Not long after Thomas Edison opened his West Orange laboratory in 1887, he moved a prototype of an electric train, created in Menlo Park, outside the entrance along Main Street.
“He mounted it right outside right in front of the lab complex,” said David Vago, curator at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange. “He thought highly enough of his work to make them the monuments that would most appropriately commemorate his work in front of his lab.”
Vago gave a presentation at the October meeting of the Tri-State Railway Historical Society called “Thomas Edison and the Railroads” in which he discussed the inventor’s lesser-known contributions to the railroad industry.
Edison is best known for inventing the light bulb, phonograph, and the motion picture. But Edison lived at the height of the railroad age and his ingenuity helped spur improvements in train technology. This was work he was proud of as evidence of the prototype that still stands in front of the museum today.
Edison’s first job was working on the Grand Trunk Railroad as a newsboy. It was his job as a railroad telegrapher that would steer him toward a career as an inventor as his first laboratory after graduating Cooper Union was at a telegraph company at his Ward Street factory in Newark.
In the 1880s, while at his Menlo Park laboratory, Edison began tinkering with electricity-powered trains in the 1880s and founded the Electric Railway Company in 1883 and Edison General Electric in 1889.
“Like the lightbulb, Edison didn’t come up with the idea for an electric locomotive — the idea had been around for a while,” Vago said.
This decade, he collaborated with inventor Stephen D. Fields to create the first elevated electric railway for the Chicago Railway Exposition. A notable collaboration was with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad where he designed means of a steam-powered train to pass through the 1.7-mile-long Howard Street tunnel in Baltimore using electricity.
In 1912, Edison tested a battery- powered three-car train along the Erie Railroad’s Orange Branch, according the New York Times. The Orange Branch railroad corridor ran beside his factory and connected to Newark and Jersey City. It became one of the most important industrial lines in New Jersey. Edison storage batteries were widely used in the railroad industry for signal systems and passenger coach lighting.
In 1913, Edison developed prototypes for the battery-powered street car. “They weren’t a big hit,” Vago said. “Reliability was the ultimate deciding factor so very few cities adopted this.”
Even when Edison’s attention turned to motion pictures, the subject of his short experimental films often was the trains, including the Philadelphia Express and Jersey Central, which he filmed passing through Elizabeth. In 1903, one of his first narrative films was The Great Train Robbery, filmed on the Lackawanna Railroad in Essex County. Visitors to the Thomas Edison Historical Park can watch the 12-minute silent film.
“He’s filming what’s in the world around him and he’s in a world of trains,” Vago said.
Vago’s presentation will make you see Edison’s career in a different light and make you notice things inside the museum that may not have stood out on previous visits. For example, in his library, which is open to the public, there is a photograph of the inauguration of electrified trains — for which Edison General Electric provided parts — that the Lackawanna Railroad used from 1930 to 1984. It hangs near photos of his closest friends and dignitaries and the honorary Academy Award he won in 1929.
“This is a place of importance to Edison,” Vago said. “Edison held that moment, the moment that he operated those inaugural trains, in high regard.”
Watch David Vago’s presentation “Thomas Edison and the Railroads.”
