Railroad Policing

Private railroad companies established their own police forces as early as 1847. The construction of railroads contributed to trespassing and thievery and[Page 835] the layouts of rail yards and storage material led to placing value goods distant from established communities, many of which lacked organized police forces. Even in cities that had begun to develop their own police forces after the 1850s and 1860s, railroads were concerned with the safety of passengers and their luggage. After the Civil War, hobos took to rail facilities, setting up squatter camps, traveling at no cost, and often taking whatever they could along the way, and although train robberies occurred throughout the nation, in the years after the 1880s until the turn of the century they became closely associated with banditry in the American West. Railroad police, who were recognized as commissioned police officers in the states and territories in which they worked, cooperated with the few local police, sheriffs, and U.S. Marshals to prevent robberies and then track those who perpetrated them.

In 1847, when the Baltimore & Ohio appointed a railroad police officer to keep order at its Pratt Street Depot in Baltimore, the city had been faced with numerous mob disturbances but did not establish a viable day police force until 1857. In the Midwest, where city building lagged behind the East Coast, railroads traveling out of Chicago were frequent targets of thieves and vandals and almost immediately became the preferred mode of travel for tramps and hobos. Within a year of running its first train in 1854, the Milwaukee Road employed policemen, and in 1855 the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, whose railroad had been in existence only four years, complained about vandals tampering with equipment and noted the need for daily protection. Responding to this need, on February 1, 1855, a number of railroads signed a contract with Allan Pinkerton, who had earned an enviable reputation as a public police officer, a private detective, and a special agent for the Chicago Post Office. Pinkerton established a police agency in Chicago that was devoted to the IC, the Rock Island, the Burlington, the Galena and Chicago Union (later to be incorporated into the Chicago & North Western), and others that eventually became part of the New York Central and Milwaukee Road systems.

The contract establishing the North West Police Agency called for its work to be to the exclusion of other business by Pinkerton. Operating initially with nothing more than citizen's power to arrest, the North West Police Agency was in full swing three months before the Chicago Police Department combined its day and night forces into a 24-hour police operation. Even the development of municipal policing did not help the railroads, because the localized nature of policing prevented city police from protecting the railroads as soon as they left the city's jurisdiction. At a time when local police were fairly new, state police nonexistent, and the federal government weak, railroads were on their own in protecting themselves. Pinkerton understood this and prospered, devoting his personal attention to the railroads until 1860.

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