Landmarks on the Iron Road: Two Centuries of North American Railroad Engineering (Railroads Past and Present)

These spans needed to cross great rivers and deep canyons as well as bear weights unknown to earlier bridges. Bridges until that time were built much as they had been in Roman antiquity; to develop safe load-bearing bridges required much trial and error. It also required vision and experience, and Middleton's text is populated by a cast of brilliant, practical-minded men who figure little in standard histories of westward expansion but who were as important as any explorer or military leader in uniting the country. One such man was Wendel Bollman, a carpenter who developed a patented "suspension and trussed bridge" that was widely used along the Potomac, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers; another was J. E. Schwitzer, who adapted Swiss designs to the daunting conditions of the Rocky Mountains; still another was Theodore Dehone Judah, who built the first railroad along the tortuous California coast.

Middleton celebrates these and other bridge builders and their remarkable creations, many of which are still in use today. His text, illustrated with historic photographs and drawings, will be of much interest to railroad buffs. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description
A lavishly illustrated engineering history of American railroads--bridges, mountain passes, tunnels, freight yards, docks and terminals--from pioneer times to the present.

American civil engineers were unsurpassed in their ability to build railroads over great distances and across high mountain passes, to erect great bridges, or to bore tunnels of prodigious length. There is a remarkable story of the application of engineering to the building of a transportation system that civilized and settled America, and then supported an industrial revolution and created a world power.

Landmarks of the Iron Road is something to be appreciated by civil engineers, railway historians, and those with an concern for the history of North American economic development. It is a careful collection of photographs and essays, supplemented with "how to find" these special locations. Middleton's book constitutes a "landmark" in the literary sense.