Marketing the Machine Age: Industrial Archaeology and Heritage Tourism in America’s "Rust Belt"
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But what does the contrast between these two sets of features tell us? We could attempt to explain this, and other alterations in roundhouse design which occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by resort to that hackneyed phrase "technological evolution". But this updated gloss on the hopelessly Whiggish notion of "the march of progress" hides more than it reveals. More usefully, we can sketch out the changes in management practices that accompanied the rationalization of business and the search for efficiency as corporations attempted to survive in an increasingly competitive environment.

I would suggest that while the latter approach tells part of the story, it is only a partially corrective. Concerted action by railroad workers, through formal unions or direct action, plagued management. Railroaders proved to be among the most restive segment of the labor force. Even before the rise to prominence of the railroad brotherhoods, the engineers, brakeman and mechanics had demonstrated their determination to challenge management prerogatives. The railroad general strike of 1877, spontaneous and explosive, swept across the continent along the national network of railroad lines. It took massive armed intervention, and the full weight of the federal government, to suppress this first truly national strike. In its wake millions of dollars of railroad property lay a smoldering ruin, and more than one hundred people lay dead. The events of July, 1877, shook gilded age America to the core.

Details of the industrial plant, like the changing pit construction noted here, must be placed within the context of these larger social forces. The struggles for control, both at the point of production and in industrial communities at large, led employers to make concessions which changed the face of the workplace. Sometimes these concessions were wring from reluctant management by organized unions, and sometimes they were introduced in an effort to forestall organization. In either case the evidence of the contentious nature of industrial relations is written in the physical fabric of America’s industrial sites.