Habsburg Railroad Engineers in America

by Henry Blood.

In studying the development of railroads in the Habsburg Empire, I initially had no idea there would be any link between Europe and the United States of America. However, while doing archival research, I learned that in the neighborhood of Meidling in Vienna’s twelfth district there is a bridge, the Philadelphiabrücke. It’s an odd name, very different from the names of other bridges in the city: the Reichsbrücke, the Praterbrücker, the Friedensbrücke. I became even more intrigued when I learned that this bridge was named after a steam locomotive, designed and built in the city of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century, delivered to the Wien-Gloggnitzer Railway in 1838. Beyond the self-centered interest of wanting to know more about what my hometown had to do with railroads in the Habsburg Empire, the evidence of a trade in railroad technology across the Atlantic in the 1830s was worth further examination. The 1830s represent a very early period of modern railroad development, a moment where generally the British reigned supreme in transportation technology. Why were companies in the Habsburg Empire buying locomotives in the United States of America, all the way across the Atlantic, when they were available so much closer to hand just across the English channel? What was attractive about American locomotives? Beyond the transfer of technology, what were the opinions of Habsburg visitors to America, and what did such contact engender?

Before the relationship between the Habsburg Empire and the United States of America developed, Habsburg railroad companies did at first look towards Great Britain as the preeminent railroading nation. Research trips to the rapidly industrializing British Isles had become a kind of established right of passage for privileged civil engineers from the Habsburg monarchy, even before the widespread adoption of railroads. For example, the engineer, Sebastian von Maillard was sent to England in 1795 to study British canal construction in preparation for building of a canal between Vienna and Wiener Neustadt. 2 The planning of the Habsburg Empire’s first railroads followed a similar pattern with a series of visits by engineers in the 1820s and 1830s.

British civil engineering was the standard to emulate. However, in the second half of the 1830s, news across the Atlantic of American railroad advancements became increasingly impressive.

Trade publications from the United States, such as the American Railroad Journal published a series of reports that made waves all the way across the Atlantic beginning  in 1836. 3 Of particular interest were claims that American steam locomotives could tackle steep inclines. Early steam locomotives, those built by the British, were unable to ascend even very mild grades. Their early railroads overcame this problem in two ways. One method necessitated the expensive leveling of track surfaces: cutting, blasting, and tunneling through hills, and filling in valleys. Another option was the use of stationary steam engines placed at troublesome points. These engines would pull trains between different elevations, replicating on land the rhythm of canal transportation between locks already common in Great Britain. The American development of steam locomotives which could climb, if it were true, presented railroad engineers the opportunity to avoid both the expense of extensive track levelling, and the hassle of utilizing stationary steam engines at every mild rise in elevation along a route.

The news of this technological development made an impression on the Habsburg engineer, Matthias Schönerer, who in 1837 was in England in the process of planning the first sections of what would become the Habsburg Empire’s Southern Railway (Südbahn), a line stretching from Vienna to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Tasked with overcoming several Alpine passes, the developments rumored to be occurring in America surrounding climbing locomotives had the potential to drastically lower construction costs and shorten the length of time it took to cross the mountainous route. Boarding a ship from England, Schörnerer arrived in the United States to find out if what had been reported about American locomotives was true. 4

Schönerer’s destination was Philadelphia, which in a few short years had become the center of locomotive manufacturing in the United States, supporting three separate factories. He had come to see one manufacturer in particular, however, the Norris Locomotive Works. It was their engines which were purported to climb grades of up to seven percent. 5 Just outside the city at the Belmont Plateau along the Columbia Railroad, Schörnerer was able to observe Norris Locomotive’s climbing, unassisted, on what had been an incline plane powered by a stationary steam engine. Sufficiently impressed, Schörnerer placed an order for the engine which would be named Philadelphia, and which supplied the name to the bridge I came across in Vienna’s 12th district. However, this is not the end of the story.

Schörnerer’s trip was not isolated. Instead it was the first of at least three high profile journeys by Habsburg engineers to the United States. It initiated a period of transatlantic trade in steam engines that eventually led to the arrival of an American factory in Vienna. The most well documented of these trips was made by Franz Anton von Gerstner and his wife Clara, who between 1838 and 1840 traveled across nearly the entire young republic, visiting almost every state by nearly every means of transportation: train, stage coach, canalboat, steamboat, etc.

The Gerstners’ trip, vastly more ambitious in geographic scale than Schörnerer’s, reflected the differing goals of the different Habsburg engineers. Schörnerer’s remit had been to investigate whether the rumors of the capacities of American locomotives were true, and if so to acquire one. In contrast, Gerstner’s journey was not related to any one specific railroad project. It was rather an attempt to revitalize his career. Having begun a promising profession in railroads in the Habsburg Empire as the lead engineer of the horse drawn Budweis-Linz-Gmunden Railway, Gerstner had been sacked and replaced with his colleague, and former student, Matthias Schönerer.7  Seeking work abroad, Gerstner built the first railway in the Russian Empire, but following similar issues related to financing that he had faced in the Habsburg Empire, Gerstner was out of regular work when he traveled to the United States in 1838. 8 Through his travels in America, Gerstner hoped on the one hand to present himself to the Americans as a seasoned European professional, and on the other to burnish his reputation back in Europe as an expert on railroads in both the Old World and the New.

Franz Anton von Gerstner was remarkably successful in rebooting his career in railroads, filling a niche as a railroad journalist, writing articles in German for publication in Europe in the Allegemeine Preusßsche Staatszeitung, and in English for the American Railroad Journal. 9 Focused not only on the capacities of American locomotives, but on the entirety of the American railroad system, Gerstner’s writings went beyond specific technical data. He pondered the cultural and societal factors he saw underpinning the success of American railroads, and the country more generally. The exploration of American society at the cusp of industrialization was a joint marital project, Clara van Gerstner kept a diary which remarked upon the differences between European and American cultures undergoing rapid change, particularly with regard to race, class, and gender. 10

Railroads allowed the Gerstners the opportunity to think about how European society might adapt elements of the young American republic. Oddly, Franz Anton and Clara commented little on democracy or republicanism. Instead, they focused on education, finance, infrastructure, and culture. The first three for Franz Anton represented a guiding trinity that explained the progress of the American economy. 11 Among these he was most interested in finance. He believed it was Americans’ relatively easy access to capital and credit for railroads, for anything and everything that explained the country’s success. It was his contention that for the Habsburg Empire to flourish, there similarly needed to be vastly larger access to credit, and more lenient policies regarding bankruptcy. Implicitly, this may have implied that his earlier railroad projects would have succeeded in a financial culture similar to the United States.

Clara von Gerstner was similarly fascinated by America during her husband’s train-related travels. She was, however, considerably more critical and wished for fewer elements of America to be adopted in Europe. For example, she found the humanistic education of girls that she observed at the Albany Female Academy in New York state to be at once both high minded, but ill-conceived for a women’s place in society. Better she thought was the religious education she observed of black girls at the Catholic Sisters of Providence in Baltimore. 12 She did at least think gender relations in stage coaches were much better in America than in Europe. Men gave up their seats without asking this side of the Atlantic. However, it was shocking to learn that men did the grocery shopping in Philadelphia, an intrusion into the realm of women in her opinion. A thoroughly class conscious woman, she was impressed at the literacy and industriousness of ordinary Americans, their will to self-improvement. These and other musings facilitated by Franz Anton’s work as railroad journalist were cut short, however, when Clara’s husband died in Philadelphia in 1840.

The final Habsburg railroad engineer to travel to the United States was Carl von Ghega. He traveled in 1842 as part of his preparation for building a state planned railroad system covering the entire empire. While the majority of railroads in the Habsburg Empire had hitherto been built as private ventures, by 1842 members of the government, including figures such as Metternich had concluded that railroads were so important to the future of the empire that state intervention was necessary. 13 Market forces alone were insufficient to develop an imperial rail network. American railroads had developed a reputation in the Habsburg Empire, burnished heavily by Gerstner, and the prior experience of Schönerer. That an engineer building a state run railroad went to America, the land of free enterprise is less strange than it might appear. A number of American railroads at the time for example were state owned. In addition, beyond Gerstner’s promotion of American values surrounding credit, he had stressed American railroad engineers’ ability to build economically. Ghega was impressed particularly with one railroad company in America, the Baltimore and Ohio, writing a book on the business on his return to the Habsburg Empire. 14 While impressed with what he saw in America, Ghega was less of an evangelist of American railroads and values than Gerstner. Instead, he advocated the Habsburg monarchy to be selective in the adoption of American techniques where most applicable rather than a more thorough conversion to American technology and values. 15

The flow of railroading personalities was not entirely unidirectional between the Habsburg Empire and the United States of America. William Norris, the owner of the eponymous Norris Locomotive Factory, moved in 1844 to Vienna to set up his business at the invitation of the Austrian government. It was a second chance for William Norris. His savings had been whipped out by bank failures, and business had been in decline during the American economic depression of the 1840s. 16 There were risks to the American financial system, which Gerstner wished to implement in Europe. Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that Norris factory in Vienna functioned as an assembly plant for machines shipped for the United States. It was a short-term venture, closing down in 1846. 17 Norris’s company had, however, made a mark, Austrian competitors which had gone into business since the Philadelphia had arrived in 1838 were producing locomotives based off of Norris’s own designs. Increasingly towards the end of the 1840s, Habsburg engineers had less need of American expertise, preferring to rely on indigenous designs inspired by Norris, or those of other continental European manufacturers.

Beginning in the late 1830s, Habsburg engineers went to America first to understand why Americans locomotives could tackle inclines better than their more famed British counterparts. Successive journeys investigating American railroads found that there was more than just technical knowledge that was worth adopting. American cultural attitudes towards money, and some limited social values were attractive to privileged members of Habsburg society. When a complex state run imperial network in the Habsburg Empire was planned, the railroads of the United States served as an important model. Many decades before the United States of America became a global industrial powerhouse, its locomotives were attractive to Habsburg engineers to both import and to copy. Early in the development of railroads on the European continent, within a decade of the first modern passenger railroad, Great Britain had competition from the United States of America as a model to follow in the construction of steam engines and railroads.

1. Thomas S. Sinclair, Peter’s Island R.R. Bridge, Lithograph, c. 1842, Library Company of Philadelphia.
2.  David Gwyn, The Coming of the Railway: A New Global History, 1750-1850, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2023), 67.
3. American Railroad Journal, No. 28, Vol. V (July 16, 1836): 433; American Railroad Journal, No. 29, Vol. V (July 23, 1836): 449; American Railroad Journal, No. 30, Vol. V (July 30, 1836): 465.
4. Hermann Strach, Geschichte der Eisenbahnen der Oesterreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie, Band I. (Wien, Karl Prochaska, k.u.k. Hofbuchhandlung & k.u.k. Hofbuchdruckerei, 1898), 167.
5. John H. White Jr., “Once the Greatest of Builders: The Norris Locomotive Works” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 150 (1984): 19.
6. John Casper Wild, VIEW from the INCLINED PLANE, near Philadelphia. Lithograph, c. 1838, Library Company of Philadelphia.
7. Gwyn, The Coming of the Railway, 227.
8. Steven Rowan, introduction to Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, Reports from the United States of North America on railroads, steamship travel, banks and other public undertakings, trans. Steven Rowan, (St. Louis, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2019), 5.
9. American Railway Journal, No. 10, Vol. 1 (November 15, 1838): 297; American Railway Journal, No. 11, Vol. 1 (December 1, 1838): 350-355; American Railway Journal, No. 12, Vol. 1 (December 15, 1838): 377-382; American Railway Journal, No. 11, Vol. 2 (June 1, 1839): 321; American Railway Journal, No. 1, Vol. 3 (July 1, 1839): 1, 4, 5-15; American Railway Journal, No. 2, Vol. 3 (July 15, 1839): 49; American Railway Journal, No. 6, Vol. 3 (September 15, 1839): 161; American Railway Journal, No. 7, Vol. 3 (October 1, 1839): 221; American Railway Journal, No. 9, Vol. 3 (November 1, 1839): 262; American Railway Journal, No. 10, Vol. 3 (November 15, 1839): 296, 301; American Railway Journal, No. 12, Vol. 3 (December 15, 1839): 367; American Railway Journal, No. 1, Vol. 4 (January 1, 1840): 2; American Railway Journal, No. 1, Vol. 5 (January 15, 1840): 38; American Railway Journal, No. 6, Vol. 5 (March 15, 1840): 171.
10. Carla von Gerstner, Beschreibung einer Reise durch die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-America in den Jahren 1838 bis 1840, (Leipzig: Verlag der J. C. Hinrichs’schen Buchhandlung, 1842), 51.
11. Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, Reports from the United States of North America on Railroads, Steamship Travel, Banks and Other Public Enterprises, trans. Steven Rowan (St. Louis, University of Missouri, , 2019), 14.
12. Carla von Gerstner, Beschreibung einer Reise durch die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-America in den Jahren 1838 bis 1840, (Leipzig: Verlag der J. C. Hinrichs’schen Buchhandlung, 1842), 237.
13. Klemens von Metternich, “Die Stellung der Regierung zu den Eisenbahnunternehmungen,” (Metternich an Hofrath Hummerlauer, 3 August 1841) in Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, Band 6, (Wien, Wilhelm Braumüller K.K. Hof- und Unitversitätsbuchhändler, 1883), 525.
14. Carl Ghega, Über die Baltimore-Ohio-Eisenbahn in Nordamerika und die Amerikanischen Lokomotive, (Wien, Kaulfuss Witwe, Prandel & Comp., 1844).
15. Carl Ghega, Über nordamerikanischen Brückenbau und Berechnung des Tragvermögens der Howe’schen Brücken, (Kaulfuss Prandel, Wien 1845), v-vi.
16. John H. White Jr., “Once the Greatest of Builders: The Norris Locomotive Works” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 150 (1984): 22.
17. Hermann Strach, Geschichte der Eisenbahnen der Oesterreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie, Band II. (Wien, Karl Prochaska, k.u.k. Hofbuchhandlung & k.u.k. Hofbuchdruckerei, 1898), 430-431, 446.