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With more than 220 black and white photographs from the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and private collections across the country, this is the essential pictorial guide for all those interested in the role of the Iron Horse in the American Civil War.
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On the morning of May 10, 1869, a gang of Irish immigrants met a party of Chinese laborers on a windy bluff northwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Tired to the bone, the two groups laid down the last of countless wooden ties, bought at the exorbitant cost of six dollars apiece, and thus joined two great rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to form a single transcontinental route. That rail line made possible the mass settlement of the West, and, as those who conceived it well knew, it changed the course of American history.
David Haward Bain's superb narrative of westward rail history, weighing in at 800 pages, ends not with this great achievement but with the political and financial scandal that would almost overshadow it. Along the way Bain looks closely at the entrepreneurial men who foresaw the possibilities of a vast nation joined by a steel ribbon.
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No one nowadays salutes the name of Tom MacDonald, but this road construction czar and federal bureaucrat single-mindedly changed the landscape of the U.S. By the time his 34 years of promoting the automobile ended in 1953, the iron horse was a nag limping into the boneyard, and the designs for U.S. autobahns by MacDonald's Bureau of Public Roads were ready to cut through and wall off cities and interstates, begun in 1956, were just around the corner. The result, traffic jams and railroads living on subsidized life support, is an unsung revolution whose concealed obviousness in the everyday is akin to looking for the nose on one's face: it's there but hard to see. So the triumph of the car calls for an enthusiastic scholar and bard who also sings the dirge for lost railroads. That Goddard is. In the process of disinterring MacDonald and others, he reveals his zest for and immersion in his subject and writes with anecdotal richness about the politics and wastrel economics surrounding the car--and he could have written a second volume on its cultural drawbacks. This will grab the policy-interested reader; the masses stuck in lonely gridlock can listen if it ever becomes an audiobook.
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From the author of the bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a classic account of the building of the transcontinental railroads.
In February 1854 the first railroad from the East reached the Mississippi; by the end of the nineteenth century five major transcontinental railroads linked the East Coast with the Pacific Ocean and thousands of miles of tracks crisscrossed the West, a vast and virginal land just a few years before.
The story of this extraordinary undertaking is one of astonishing technological ingenuity, otherwordly idealism, and all-too-wordly greed. The heroes and villains were Irish and Chinese laborers, intrepid engineers, avaricious bankers, stock manipulators, and corrupt politicians. Before it was over more than 155 million acres (one tenth of the country) were given away to the railroad magnates, Indian tribes were decimated, the buffalo were driven from the Great Plains, millions of immigrants were lured from Europe, and a colossal continental nation was built.
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Why did American railroads decline from the glory days of the early twentieth century? Why did so many railroad mergers in the 1950s and 1960s, intended as a panacea for the ills of an outdated system, go sour and, in fact, make a bad situation worse? Saunders addresses these and many other issues in this authoritative history of U.S. railroads and their corporate mergers.
Beginning with a wide-ranging analysis of the role of railroads in the economic and social fabric of American life, Saunders traces the causes and results of the twentieth century's merger mania. Mergers, he explains, were expected to save money, to improve service to customers, and to help railroads compete against other modes of transportation, such as the growing airline and trucking industries. Saunders then gives colorful, richly detailed accounts of the mergers and shows the reasons?including corporate greed and the inept blundering of government regulatory agencies?the outcomes fell far short of expectations.
Merging Lines explores the impact of shifting political control of railroads as no history has done before. The fates of both workers and railroad companies were dictated by the rise and fall of business and governmental leaders, including Bill Brosnan, Robert R. Young, Alfred Perlman, President John F. Kennedy, and President Lyndon B. Johnson. As power struggles erupted, the original goals of the mergers were thwarted by consumer frustration, violent labor strikes, and organizational collapse. Saunders explores these and other crucial developments in this extensive work, carefully designed for railroad historians and enthusiasts at any level.
Encyclopedic in its scope, Merging Lines includes sixty-eight maps, a list of court cases involving railroad mergers, and a wealth of information on American railroads from coast to coast. An extensively revised, updated, and supplemented edition of Saunders's earlier classic, The Railroad Mergers and the Coming of Conrail (1978), it is essential reading for all who are interested in railroad and transportation history.
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Metropolitan Corridor Author: John R. Stilgoe Publisher: Yale Univ Pr; Reprint edition (August 1985)
Only superlatives can do justice to ... Stilgoe's METROPOLITAN CORRIDOR. It is a physically handsome book whose layout and design subtly compliments and supports Stilgoe's themes.... Stilgoe's engaging and lyrical writing skillfully recreates a visual and psychic imagery that transports us, the reader, back to a time when railroads had a powerful grip on American life and imagination.... A wealth of detail, imagery and imaginative insight made this exploration of a past time and mindset come alive.... It will be welcomed enthusiastically by all devotees of American studies. --Emil Peacock, Material Culture
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Building a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's Big Four--Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford--to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their dreadful vitality figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks.
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