap sources of unskilled labor.(3) Since most arrived in poverty and faced nativist discrimination, they could not choose the sort of jobs they worked. Direct dangers of the railroad were not the only causes of death: poor nutrition and medicine took many worker lives as well. Fear of diseases like cholera compounded by anti-Catholic sentiments often prevented Irish workers from getting the treatment they needed. Eventually, the railroads would serve as a way to move up to a more semiskilled job; workers moving up to better jobs would recruit newly-arrived immigrants to replace them in their old jobs. Eventually, this part of the workforce would come to be Americanized.
On the other side of the coast, railroad work was famously dominated by the Chinese. During work on the Transcontinental Railroad, Leland Stanford told Congress: "A large majority of the white laboring class... find more profitable and congenial employment in mining and agricultural pursuits, than in railroad work."(4) For this reason, the Chinese were more easily hired. Eventually, up to 15,000 Chinese were working on the rails. Wages of Chinese laborers would eventually rise to match those of their white counterparts, but still worked longer hours and had to pay for their own lodging and tools. When Chinese workers did strike in 1867, the nonviolent affair was ended when their supplies were cut off for eight days. For their work on the railroad, the Chinese became subjects of typically discriminatory legislation that segregated schools, prevented immigrants from appearing as witness in court, or becoming naturalized citizens.(5) Such is the way of racism in America.

Yes, this post was made purely for the sake of an elaborate pun. Anything educational about this post is an accident.

Sources:
(1) https://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-workplace-safety-in-the-united-states-1880-1970-2/
(2) http://www.wcrscorp.com/resources/frasafety.pdf
(3) https://hsp.org/sites/default/files/studentreadingimmigrantlaborontherailroads_revised.pdf
(4) http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/faqs/
(5) http://www.class.uh.edu/gl/china1.htm