front cover of Across the Continent
Across the Continent
The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew Joseph Russell
Daniel Davis
University of Utah Press, 2018

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts

Andrew J. Russell is primarily known as the man who photographed the famous “East and West Shaking Hands” image of the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869. He also took nearly one thousand other images that document almost every aspect of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. Across the Continent is the most detailed study to date of the life and work of an often-overlooked but prolific artist who contributed immensely not only to documentation of the railroad but also to the nation’s visualization of the American West and, earlier, the Civil War.
 
The central focus in the book is on the large body of work Russell produced primarily to satisfy the needs of the Union Pacific. Daniel Davis posits that this set of Russell’s photos is best understood not through one or a handful of individual images, but as a photographic archive. Taken as a whole, that archive shows that Russell intended for viewers never to forget who built the Union Pacific. His images celebrate working people—masons working on bridge foundations, freighters and their wagons, surveyors with their transits, engine crews posed on their engines, as well as tracklayers, laborers, cooks, machinists, carpenters, graders, teamsters, and clerks pushing paper.
 
Russell contributed to a golden age of Western photography that visually introduced the American West to the nation, changing its public image from that of a Great American Desert to a place of apparently unlimited economic potential.
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Alabama Railroads
Wayne Cline
University of Alabama Press, 1997
A comprehensive, illustrated history that shows Alabama's important role in the development of the nation's railroad system
 
Alabama Railroads is the first extensive history of the state’s railway system, from the chartering of the Tuscumbia Railway Company in January 1830, to the maturity of the system in the latter half of the 20th century, when Amtrak assumed control of the nation’s passenger service.
 
Railroads built Alabama. Without them the state’s vast natural resources could not have been developed. Scores of Alabama towns, including the city of Birmingham, owe their existence to the railroads. Moreover, Alabama legislators were instrumental in securing passage of momentous land grant legislation that brought the railroad—and settlers—to every section of the American frontier.
 
During the Civil War, the state’s rail system was a primary objective of Union raiders, and an Alabama rail connection into Chattanooga proved to be a vital key to victory. After the war, the railroad shaped politics and economic development in the state. Indeed, most of the important events of the first 100 years of Alabama history were influenced in a significant manner by the railroad. Alabama Railroads chronicles these events—from land grant legislation and the strategic importance of Alabama’s railroads in the Civil War to the founding of Birmingham and the development of the state’s agricultural, mineral, and timber regions.
 
Wayne Cline traces the development of all the major lines as well as the most prominent short lines, from the day in 1832 when the first horse-drawn cars rolled over primitive tracks at Tuscumbia, to the night in 1971 at Sylacauga when the final operating order was issued for one of the 20th century’s most famous streamliners. Along the way we meet the varied cast of colorful characters who pioneered the railway system that serves the state today. With more than 100 rare and vintage illustrations from the 19th and early 20th centuries, Alabama Railroads places Alabama’s rail heritage in a national context and allows students of southern history as well as railroad enthusiasts to view this Deep South state from an entirely fresh perspective.
 
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American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920
Rates, Wages and Efficiency
K. Austin Kerr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968
This book examines the concern of a variety of interest groups with federal policy toward railroads, concentrating on the crucial years during World War I when the federal government ran the industry, and prior to the passage of the Transportation Act of 1920. Through extensive archival research, James A. Kerr describes the political dealings among those involved in railroad-government relations: labor leaders; shippers; railroad executives; and financiers; and analyzes the motivations that influenced policymaking.
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American Railroads
John F. Stover
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Few scenes capture the American experience so eloquently as that of a lonely train chugging across the vastness of the Great Plains, or snaking through tortuous high mountain passes. Although this vision was eclipsed for a time by the rise of air travel and trucking, railroads have enjoyed a rebirth in recent years as profitable freight carriers.

A fascinating account of the rise, decline, and rebirth of railroads in the United States, John F. Stover's American Railroads traces their history from the first lines that helped eastern seaports capture western markets to today's newly revitalized industry. Stover describes the growth of the railroads' monopoly, with the consequent need for state and federal regulations; relates the vital part played by the railroads during the Civil War and the two World Wars; and charts the railroads' decline due to the advent of air travel and trucking during the 1950s.

In two new chapters, Stover recounts the remarkable recovery of the railroads, along with other pivotal events of the industry's recent history. During the 1960s declining passenger traffic and excessive federal regulation led to the federally-financed creation of Amtrak to revive passenger service and Conrail to provide freight service on bankrupt northeastern railroads. The real savior for the railroads, though, proved to be the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which brought prosperity to rail freight carriers by substantially deregulating the industry. By 1995, renewed railroad freight traffic had reached nearly twice its former peak in 1944.

Bringing both a seasoned eye and new insights to bear on one of the most American of industries, Stover has produced the definitive history of railroads in the United States.
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American Railroads
Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century
Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer
Harvard University Press, 2014

Once an icon of American industry, railroads fell into a long decline beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. Overburdened with regulation and often displaced by barge traffic on government-maintained waterways, trucking on interstate highways, and jet aviation, railroads measured their misfortune in lost market share, abandoned track, bankruptcies, and unemployment. Today, however, as Robert Gallamore and John Meyer demonstrate, rail transportation is reviving, rescued by new sources of traffic and advanced technology, as well as less onerous bureaucracy.

In 1970, Congress responded to the industry's plight by consolidating most passenger rail service nationwide into Amtrak. But private-sector freight service was left to succeed or fail on its own. The renaissance in freight traffic began in 1980 with the Staggers Rail Act, which allowed railroad companies to contract with customers for services and granted freedom to set most rates based on market supply and demand. Railroads found new business hauling low-sulfur coal and grain long distances in redesigned freight cars, while double-stacked container cars moved a growing volume of both international and domestic goods. Today, trains have smaller crews, operate over better track, and are longer and heavier than ever before.

Near the end of the twentieth century, after several difficult but important mergers, privately owned railroads increased their investments in safe, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly freight transportation. American Railroads tells a riveting story about how this crucial U.S. industry managed to turn itself around.

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An Anthropology of the Machine
Tokyo's Commuter Train Network
Michael Fisch
University of Chicago Press, 2018
With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine, Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities.
 
An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population. 
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Bonds of Enterprise
John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age
John Lauritz Larson
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Bonds of Enterprise uses the life of railroad entrepreneur John Murray Forbes to explore the shift from antebellum merchant capitalism to late ninetieth-century corporate capitalism, the rise of big business, technological innovations, farmer agitation for railroad rate control, and the process of government regulations. Forbes started off his business life as a China trader in the 1830s, returned to the States in time to surmount the Panic of 1837, and then—deciding that railroad construction should be based on existing settlement and traffic systems rather than speculative ambitions—became a master builder, beginning with the Michigan Central Railroad and ending with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system and the growth of Chicago as a railroad hub. Focusing on Forbes’s life allows Larson to elaborate on the contest of wills between eastern capitalists and Midwestern boosters and the complex patterns of regional growth, particularly in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Nebraska.
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The Born in the Spring
A Collection of Spring Wildflowers
June Carver Roberts
Ohio University Press, 2024
A must for flower and art lovers, Born in the Spring is a unique collection of line drawings and magnificent watercolors of spring wildflowers. All of the drawings and paintings were done from living plants, in minute detail, with complete botanical accuracy. There are over 90 illustrations, 46 of which are in full color. The text accompanying each plate enables the reader to easily locate the flower in its natural setting. The text also includes the origins of the common and botanical names, and bits of history and lore connected with the flowers. Some are hardy aliens that have come from all over the world, while others are fragile natives described by the earliest settlers; some are now becoming rare.
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Bound by Steel and Stone
The Colorado-Kansas Railway and the Frontier of Enterprise in Colorado, 1890-1960
J. Bradford Bowers
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Bound by Steel and Stone analyzes the Colorado-Kansas Railway through the economic enterprise in the American West in the decades after the supposed 1890 closing of the frontier. In it, J. Bradford Bowers weaves a tale of reinvention against the backdrop of the newly settled West, showing how the railway survived in one form or another for nearly fifty years, overcoming competition from other railroads, a limited revenue base, and even more limited capital financing.
 
Offering the Colorado-Kansas Railway as an example of how shortline railroads helped to integrate the rural landscape with the larger urban and economic world, Bowers reveals the constant adaptations driven by changing economic forces and conditions. He puts the railway in context of the wider environmental and political landscapes, the growing quarrying and mining business, the expansion of agriculture and irrigation, Progressive-era political reforms, and land development. In the new frontier of enterprise in the early twentieth-century American West, the railroad highlights the successes and failures of the men inspired to pursue these new opportunities as well as the story of one woman who held these fragile industries together well into the second half of the twentieth century.
 
Bound by Steel and Stone is an insightful addition to the history of industrialization and economic development in Colorado and the American West.
 
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British-Owned Railways in Argentina
Their Effect on the Growth of Economic Nationalism, 1854-1948
By Winthrop R. Wright
University of Texas Press, 1974

During the nineteenth century, British-owned railways grew under the protection of an Argentine ruling elite that considered railways both instruments and symbols of progress. Under this program of support for foreign enterprise, Argentina had by 1914 built the largest railway network in Latin America.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the railways were successful in following a policy of calculated disregard for Argentine interests in general. However, following the end of World War I, the British economic empire began to decline and Argentine economic nationalism grew. A number of popularistic political movements incorporated economic nationalism into their platforms, and even among the ruling elite there were signs of increasing nationalistic sentiment.

Although most studies of economic nationalism have emphasized the importance of the middle-class Radical party in the rise of xenophobia, Winthrop R. Wright's study shows that antiforeign economic nationalism was not entirely a reaction to the conservative elite. Between 1932 and 1938 the nationalistic programs of General Agustin Justo's government—basically a conservative regime—led the British interests to decide to sell their holdings. The British govemment had arrived at a position of supporting the economic withdrawal of the large British-owned firms long before Juan D. Perón appeared on the political scene.

Perón combined traditional Argentine economic nationalism with his own scheme to gain power over all elements in Argentina. His solution to the railway problem, although more dramatically executed, did not differ greatly from that of the conservative Justo. Perón purchased the railways outright in 1947–1948, but his use of nationalism was in reality covering his own inability to outbargain Britain and the United States following the conclusion of World War II.

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Brotherhoods of Color
Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality
Eric Arnesen
Harvard University Press, 2001

From the time the first tracks were laid in the early nineteenth century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Eric Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution—the story of African Americans on the railroad.

African Americans have been a part of the railroad from its inception, but today they are largely remembered as Pullman porters and track layers. The real history is far richer, a tale of endless struggle, perseverance, and partial victory. In a sweeping narrative, Arnesen re-creates the heroic efforts by black locomotive firemen, brakemen, porters, dining car waiters, and redcaps to fight a pervasive system of racism and job discrimination fostered by their employers, white co-workers, and the unions that legally represented them even while barring them from membership.

Decades before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, black railroaders forged their own brand of civil rights activism, organizing their own associations, challenging white trade unions, and pursuing legal redress through state and federal courts. In recapturing black railroaders' voices, aspirations, and challenges, Arnesen helps to recast the history of black protest and American labor in the twentieth century.

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Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England
Michael J. Connolly
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In this engaging new study, Michael J. Connolly seeks to understand the interrelationships among political change, economic interests, and railroad development in northern New England prior to the Civil War. He analyzes the political thought of the region as it involved the growth of party confrontations—among the Radical Democrats in New Hampshire, the Whigs and Conservative Democrats in New Hampshire, and the Whigs in Essex County, Massachusetts—and the rise of voting activity. An assortment of antebellum demographic data on the various railroad lines is made clear by the maps in the book.
New England was an older region with settled patterns of political economy, and innovations like the railroad forced antebellum citizens to alter their patterns of life. Jacksonian Democrats debated among themselves the wisdom of railroad technology, its influence on political power, and its effect on regional economies, remaining skeptical about how this invention would improve their lives. They voiced serious concern that railroads would shrink private rights and destroy the existing “liberal capitalist” economy, all the while making northern New Englanders the minions of business interests far away in Boston and Canada. These concerns separated them from the Whigs.
Whigs remained ebullient over how railroads would transform their political and economic lives, improve the lot of every New Englander in the long run, and rescue a dying region from social oblivion. They believed that danger came in not developing railroads. Whigs were willing to extend public power to a remarkable extent: bridges were destroyed, courthouses demolished, land and buildings taken to make way for railroads. Less sophisticated in economic understanding than the Jacksonians, Whigs never worried over “illiberal capitalism”; they welcomed it. The great consensus between Jacksonians and Whigs was capitalism. No one opposed markets.
The antebellum conflict was not about whether America should be a market society, but what shape those markets should take; not about whether government should have power over private rights, but to what extent states could impose on private citizens. At the center of this debate was the railroad.
Providing an excellent view of the economics of railroad development and how it affected the factory and farm world of northern New England, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England makes a major contribution to our full understanding of the coming of the Civil War.
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Chicagoland
City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age
Ann Durkin Keating
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Formed by images of crowded city streets and towering skyscrapers, our understanding of nineteenth-century Chicago completely neglects the fact that the city itself was only the center of a web of neighborhoods, farm communities, and industrial towns—many connected to the city by the railroad. Farmers used trains to transport produce into the city daily; businessmen rode the rails home to their commuter suburbs; and families took vacations mere miles outside the Loop.

Historian and coeditor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Chicago, Ann Durkin Keating resurrects for us here the bustling network that defined greater Chicagoland. Taking a new approach to the history of the city, Keating shifts the focus to the landscapes and built environments of the metropolitan region. Organized by four categories of settlements-farm centers, industrial towns, commuter suburbs, and recreational and institutional centers-that framed the city, Chicagoland offers the collective history of 230 neighborhoods and communities, the people who built them, and the structures they left behind that still stand today.

Keating reanimates nineteenth-century Chicagoland with more than a hundred photographs and maps; we find here the taverns, depots, and way stations that were the hubs of the region's vibrant, mobile life. Keating also includes an appendix of driving tours so readers can see this history for themselves. Chicagoland takes us into the buildings and sites that are still part of our landscape and repopulates them with the stories and characters behind their creation. The result is a wide-angle historical view of Chicago, an entirely new way to understand the region.
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Constructing Iron Europe
Transnationalism and Railways in the Interbellum
Irene Anastasiadou
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Although the years between the world wars were ones of diplomatic tension in Europe, they also saw the construction of countless miles of international railroads on the continent. In Constructing Iron Europe, Irene Anastasiadou examines this era of railroad building and argues that, contrary to most conventional histories—which view railroad building as an aspect of nation- or empire-building—the construction in this era was deliberately transnational, and ultimately aimed at tightening links between nations and constructing a closer-knit European community.
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Corridors
Passages of Modernity
Roger Luckhurst
Reaktion Books, 2019
We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infrastructure rather than architecture.

This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the “corridors of power,” bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.
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The Depletion Myth
A History of Railroad Use of Timber
Sherry H. Olson
Harvard University Press, 1971
Sherry Olson traces the timber conversation issue over the full term of evolution of forestry consciousness in America, giving new prominence to the role of industrial consumers in adjusting the use pattern of a major resource. In its preoccupation with growing wood the Forest Service underestimated the ability of consumers to reduce their use of timber. Olson attributes this mistake to confusion of the economic facts of supply and demand with physical facts of production and consumption. This distinction, she believes, could be applied with profit to current problems of resource management.
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Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism
Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age
Thomas C. Owen
Harvard University Press, 2005

Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow’s first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly illuminates the life and world of this seminal figure in early Russian capitalism.

Chizhov condemned European capitalism as detrimental to the ideal of community and the well-being of workers and peasants. In his strategy of economic nationalism, Chizhov sought to motivate merchants to undertake new forms of corporate enterprise without undermining ethnic Russian culture. He faced numerous obstacles, from the lack of domestic investment capital to the shortage of enlightened entrepreneurial talent. But he reserved his harshest criticism for the tsarist ministers, whose incompetence and prejudice against private entrepreneurship proved his greatest hindrance.

Richly documented from Chizhov’s detailed diary, this work offers an insightful exploration of the institutional impediments to capitalism and the rule of law that plagued the tsarist empire and continue to bedevil post-Soviet Russia.

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The Dragon and the Iron Horse
The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876-1937
Ralph William Huenemann
Harvard University Press, 1984

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Electric Railways
1880-1990
Michael C. Duffy
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
Electric Railways 1880-1990 explores the history of the integration of both electric and diesel-electric railway systems and identifies the crucial role that diesel-electric traction played in the development of wireless electrification. The evolution of electrical technology and the modern railway produced innovations in engineering that were integral to the development of traction, power and signalling systems. This book presents a thorough survey of electric railway development from the earliest days pf the London Underground to modern electrified main line trains. The distinction between 'enforced electrification' and 'economic electrification' is also discussed and the pioneering role of J.J. Heilmann assessed.
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Field Life
Science in the American West during the Railroad Era
Jeremy Vetter
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Winner, 2018 HSA Phillip J. Pauly Prize

Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded.

Four distinct modes of field practice, which were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them. Using two diverse case studies to animate each mode of practice, as well as the making of the field as a place for science, Field Life combines textured analysis of specific examples of field science on the ground with wider discussion of the commonalities in the practices of a diverse array of field sciences, including the earth and physical sciences, the life and agricultural sciences, and the human sciences.

By situating science in its regional environmental context, Field Life  analyzes the intersection between the cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the experiential knowledge of people living in the field. Examples of field science in the Plains and Rockies range widely: geological surveys and weather observing networks,  quarries to uncover dinosaur fossils and archaeological remains, and branch agricultural experiment stations and mountain biological field stations.
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The Fishing Line
A History of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 2018
With roots in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad—nicknamed “The Fishing Line” for its connections to attractive Michigan tourist areas—was organized in the mid–nineteenth century to take advantage of the lucrative logging business of the vast forests of the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan and other potential freight traffic. Once built into northern Michigan, it had an important role in developing the region’s tourist industry. Financed and built by officials of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad system, the GR&I eventually was merged into that company. Using a plethora of newspapers, public documents, and other primary source materials, Meints has crafted an engaging narrative that is easily accessible to the lay reader as well as specialists in railroad and local history. Tracing a thorough corporate history of a fascinating but little-known regional line from its beginning through the early twentieth century, The Fishing Line: A History of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad is a must-read.

 
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The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828
Thomas Abernethy, with an introduction by David T. Morgan
University of Alabama Press, 1995

The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828 is a beautifully crafted history of the evolution of the state written by Thomas Perkins Abernethy in 1922. The work shows how Alabama grew out of the Mississippi Territory and discusses the economic and political development during the years just before and just after Alabama became a state.

Abernethy’s story begins when Alabama existed as the eastern part of the Mississippi Territory, settled primarily by Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks, a few traders, and some brave but foolhardy “squatters” who thought to supplant the Indians and carve out a home for themselves and their descendants from Indian territory. Friction with the Creeks escalated into war and, with their defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the successful move began to wrest land from the Indians for white settlement. The availability of good land, the promise of transportation of goods along the waterways, and the opening of the Federal Road brought rapid population growth to an area blessed (and cursed) with forceful leaders. Abernethy describes in detail the political maneuverings and economic strangleholds that created territorial division and turmoil in the early days of Alabama’s statehood.
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GENERATION OF BOOMERS
Shelton Stromquist
University of Illinois Press, 2000
"'Boomer' railroad men have a cherished place in the popular imagination. Although the romance of their vocations and the itinerancy of their lives have been exaggerated, the term ‘Boomer' fittingly characterizes a significant portion of the generation of workers that built and operated the railroads during the expansive years of the late nineteenth century. There are numerous excellent accounts of the major railroad strikes for this period. There is also a rich literature of local studies that focus primarily on changes in working class culture and community in a variety of industrial settings. But we lack a framework for integrating the local analysis of social and cultural patterns with changes in the political economy of nineteenth-century American capitalism, and we lack an analysis of strikes that locates episodes within broader patterns of emerging class conflict. This volume is an attempt to build such a larger framework."
 
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Getting There
The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century
Stephen B. Goddard
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"A readable and concise overview of how U.S. transportation came to its present pass. . . . Goddard is at his best when recounting the complex and interesting history of what has come to be called 'the highway lobby.'. . . An excellent book for the general reader with an interest in getting around."—Larry Fish, Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is a riveting story: of mighty railroads hamstrung almost overnight by government bureaucrats; of road interests led by General Motors Corp. conspiring in city after city to destroy efficient trolley systems . . . and of freeways that are far from free."—Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press

"The combination of forces and fates that turned America into a giant parking lot from sea to shining sea is the subject of Stephen B. Goddard's lively pop history. . . . As Mr. Goddard ably points out, road-building and the creation of car-dependent suburbs have become ends in themselves."—James Howard Kunstler, Wall Street Journal

"The strength of Goddard's book is that he understands the complexities of manipulating public opinion to influence legislatures."—David Young, Chicago Tribune

"[Goddard's] book is a deft and easily read history of how transportation has shaped the nation and its economy, and ultimately, how a federation of truck and car interests drastically tilted national policies. . . . For many reasons this is an exceptionally important work."—Jim Dwyer, New York Newsday
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Goin' Railroading
Two Generations of Colorado Stories
Margaret Coel
University Press of Colorado, 1998
As America, carried along by the expanding rail system, moved westward in the nineteenth century, few occupations seemed more exciting or romantic than that of railroad engineer. And in the mountains and plains of the West, long hours, backbreaking labor, bitter temperatures, and faulty brakes were the crucible in which the best of the early railroaders were formed: only the most dedicated and skilled men passed the tests the narrow-gauge lines of Colorado meted out.

Goin' Railroading is the story of two generations of such men, four members of the Speas family who, from the open cabs of narrow-gauge steam engines, watched Colorado grow.

Sam Speas tells the story of his father, Sam Speas Sr., who left Missouri in 1883 to become an engineer in Colorado, and recounts his own experiences and those of his brothers and fellow railroaders on the Colorado and Southern Railway, from the golden era of the narrow-gauge lines in South Park to the final days of steam power on the Front Range and the coming of the diesel engine.

His stories are a profound document of a vanished way of life, a testament to the courage and tenacity of the early citizens of Colorado, and a tribute to the rough-hewn, often gallant men who took the trains through incredible, almost unbelievable, hazards. Funny, tragic, bittersweet, and poignant, Goin' Railroading is a remarkable book that brings a portion of the history and people of an earlier Colorado to vibrant life.

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Grand Trunk Corporation
Canadian National Railways in the United States, 1971-1992
Don L. Hofsommer
Michigan State University Press, 1995

The Detroit, Michigan-based Grand Trunk Corporation was established more than two decades ago by Canadian National to oversee and maximize the potential of its railroad holdings in the United States. By making use of corporate records, oral histories, and archival material, Hofsommer uncovers the interesting and complex history of Grand Trunk from its inception in 1971 through 1992.
 

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The Great Machines
Poems and Songs from the Age of the American Railroad
Robert Hedin
University of Iowa Press, 1996

Here, for the first time, is a feast for anyone who has ever been beguiled by the trains that formerly thrummed through the landscapes of our lives. This entertaining and evocative anthology presents the amazing variety of poems and songs written about the American railroad in the last century and a half. Comprised of selections from both oral and written traditions, the volume celebrates the historical and cultural significance of this marvel of engineering skills. Hedin's anthology allows all readers, from the most avid railroad buff to anyone who has fond memories of train travel, to enjoy the romance of trains.

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The Great Strikes of 1877
Edited by David O. Stowell
University of Illinois Press, 2007

A spectacular example of collective protest, the Great Strike of 1877--actually a sequence of related actions--was America's first national strike and the first major strike against the railroad industry. In some places, non-railroad workers also abandoned city businesses, creating one of the nation's first general strikes. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers, the Great Strikes of 1877 transformed the nation's political landscape, shifting the primary political focus from Reconstruction to labor, capital, and the changing role of the state. 

Probing essays by distinguished historians explore the social, political, regional, and ethnic landscape of the Great Strikes of 1877: long-term effects on state militias and national guard units; ethnic and class characterization of strikers; pictorial representations of poor laborers in the press; organizational strategies employed by railroad workers; participation by blacks; violence against Chinese immigrants; and the developing tension between capitalism and racial equality in the United States. 

Contributors: Joshua Brown, Steven J. Hoffman, Michael Kazin, David Miller, Richard Schneirov, David O. Stowell, and Shelton Stromquist.

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Gulf To Rockies
The Heritage of the Fort Worth and Denver–Colorado and Southern Railways, 1861–1898
By Richard C. Overton
University of Texas Press, 1953

Gulf to Rockies is a chapter in the business and economic history of the American West and the story of two of the most colorful railroad builders of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 1860s the mineral treasures of Colorado were virtually inaccessible for lack of railroads. Even after a hectic decade of building in the 1870s, the state faced a new sort of isolation: every railroad crossing her borders was controlled by the Union Pacific or the Santa Fe. As a result, the Rocky Mountain region could not hope to compete with the Midwest for the business of the Atlantic seaboard.

To remedy this situation, John Evans, former governor of Colorado, organized in 1881 a railroad to run southward from Denver as the first link in a cheap rail-water route via the Gulf of Mexico to the East. Meanwhile ambitious Fort Worth citizens had incorporated the Fort Worth and Denver City in 1873. Not a rail was laid on either road, however, until General Grenville M. Dodge, famed builder of the Union Pacific and the Texas Pacific, took up the Texas project and joined forces with Evans to create the Gulf-to-Rockies route.

It took seven years for these men and their associates to mobilize funds and complete the Fort Worth–Denver line, and another decade to establish the system’s independence and solve its financial problems in the face of drought, depression, and intense competition.

Gulf to Rockies was written under special agreements with Northwestern University and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, whereby the university relieved Mr. Overton of a part of his duties in order that he might have time for research and writing and the railroad undertook to bear the cost of the research. The Burlington also permitted him free access to all company records and granted him unrestricted freedom to publish his findings.

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A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps
Jeremy Black
University of Chicago Press, 2024

The first international history of railroads and railroad infrastructure told through stunningly reproduced maps.

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consume and consult.

Featuring full-color maps primarily from the British Library's distinguished collection—many of them never before published—A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is the first international history of railroads and railroad infrastructure told through maps. Jeremy Black includes examples from six continents, spanning a variety of uses from railroad planning and operations to guides for passengers, shippers, and tourists.

Arranged chronologically, the maps are accompanied by explanatory text that sheds light on the political, military, and urban development histories associated with the spread of railroads. A final chapter considers railroad maps from games, books, and other cultural artifacts. For anyone interested in the history of railroads or maps, A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps will offer new and unexpected insights into their intertwined global history.

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The Hocking Valley Railway
Edward H. Miller
Ohio University Press, 2024
The Hocking Valley Railway was once Ohio’s longest intrastate rail line, filled with a seemingly endless string of coal trains. Although coal was the main business, the railroad also carried iron and salt. Despite the fact that the Hocking Valley was such a large railroad, with a huge economic and social impact, very little is known about it. The Hocking Valley Railway traces the journey of a company that began in 1867 as the Columbus & Hocking Valley, built to haul coal from Athens to Columbus. Extensions of the line and consolidation of several branches ultimately created the Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo. This was a 345-mile railway, extending from the Lake Erie port of Toledo through Columbus and on to the Ohio River port of Pomeroy. The history of the Hocking Valley, like that of other railroads, is one of boom times and depression. By the 1920s, the Hocking coalfields were largely depleted, and the mass of track south of Columbus became a backwater, while the Toledo Division boomed. The corporate name has been gone for more than three-quarters of a century, but the Hocking Valley lives on as an integral part of railroad successor CSX. The Hocking Valley Railway, complete with 150 photographs and illustrations, also documents a historic transformation in midwestern transportation from slow canalboats to fast passenger trains. Historians and railroad enthusiasts will find much to savor in the story of this ever-changing company and the managers who ran it.
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Iowa Railroads
The Essays of Frank P. Donovan, Jr.
H. Roger Grant
University of Iowa Press, 2000

What began as a study of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway stretched into more than a dozen contributions on Hawkeye state railroad topics. By 1969 Donovan had examined Iowa's “Little Three”: Chicago Great Western, Illinois Central, and Minneapolis & St. Paul as well as the state's “Big Four”: Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific; and Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific. In addition to these seven core carriers, Donovan covered the state's less prominent railroads: Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; Great Northern; and Union Pacific and Wabash. Moreover, he contributed an issue on Iowa's principal interurbans, most of which survived into the 1950s as electric-powered freight-only short lines. In uniting Donovan's articles into a single volume, Iowa Railroads provides the most complete history of Iowa's rail heritage.

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Iron Horse Imperialism
The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880-1951
Daniel Lewis
University of Arizona Press, 2008
The Southern Pacific of Mexico was a U.S.–owned railroad that operated between 1898 and 1951, running from the Sonoran town of Nogales, just across the border from Arizona, to the city of Guadalajara, stopping at several northwestern cities and port towns along the way. Owned by the Southern Pacific Company, which operated a highly profitable railroad system north of the border, the SP de Mex transported millions of passengers as well as millions of tons of freight over the years, both within Mexico and across its northern border. However, as Daniel Lewis discloses in this thoroughly researched investigation of the railroad, it rarely turned a profit. So why, Lewis wonders, did a savvy, money-minded U.S. corporation continue to operate the railroad until it was nationalized by the Mexican government more than a half-century after it was constructed? Iron Horse Imperialism reveals that the relationship between the Mexican government and the Southern Pacific Company was a complex one, complicated by Mexico’s defeat by U.S. forces in the mid-nineteenth century and by SP’s failure to understand that it was conducting business in a country whose leaders were ambivalent about its presence. Lewis contends that SP executives, urged on by the media of the day, operated with a reflexive imperialism that kept the company committed to the railroad long after it ceased to make business sense. Incorporating information discovered in both Mexican and American archives, some of which was previously unavailable to researchers, this comprehensive book deftly describes the complicated, decades-long dance between oblivious U.S. entrepreneurs and wary Mexican officials. It is a fascinating story.
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John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad
Mary Sharp
Michigan State University Press, 2016
John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad provides a look at the principles and personal values that guided John H. Burdakin through a long, successful career as a top manager at three railroads—the Pennsylvania, the Penn Central, and finally the Grand Trunk Western, where he was president of the regional carrier from 1974 to 1986. The book, written from interviews with Burdakin before his death in 2014, gives real-life examples of how Burdakin’s management principles and personal qualities helped him solve labor- management problems, update railroad technology, protect worker safety, and improve employee morale while managing a four thousand–person workforce. It introduces colorful characters who were involved in American railroads, as well as the serious, life-threatening issues that confronted railroads in the last half of the twentieth century in America. This book will provide insights for managers of any business as well as for those seeking to balance a successful career and a rewarding home life.
 
 
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John H. Burdakin
Railroader
Don L. Hofsommer
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Genuinely talented and successful managers in any field—business, government, military, academia—are scarce. John Howard Burdakin was a happy exception to the norm. This engaging biography examines Burdakin’s life in the railroad industry—at Pennsylvania Railroad, Penn Central, and finally at Grand Trunk Corporation—during a tumultuous time in the transportation business and underscores his core principles and how he employed them in the management of people and property. Some contemporary observers may consider Burdakin’s often conservative style as quite out of date, but a more sober assessment reveals that his approach has utility in any time and in any field. An excellent resource for leadership professionals, this study focuses on Burdakin’s career in management, ever stressing his foundational convictions—how he came by them, how he employed those principles as a manager, and how they were understood by those who worked for him or with him. Through teamwork, trust, hard work, honesty, diligence, and integrity, Burdakin would become respected as one of the railroad industry’s brightest guiding lights.
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Last Train to Auschwitz
The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability
Sarah Federman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism. However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to death camps. Sarah Federman delves into the interconnected roles—perpetrator, victim, and hero—the company took on during the harrowing years of the Holocaust.

Grounded in history and case law, Last Train to Auschwitz traces the SNCF’s journey toward accountability in France and the United States, culminating in a multimillion-dollar settlement paid by the French government on behalf of the railways.The poignant and informative testimonies of survivors illuminate the long-term effects of the railroad’s impact on individuals, leading the company to make overdue amends. In a time when corporations are increasingly granted the same rights as people, Federman’s detailed account demonstrates the obligations businesses have to atone for aiding and abetting governments in committing atrocities. This volume highlights the necessity of corporate integrity and will be essential reading for those called to engage in the difficult work of responding to past harms.
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The Little Man with the Long Shadow
George S. Mills
University of Iowa Press, 1988

 Frederick M. Hubbell, railroad financier and builder, real estate investor, public utilities magnate, leading lawyer, and founder of Iowa’s first life insurance company, the Equitable, was at one time the wealthiest Iowan in the state’s history. Based on his diaries from 1855 to 1927, The Little Man with the Long Shadow tells the story of this industrious and imaginative entrepreneur.

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Living in the Depot
The Two-Story Railroad Station
H. Roger Grant
University of Iowa Press, 1997

At the heart of this excellent book are the striking and rare postcards that provide a comprehensive visual review of this popular building type from coast to coast. Over 150 illustrations feature the gingerbread structures of the Northeast, the simple buildings of the Gold Rush West, and the mission-style stations of the Southwest in this first book to concentrate on this overlooked aspect of railroad history.

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Long Steel Rail
Norm Cohen
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Impeccable scholarship and lavish illustration mark this landmark study of American railroad folksong. Norm Cohen provides a sweeping discussion of the human aspects of railroad history, railroad folklore, and the evolution of the American folksong. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of eighty-five songs, from "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" to "Hell-Bound Train" and "Casey Jones," with their music, sources, history, variations, and discographies. A substantial new introduction updates this edition.
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Michigan Railroads & Railroad Companies
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 1992

Michigan Railroads and Railroad Companies is an invaluable reference manual for everyone interested in regional transportation history, the history of railroading, and Michigan history in general. It contains complete, cross-referenced listings for every company formed to operate a railroad in the state of Michigan. In addition to the comprehensive entries for major lines, Graydon Meints has included details about the many small, common-carrier steam and electric companies, logging roads, and numerous other primitive and contemporary rail systems. This encyclopedic reference guide also contains information on the so-called "paper railroads," companies that were projected but which never laid a foot of track.  
     Michigan Railroads is divided into three parts. One includes alphabetical entries for the actual and intended railroad companies themselves, the date and purpose for their organization, and a brief history from their origins to their dispositions. Included in this portion of the work are a number of railroad "family trees" showing the corporate antecedents of the largest of the rail lines operating in the state today. Another contains a chronology of significant corporate events; it works as a useful finding aid for accessing source data contained in the first section. A third contains a statewide county-by-county listing of railroads, both paper and real.

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Michigan Railway Company
The Northern and Southern Divisions
Norman L. Krentel
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Michigan Railway Company: The Northern and Southern Divisions, the first comprehensive history of the Michigan United Railway Company, traces the rise and fall of Michigan’s most significant electric railway. This volume covers the company’s founding in local rail-based public transportation systems in Lansing, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Owosso-Corunna and ends with its eventual demise, abandoned prior to the stock market crash of 1929. Norman L. Krentel follows the fragments of lines in lower Michigan, which came together to form the MUR. He examines the interurban lines, which were broken down into five divisions, each with a separate superintendent. These divisions were Northern and Southern, which had formerly been Michigan United Railways; Northwestern, which had been Grand Rapids, Holland, and Chicago Railway; Western; and Northeastern. 
This also explores how electric railway history is intertwined with the state of Michigan. The interurban electric rail system supported automobile manufacturing, allowing for the shipment of parts supplies, and finished automobiles through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Major auto plants like REO and Oldsmobile had rail sidetracks served by Michigan Railway’s interurban freight trains. Electric railway history is thus an essential, previously overlooked factor in Michigan’s industrial development.
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The Milwaukee Road
Its First Hundred Years
August Derleth
University of Iowa Press, 2002

From its incorporation in 1847 in Wisconsin Territory to its first run in 1851—twenty miles between Milwaukee and Waukesha—to its later position of far-flung power, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul &Pacific Railroad Company had a vivid history. By 1948, the Milwaukee Road had more than 40,000 employees and maintained more than 10,000 miles of line in twelve states from Indiana to Washington.

Also in 1948, August Derleth's popular and well-crafted corporate history celebrated the strength and status of this mighty carrier. On February 19, 1985, the railroad became a subsidiary of Soo Line Corporation and its identity vanished overnight. Nonetheless, it remains a romantic memory, and Derleth's book remains the only complete history of this innovative and dynamic railroad.

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A Missouri Railroad Pioneer
The Life of Louis Houck
Joel P. Rhodes
University of Missouri Press, 2013

Lawyer and journalist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Louis Houck is often called the “Father of Southeast Missouri” because he brought the railroad to the region and opened this backwater area to industrialization and modernization. Although Houck’s name is little known today outside Missouri, Joel Rhodes shows how his story has relevance for both the state and the nation.

Rhodes presents a more complete picture of Houck than has ever been available: reviewing his life from his German immigrant roots, considering his career from both social and political perspectives, and grounding the story in both state and national history. He especially tells how, from 1880 to the 1920s, this self-taught railroader constructed a network of five hundred miles of track through the wilderness of wetlands known as “Swampeast Missouri”—and how these “Houck Roads” provided a boost for population, agriculture, lumbering, and commerce that transformed Cape Girardeau and the surrounding area.

Rhodes discusses how Houck fits into the era of economic individualism—a time when men with little formal training shaped modern industry—and also gives voice to Houck’s critics and shows that he was not always an easy man to work with. In telling the story of his railroading enterprise, Rhodes chronicles Houck’s battle with the Jay Gould railroad empire and offers key insight into the development of America’s railway system, from the cutthroat practices of ruthless entrepreneurs to the often-comic ineptness of start-up rail lines.

More than simply a biography of a business entrepreneur, the book tells how Houck not only developed the region economically but also followed the lead of Andrew Carnegie by making art, culture, and formal education available to all social classes. Houck also served for thirty-six years as president of the Board of Regents of Southeast Missouri State Teacher’s College, and as a self-taught historian he wrote the first comprehensive accounts of Missouri’s territorial period.

A Missouri Railroad Pioneer chronicles a multifaceted career that transformed a region. Solidly researched, this lively narrative also offers an entertaining read for anyone interested in Missouri history.

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Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan
The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries
Grant Brown, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"A must buy for anyone interested in the Great Lakes."
---Frederick Stonehouse, maritime historian

In 1892, the Ann Arbor Car Ferries shook the transportation world by doing what was then deemed impossible---carrying loaded railroad cars by ship across the sixty-two miles of open water between Frankfort, Michigan and Kewaunee, Wisconsin. With passion, acuity, and remarkable detail, Grant Brown describes the nearly 100-year crossings---from their beginnings with James Ashley's bold new idea of car ferrying down to the last fight for survival until the Michigan Interstate Rail Company finally closed in 1982.

Crossing the lake with loaded freight cars was a treacherous task that presented daily obstacles. Knowledgeable people believed it was impossible to secure rail cars from tipping over and sinking the ship. Weather and ice presented two near-insurmountable hurdles, making car ferrying doubly difficult in the winter when nearly all shipping on the Great Lakes shut down. This vivid history gives voice to the ships and their crews as they battled the storms without modern navigational aids or adequate power.

This spirited account of the Ann Arbor car ferries draws on ships' logs from various museums, over 2,000 newspaper articles, annual reports from 1889 through 1976, and interviews with former employees. The result is a living history of the ships, the crews, and their adventures; of the men who built and ran the business; and of the enormous influence the vessels had on the communities they served.

Grant Brown, Jr., worked for S.D. Warren Company, a paper manufacturer, for 37 years. He raced sailboats on Crystal Lake in northern Michigan for ten years while growing up, continued in Boston and St. Louis, and has since returned to living and racing in Frankfort, Michigan. He spent eight years in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, where he learned navigation and shipboard procedure.

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Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan
The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries
Grant Brown, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"A must buy for anyone interested in the Great Lakes."
---Frederick Stonehouse, maritime historian

In 1892, the Ann Arbor Car Ferries shook the transportation world by doing what was then deemed impossible---carrying loaded railroad cars by ship across the sixty-two miles of open water between Frankfort, Michigan and Kewaunee, Wisconsin. With passion, acuity, and remarkable detail, Grant Brown describes the nearly 100-year crossings---from their beginnings with James Ashley's bold new idea of car ferrying down to the last fight for survival until the Michigan Interstate Rail Company finally closed in 1982.

Crossing the lake with loaded freight cars was a treacherous task that presented daily obstacles. Knowledgeable people believed it was impossible to secure rail cars from tipping over and sinking the ship. Weather and ice presented two near-insurmountable hurdles, making car ferrying doubly difficult in the winter when nearly all shipping on the Great Lakes shut down. This vivid history gives voice to the ships and their crews as they battled the storms without modern navigational aids or adequate power.

This spirited account of the Ann Arbor car ferries draws on ships' logs from various museums, over 2,000 newspaper articles, annual reports from 1889 through 1976, and interviews with former employees. The result is a living history of the ships, the crews, and their adventures; of the men who built and ran the business; and of the enormous influence the vessels had on the communities they served.

Grant Brown, Jr., worked for S.D. Warren Company, a paper manufacturer, for 37 years. He raced sailboats on Crystal Lake in northern Michigan for ten years while growing up, continued in Boston and St. Louis, and has since returned to living and racing in Frankfort, Michigan. He spent eight years in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, where he learned navigation and shipboard procedure.

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The Northeast Corridor
The Trains, the People, the History, the Region
David Alff
University of Chicago Press, 2024
All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor.
 
Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.
 
Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.
 
Trains have long made the places that make America, and they still do.
 
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Ohio Canal Era
A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861
Harry N. Scheiber
Ohio University Press, 2012

Ohio Canal Era, a rich analysis of state policies and their impact in directing economic change, is a classic on the subject of the pre–Civil War transportation revolution. This edition contains a new foreword by scholar Lawrence M. Friedman, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, and a bibliographic note by the author.

Professor Scheiber explores how Ohio—as a “public enterprise state,” creating state agencies and mobilizing public resources for transport innovation and control—led in the process of economic change before the Civil War. No other historical account of the period provides so full and insightful a portrayal of “law in action.” Scheiber reveals the important roles of American nineteenth-century government in economic policy-making, finance, administration, and entrepreneurial activities in support of economic development.

His study is equally important as an economic history. Scheiber provides a full account of waves of technological innovation and of the transformation of Ohio’s commerce, agriculture, and industrialization in an era of hectic economic change. And he tells the intriguing story of how the earliest railroads of the Old Northwest were built and financed, finally confronting the state-owned canal system with a devastating competitive challenge.

Amid the current debate surrounding “privatization,” “deregulation,” and the appropriate use of “industrial policy” by government to shape and channel the economy. Scheiber’s landmark study gives vital historical context to issues of privatization and deregulation that we confront in new forms today.

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Ohio canal era
a case study of government and the economy, 1820-1861
Harry N. Scheiber
Ohio University Press, 1987

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Over the Alleghenies
Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania
Robert J. Kapsch
West Virginia University Press, 2013
Between 1826 and 1858 the state of Pennsylvania built and operated the largest and most technologically advanced system of canals and railroads in North America–almost one thousand miles of transport that stretched from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and beyond.
 
The construction of this ambitious transportation system was accompanied by great euphoria. It was widely believed that the revenue created from these canals and railroads would eliminate the need for all taxes on state citizens. Yet with the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis much like boom and bust cycle that ended in 2008, a deep recession fell across the country.
By 1858, Pennsylvania had sold all canals and railroads to private companies, often for pennies-on-the-dollar.
 
Over the Alleghenies: Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania is the definitive history of the state of Pennsylvania’s incredible canal and railroad system. Although often condemned as a colossal failure, this construction effort remains an innovative, magnificent feat that ushered in modern transportation to Pennsylvania and the entire country. With extensive primary research, over one hundred illustrations, newspapers clippings, and charts and graphs, Over the Alleghenies examines and dissects the infrastructure project that bankrupted the wealthiest state in the Union. 
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Over the Range
A History of the Promontory Summit Route of the Pacific Railroad
Richard V. Francaviglia
Utah State University Press, 2008

Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad's completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America's coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area's landscape.

Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer's perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast's knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian's understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded in maps, and a desert lover's appreciation of the striking basin-and-range landscape that borders the Great Salt Lake.

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Pere Marquette
A Michigan Railroad System before 1900
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The Pere Marquette Railroad has not one but two histories—one for the twentieth century and one for the nineteenth. While the twentieth-century record of the Pere Marquette Railroad has been well studied and preserved, the nineteenth century has not been so well served. This volume aims to correct that oversight by focusing on the nineteenth-century part of the company’s past, including the men who formed and directed these early roads, and the development of the system. The Pere Marquette Railroad was formed in 1900 by a merger of three Michigan railroad companies and lasted forty-seven years, disappearing in June 1947 by merger into the maw of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. Prior to the 1900 merger, the Pere Marquette Railroad’s predecessors made up a motley collection of disconnected and unaffiliated short, local rail lines. After the financial panic of 1893, and with some commonality of ownership, the companies worked together more closely. Before the end of the decade, the three main railroads—the Flint & Pere Marquette; the Detroit, Lansing & Northern; and the Chicago & West Michigan—had decided that the only way to maintain solvency was to merge. Using a plethora of primary sources including railway timetables and maps, this work lends insight into the little-known corporate business history of the Pere Marquette Railroad.
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Pivot of China
Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou
Mark Baker
Harvard University Press, 2024

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. These inequalities have variously been attributed to the dualistic economy of semi-colonialism, rural–urban division in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker argues that different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.

Pivot of China tells this story through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.

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The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930
By Steven Topik
University of Texas Press, 1987

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.

Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.

Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.

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The Railroad and the Pueblo Indians
The Impact of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe on the Pueblos of the Rio Grande, 1880-1930
Richard H. Frost
University of Utah Press, 2015
The history of the railroad conquest of the West is well known, but the impact of western railroads on Native Americans has largely been ignored. Richard Frost examines the profound effects that the coming of trains had on Pueblo Indians in New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley. The arrival of the railroad was a social and cultural tsunami. It destroyed or damaged crops, livestock, irrigation ditches, community autonomy, privacy, and well-being. The trains brought lawyers, speculators, politicians, missionaries, anthropologists, timber thieves, health seekers, and government servants. American colonialism abetted the railroads, so that the Pueblos faced land and water confiscation, court cases, compulsory American education, and other transgressions. To be sure, the trains also brought farm tools, clothing for children, and customers for Pueblo pottery; but these were comparatively marginal benefits.

The Pueblo communities responded variously, though mostly conservatively to sustain their traditional communities. This book spotlights two very different responses. Santo Domingo's reaction was hostile, but Laguna chose accommodation. These reactions reveal previously overlooked aspects of these pueblos’ histories that provide compelling reasons behind their varying responses. The book also analyzes the self-contradictory nature of Pueblo constitutional law from 1876 to 1913 and describes conflicted Bureau of Indian Affairs treatment of the Pueblos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each in turn had fateful consequences. 
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Railroad Postcards in the Age of Steam
H. Roger Grant
University of Iowa Press, 1994

Out of the tradition of those long-gone days of great, heaving steam locomotives and endless rail lines comes this remarkable selection of vintage cards, a treasure trove selected from John Vander Maas' consummate collection at the University of Iowa Libraries.

This lavish volume is the first general book-length work devoted to the once-ubiquitous railroad picture postcard. It comprises an introductory essay and an album of cards. The former fully examines the nature of the postcard craze, which reached its zenith about 1910, and discusses why images of American railroads played such an important part in the card phenomenon. The album divides an engaging assortment of more than 150 representative views into five sections: “Trains and Rolling Stock,” “Depots and Railway Structures,” “The Railroad Corridor,” “People and Railroads,” and “The Lighter Side of Railroading.”

Railroad historians, train enthusiasts, postcard collectors, and all other readers will find much to interest them in this selection of images. Not only are the cards themselves visually striking, but they convey a sense of how important railroads once were to the nation's citizenry. The sight of steaming locomotives and the hustle and bustle associated with “train time” caused hearts to quicken. These feelings made views of railroad scenes popular with buyers of postcards and now with latter-day railroad fans and card collectors.

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The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago
A Biography of William B. Ogden
Jack Harpster
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America.

Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself.

The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.

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Railroads and the Transformation of China
Elisabeth Köll
Harvard University Press, 2019

As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present.

China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion.

The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

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Railroads for Michigan
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 2013
In this thoroughly researched history, Graydon Meints tells the fascinating story of the railroad’s arrival and development in Michigan. An engaging and accessible text, the book describes the long-awaited and often-troubled advent of the railroad in the state, the building of which shifted from private to public efforts and back again, amid tumultuous social, business, and political developments. The railroad would come to play a role in almost every critical event in Michigan’s history, including the Civil War, the Granger Movement, and the Gilded Age, before beginning to wane following the arrival of the automobile, the Interstate Commerce Commission, World War I, and the Great Depression. A brief growth spurt during World War II was short-lived, and it was followed by the collapse of several major railroads and the formation of Amtrak and Conrail. Looking ahead to the future of the railroad in the Great Lakes region, Meints assesses the strengths and shortcomings of this revolutionary invention. With careful attention to the personal impact of the railroad, Meints recognizes in brief biographies the many men and women responsible for the development and operation of Michigan railroads, as well as the triumphs, tragedies, and spaces that shaped their lives and work.
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Railroads in the Heartland
Steam and Traction in the Golden Age of Postcards
H. Roger Grant
University of Iowa Press, 1997

Historians of midwestern railroading during the early part of the twentieth century have generally focused on the production of railroad company histories while ignoring the regional view. Fortunately for railway historians and buffs, coincidentally with the zenith of the Railway Age, the national fad for producing and mailing postcards was at its height. Millions of cards, including "real-photo" images, were produced between 1905 and 1915. Roger Grant has selected more than a hundred representative picture postcards to visualize the principal themes and characteristics that gave this dynamic industry its distinctive regional features.

By the turn of the century, the railroad map of the Midwest was unequaled. Anyone who examined it carefully sensed that this was the vital center of America's massive network of steel rails. Depots erected in the western prairie environment were spartan, with only minor decoration, but those in the Midwest usually mirrored more ornate New England styles. These features are often reflected in the images in this heavily illustrated book, which depicts the spare but strong pioneering spirit of the enterprise.

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Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California
Volume 3: More on the Northern Roads
David F. Myrick
University of Nevada Press, 2007
Valuable as these volumes are in relation to railroad operations in Nevada and California, their usefulness as authoritative reference sources embraces a much broader scope. Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California is as much a history of the region as it is a study of the railroads. The principal mines and mills and their production are scrupulously detailed, together with the personalities who created them.

The final volume in the complete history of Nevada and Eastern California railroads David Myrick's monumental railroad histories have become essential reference works for railroaders, historians, and hobbyists. Volume III contains additional information about the northern roads, including some not covered in previous volumes, and about developments since the publication of the first two volumes in the railroads of the region. It provides new facts gleaned from the correspondence of Collis P. Huntington, one of the builders of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. It also covers roads connected with the lumber industry and the construction of electric power plants, and Southern Pacific branch lines, including some that never advanced beyond surveys.

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Railroads of the Civil War
An Illustrated History
Michael Leavy
Westholme Publishing, 2010

The Photographic Record of the First Wide-Scale Mechanization of War
Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, America would find itself following two increasingly divergent tracks: an industrialized North and an agricultural South. By 1860 railroads were firmly entrenched in our culture, reshaping our cities and steering us through the industrial age towards worldwide prominence. From sleepy post towns to the largest east coast cities, the distant hooting of the locomotive whistle drew ever closer and louder, filling listeners with fascination while brightening the eyes of profit-driven industrialists. But this admirable invention, lavishly adorned in brass and iron trimmings, was about to take on a new and deadly role. America’s regional differences would result in a spectacular collision over slavery, and between 1861–1865, the nation fought a savage war. The “iron horse” became a major weapon in the first war fully dependent on railroads. Moreover railroads would escalate and prolong the war, leading to its terrible carnage. Trains were used to move troops rapidly and over great distances, completely changing military strategy. Trains were also used as mobile artillery, armed with large-caliber cannons that could pound cities and fortifications. Trains were a crucial means for supplying the armies on both sides, and it was the severing of the railway lines providing food and munitions to the Army of Northern Virginia that led to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

In Railroads of the Civil War: An Illustrated History, Michael Leavy uses compelling period photographs and drawings and a rich narrative to reevaluate and illuminate the role of railroads in the Civil War. In addition to identifying details about the various trains and ancillary equipment and buildings in the illustrations, the author explains how trains influenced the outcome of battles and the war in general. 

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Railway
George Revill
Reaktion Books, 2012
In the nineteenth century, railways were viewed as a symbol of progress and confidence in technological modernity. In the twenty-first century, the frustrations of gridlocked traffic, record-high gas prices, and the looming fears of climate change have transformed the railway system once again into a symbol of hope that provides the possibility of an environmentally sustainable future. In Railway, George Revill examines the technology and politics of railway history, as well as related themes such as mobility, identity, design, marketing, and sustainability.
 
In both practical and symbolic senses the cultural meanings of railways continue to play a role in how people organize and respond to modern environments, social problems, and technologies. Revill draws from art, literature, music, and film to illustrate how the railway carries meaning for all of us—creating connections and separations, detachment and involvement—from the routine commuter to the enthusiast. As Revill shows, railways inform our everyday language—from fast-track to side-track to going off the rails—and continue to fascinate us today.
 
In this wide-ranging and well-illustrated look at railways across the globe, Revill ultimately reveals how central they are to our understanding of modern everyday life.
 
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The Road
John Ehle
University of Tennessee Press, 1998
"In The Road John Ehle's skill as a storyteller brings an early episode of road building in the North Carolina mountains to rich and vivid life. Hardship and humor, suffering and dreams are the balance for survival in a landscape that makes harsh demands on its intruders. Ehle lets us experience this place, people, and past in a fully realized novel."—Wilma Dykeman

"The Road is a strong novel by one of our most distinguished authors. Muscular, vivid, and pungent, it is broad in historical scope and profound in its human sympathies. We welcome its return with warm pleasure."—Fred Chappell

Originally published in 1967, The Road  is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the top."

Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge. There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds, which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these challenges and how the  mountain people respond to the changes the railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.

The Author: A native of Asheville, North Carolina, John Ehle has written seventeen novels and works of nonfiction. His books include The Land Breakers, The Journey of August King, The Winter People, and Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Among the honors he has received are the Lillian Smith Prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award.
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Robber Baron
The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes
John Franch
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Robber Baron is the first biography of the streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), who stands alongside J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie as one of the most colorful and controversial public figures in Gilded Age America. John Franch draws upon every available source to tell the story of the man who was the mastermind behind Chicago’s Loop Elevated and the London Underground, the namesake of the University of Chicago’s observatory, and the inspiration for Frank Cowperwood, the ruthless protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. Despite various philanthropic efforts, Yerkes and his unscrupulous tactics were despised by the press and public, and he left Chicago a bitter man. While Yerkes’s enduring public works testify to his success and desire to leave a lasting impression on his world, Robber Baron also uncovers the cost of this boundless ambition.
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The Sound of the Whistle
Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan
Steven Ericson
Harvard University Press, 1996
In this thorough and detailed study of the development of the Japanese railroad industry during the Meiji period, Steven Ericson explores the economic role of government and the nature of state-business relations during Japan’s modern transformation. Ericson challenges the tendency of current scholarship to minimize the roles of the Japanese government and commercial banks in Meiji industrialization. By providing a fresh perspective on the “strong state/weak state” debate through a detailed analysis of the 1906–1907 railway nationalization, Ericson’s study sheds new light on the Meiji origins of modern Japanese industrial policy and politics, filling a major gap in the available literature on the Meiji political economy.
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Southwest Virginia's Railroad
Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in the Civil War Era
Kenneth W. Noe
University of Alabama Press, 2003

A close study of one region of Appalachia that experienced economic vitality and strong sectionalism before the Civil War

This book examines the construction of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through southwest Virginia in the 1850s, before the Civil War began. The building and operation of the railroad reoriented the economy of the region toward staple crops and slave labor. Thus, during the secession crisis, southwest Virginia broke with northwestern Virginia and embraced the Confederacy. Ironically, however, it was the railroad that brought waves of Union raiders to the area during the war

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Stalin's Railroad
Turksib and the Building of Socialism
Matthew J. Payne
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic "backwardness" of the USSR’s minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation.

Built between December 1926 and January 1931 by nearly 50,000 workers and at a cost of more 161 million rubles, Turksib embodied the Bolsheviks’ commitment to end ethnic inequality and promote cultural revolution in one the far-flung corners of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan. Trumpeted as the "forge of the Kazakh proletariat," the railroad was to create a native working class, bringing not only trains to the steppes, but also the Revolution.

In the first in-depth study of this grand project, Matthew Payne explores the transformation of its builders in Turksib’s crucible of class war, race riots, state purges, and the brutal struggle of everyday life. In the battle for the souls of the nation’s engineers, as well as the racial and ethnic conflicts that swirled, far from Moscow, around Stalin’s vast campaign of industrialization, he finds a microcosm of the early Soviet Union.
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Stealing the General
The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor
Russell S. Bonds
Westholme Publishing, 2007

Selected by Civil War Interactive as One of the Top Civil War Books of All Time
On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infiltrated north Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and matériel from the Confederate forces in Virginia. If they succeeded, Andrews and his raiders could change the course of the war. But the General's young conductor, William A. Fuller, chased the stolen train first on foot, then by handcar, and finally aboard another engine, the Texas. He pursued the General until, running out of wood and water, Andrews and his men abandoned the doomed locomotive, ending the adventure that would soon be famous as The Great Locomotive Chase. But the ordeal of the soldiers involved was just beginning. In the days that followed, the "engine thieves" were hunted down and captured. Eight were tried and executed as spies, including Andrews. Eight others made a daring escape to freedom, including two assisted by a network of slaves and Union sympathizers. For their actions, before a personal audience with President Abraham Lincoln, six of the raiders became the first men in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor—the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.

Americans north and south, both at the time and ever since, have been astounded and fascinated by this daring raid. But until now, there has not been a complete history of the entire episode and the fates of all those involved. Based on eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence, diaries, military records, newspaper reports, deposition testimony and other primary sources, Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. Bonds is a blend of meticulous research and compelling narrative that is now considered to be the definitive history of "the boldest adventure of the war."

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Steam & Cinders
The Advent of Railroads in Wisconsin
Axel Lorenzsonn
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2009
Based on the author’s extensive research into the early history of Wisconsin’s rails, Steam and Cinders chronicles the boom and bust of the first railroads in the state, from the charters of the 1830s to the farm mortgages of the 1850s and consolidation of the railroads on the eve of the Civil War. Featuring more than 75 period photographs, historic maps, and drawings, Steam and Cinders preserves the legacy of early Wisconsin railroading for railroad buffs and armchair historians alike.
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The Steam and Diesel Era in Wheeling, West Virginia
Photographs by J. J. Young Jr.
Nicholas Fry
West Virginia University Press, 2016

For nearly seventy years, John J. Young Jr. photographed railroads. With unparalleled scope and span, he documented the impact and beauty of railways in American life from 1936 to 2004.

As a child during the Great Depression, J. J. Young Jr. began to photograph railroads in Wheeling, West Virginia. This book collects over one hundred fifty of those images—some unpublished until now—documenting the railroads of Wheeling and the surrounding area from the 1930s until the 1960s.

The photographs within this book highlight the major railroads of Wheeling: the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Wheeling & Lake Erie, the Pittsburgh & West Virginia, the New York Central, and the industrial and interurban rail lines that crisscrossed the region. These images capture the routine activities of trains that carried passengers and freight to and from the city and its industries, as well as more unusual traffic, such as a circus-advertising car, the General Motors Train of Tomorrow, and the 1947 American Freedom Train.

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Steam City
Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore
David Schley
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this company the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), and they conceived of it as a public undertaking—an urban improvement, albeit one that would stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits.

Steam City tells the story of corporate capitalism starting from the street and moving outward, looking at how the rise of the railroad altered the fabric of everyday life in the United States. The B&O’s founders believed that their new line would remap American economic geography, but no one imagined that the railroad would also dramatically reshape the spaces of its terminal city. As railroad executives wrangled with city officials over their use of urban space, they formulated new ideas about the boundaries between public good and private profit. Ultimately, they reinvented the B&O as a private enterprise, unmoored to its home city. This bold reconception had implications not only for the people of Baltimore, but for the railroad industry as a whole. As David Schley shows here, privatizing the B&O helped set the stage for the rise of the corporation as a major force in the post-Civil War economy.

​Steam City examines how the birth and spread of the American railroad—which brought rapid communications, fossil fuels, and new modes of corporate organization to the city—changed how people worked, where they lived, even how they crossed the street. As Schley makes clear, we still live with the consequences of this spatial and economic order today.
 
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Steam-Powered Knowledge
William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860
Aileen Fyfe
University of Chicago Press, 2012

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

In Steam-Powered Knowledge, Aileen Fyfe explores the activities of William Chambers and the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm during its formative years, documenting for the first time how new technologies were integrated into existing business systems. Chambers was one of the first publishers to abandon traditional skills associated with hand printing, instead favoring the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper, stereotyping, and, especially, printing machines driven by steam power. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed dramatic advances in transportation, and Chambers used proliferating railway networks and steamship routes to speed up communication and distribution. As a result, his high-tech publishing firm became an exemplar of commercial success by 1850 and outlived all of its rivals in the business of cheap instructive print. Fyfe follows Chambers’s journey from small-time bookseller and self-trained hand-press printer to wealthy and successful publisher of popular educational books on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating along the way the profound effects of his and his fellow publishers’ willingness, or unwillingness, to incorporate these technological innovations into their businesses.
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Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877
David O. Stowell
University of Chicago Press, 1999
For one week in late July of 1877, America shook with anger and fear as a variety of urban residents, mostly working class, attacked railroad property in dozens of towns and cities. The Great Strike of 1877 was one of the largest and most violent urban uprisings in American history.

Whereas most historians treat the event solely as a massive labor strike that targeted the railroads, David O. Stowell examines America's predicament more broadly to uncover the roots of this rebellion. He studies the urban origins of the Strike in three upstate New York cities—Buffalo, Albany, and Syracuse. He finds that locomotives rumbled through crowded urban spaces, sending panicked horses and their wagons careening through streets. Hundreds of people were killed and injured with appalling regularity. The trains also disrupted street traffic and obstructed certain forms of commerce. For these reasons, Stowell argues, The Great Strike was not simply an uprising fueled by disgruntled workers. Rather, it was a grave reflection of one of the most direct and damaging ways many people experienced the Industrial Revolution.

"Through meticulously crafted case studies . . . the author advances the thesis that the strike had urban roots, that in substantial part it represented a community uprising. . . .A particular strength of the book is Stowell's description of the horrendous accidents, the toll in human life, and the continual disruption of craft, business, and ordinary movement engendered by building railroads into the heart of cities."—Charles N. Glaab, American Historical Review
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The Thirty-Year War
A History of Detroit's Streetcars, 1892–1922
Neil J. Lehto
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Streetcars played an especially important role in society around the turn of the twentieth century in Detroit, in part because of the downtown hub-and-spoke design of its main streets. During this period the streetcar was the main mode of transportation for the average citizen, as horse-drawn carriages and automobiles were not found outside of the upper class. Control over streetcar franchises was highly coveted—this control was simultaneous with having power over how and where people were transported throughout the city, making it an incredible political tool. The Thirty-Year War was a battle waged between 1892 and 1922 by the City of Detroit against the politically powerful and deeply entrenched corporations that owned streetcar franchises for control of the city’s streetway system. This compelling history shows how and why the owners of monopoly franchises of great public utilities such as bridges, street railways, electricity, natural gas, and cable television will protect and defend their privilege against public ownership or control, and is an example of how one city successfully fought back.
 
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Tracking Modernity
India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility
Marian Aguiar
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From Mohandas Gandhi’s nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, the railway has been one of India’s most potent emblems of modern life. In the first in-depth analysis of representations of the Indian railway, Marian Aguiar interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology.

Since the colonial period in India, the railway has been idealized as a rational utopia—a moving box in which racial and class differences might be amalgamated under a civic, secular, and public order. Aguiar charts this powerful image into the postcolonial period, showing how the culture of mobility exposes this symbol of reason as surprisingly dynamic and productive. Looking in turn at the partition of India, labor relations, rituals of travel, works of literature and film, visual culture, and the Mumbai train bombings of 2006, Aguiar finds incongruities she terms “counternarratives of modernity” to signify how they work both with and against the dominant rhetoric.  Revealing railways as a microcosm of tensions within Indian culture, Aguiar demonstrates how their representations have challenged prevailing ideas of modernity.
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Tracks across Continents, Paths through History
The Economic Dynamics of Standardization in Railway Gauge
Douglas J. Puffert
University of Chicago Press, 2009

A standard track gauge—the distance between the two rails—enables connecting railway lines to exchange traffic. But despite the benefits of standardization, early North American railways used six different gauges extensively, and even today breaks of gauge at national borders and within such countries as India and Australia are expensive burdens on commerce. In Tracks across Continents, Paths through History, Douglas J. Puffert offers a global history of railway track gauge, examining early choices and the dynamic process of diversity and standardization that resulted.

            Drawing on the economic theory of path dependence, and grounded in economic, technical, and institutional realities, this innovative volume traces how early historical events, and even idiosyncratic personalities, have affected choices of gauge ever since, despite changing technology and understandings of what gauge is optimal. Puffert also uses this history to develop new insights in the theory of path dependence. Tracks across Continents, Paths through History will be essential reading for anyone interested in how history and economics inform each other.

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Tracks in the Amazon
The Day-to-Day Life of the Workers on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad
Gary Neeleman
University of Utah Press, 2014
When construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad began in 1867, Bolivia had lost its war with Chile, causing it to become landlocked and unable to ship its minerals and other products from the Pacific Coast. Since Bolivia needed to find a way to move products from the Atlantic Coast, the government decided a railroad should be built around the Madeira River—which originates in Bolivia and travels almost 2,000 miles through Brazil to the Amazon—facilitating shipment to foreign markets via the Amazonian waterway. Completion of the railroad was initially stalled by lack of funding, but the project was resurrected in the early twentieth century and completed in 1912. Intended as an integral piece of the rubber export industry, the railroad became unnecessary once the world supply of rubber moved from Brazil to Asia.

Although there have been many brief chronicles and writings about the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad over the years, most barely scratch the surface of this incredible story. Of particular import in Tracks in the Amazon are the photographs—which until now have rarely been seen—taken by Dana Merrill, a New York photographer hired to document the construction of the railroad. It also includes reproductions of the Porto Velho Marconigram, an English-language newspaper written for and by the American expatriates who lived in the construction headquarters at Porto Velho. Because this unique railroad traversed the densest tropical jungle on earth, more than 10,000 workers lost their lives laying the first five miles of track. The images and descriptions of the life of the workers on the railroad illustrate the challenges of working in the jungles—the unforgiving climate, malaria and yellow feverbearing mosquitoes, and the threat of wild animals—which made conditions for the workers next to impossible.

Finalist for the International Latino Book Awards: Best Book in Nonfiction in Portuguese. 
 
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Trains, Buses, People
An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit
Christof Spieler
Island Press, 2018
What are the best transit cities in the US? The best Bus Rapid Transit lines? The most useless rail transit lines? The missed opportunities?

In the US, the 25 largest metropolitan areas and many smaller cities have fixed guideway transit—rail or bus rapid transit. Nearly all of them are talking about expanding. Yet discussions about transit are still remarkably unsophisticated. To build good transit, the discussion needs to focus on what matters—quality of service (not the technology that delivers it), all kinds of transit riders, the role of buildings, streets and sidewalks, and, above all, getting transit in the right places.

Christof Spieler has spent over a decade advocating for transit as a writer, community leader, urban planner, transit board member, and enthusiast. He strongly believes that just about anyone—regardless of training or experience—can identify what makes good transit with the right information. In the fun and accessible Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit, Spieler shows how cities can build successful transit. He profiles the 47 metropolitan areas in the US that have rail transit or BRT, using data, photos, and maps for easy comparison. The best and worst systems are ranked and Spieler offers analysis of how geography, politics, and history complicate transit planning. He shows how the unique circumstances of every city have resulted in very different transit systems.

Using appealing visuals, Trains, Buses, People is intended for non-experts—it will help any citizen, professional, or policymaker with a vested interest evaluate a transit proposal and understand what makes transit effective. While the book is built on data, it has a strong point of view. Spieler takes an honest look at what makes good and bad transit and is not afraid to look at what went wrong. He explains broad concepts, but recognizes all of the technical, geographical, and political difficulties of building transit in the real world. In the end,Trains, Buses, People shows that it is possible with the right tools to build good transit.
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Trains, Buses, People, Second Edition
An Opinionated Atlas of US and Canadian Transit
Christof Spieler
Island Press, 2021
“Gets right to the point: put [transit] where the people are...The author combines detailed knowledge and a refreshing frankness...Keep this book within easy reach.” 
-Planning

In some US and Canadian cities, transit has quietly been expanding and improving over the last few years, despite funding and ridership challenges. How do we assess the advances and failures of our current systems to move forward strategically and wisely?
 
The first edition of Trains, Buses, People was dubbed “a transit wonk’s bible” and guided “a smarter conversation about urban transit” in the US. This second edition is fully updated and expanded to include eight Canadian cities and two new US cities (Indianapolis and San Juan, Puerto Rico).
 
In Trains, Buses, People, Second Edition: An Opinionated Atlas of US and Canadian Transit, transit expert and “transportation hero” Christof Spieler provides a new section on inclusivity to help agencies understand how to welcome riders regardless of race, gender, income, or disability. Select cities include new maps overlaying transit and poverty data, and systems that have started construction since the first edition in 2018 have been added. Other new sections address network typologies, guideway types, station types, and fares.

Spieler has spent over a decade advocating for transit as a writer, community leader, urban planner, transit board member, and enthusiast. He strongly believes that just about anyone—regardless of training or experience—can identify what makes good transit with the right information. In the fun, accessible, and visually appealing Trains, Buses, People, Second Edition: An Opinionated Atlas of US and Canadian Transit, Spieler shows how cities can build successful transit. He profiles the 49 metropolitan areas in the US and eight metropolitan areas in Canada that have rail transit or BRT, using data, photos, and maps for easy comparison. Spieler ranks the best and worst systems and he offers analysis of how geography, politics, and history complicate transit planning. He shows how the unique circumstances of every city have resulted in very different transit systems.

Trains, Buses, People, Second Edition is intended for non-experts—it will help any citizen, professional, or policymaker with a vested interest evaluate a transit proposal and understand what makes transit effective. It shows that it is possible, with the right tools, to build good transit.
 
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Union Pacific
Volume II, 1894-1969
Maury Klein
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
The second volume in the history of the Union Pacific begins after the financial panic of 1893, one of the worst depressions Americans had yet experienced, which pushed the railroad into bankruptcy. Maury Klein examines the complex challenges faced by the Union Pacific in the new century—the expanding role of government and its restrictive regulations, the growth of labor unions, the devastating effects of two world wars, and the growing competition from new modes of transportation—and how, under the innovative and influential leadership of Edward H. Harriman, the Union Pacific again played the role of industrial pioneer. Union Pacific has remained one of the strongest railroads in the country, surviving the eras of government regulation and the corporate mergers of the past twenty-five years. Insightful, definitive in scope, rich in colorful anecdotes and superb characterizations, Union Pacific is a fascinating saga not only of a particular railroad but also about how that industry transformed America.Maury Klein is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Life and Legend of Jay Gould.
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front cover of Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty
Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty
Navajos, Hozho, and Track Work
Jay Youngdahl
Utah State University Press, 2011

For over one hundred years, Navajos have gone to work in significant numbers on Southwestern railroads. As they took on the arduous work of laying and anchoring tracks, they turned to traditional religion to anchor their lives.

Jay Youngdahl, an attorney who has represented Navajo workers in claims with their railroad employers since 1992 and who more recently earned a master's in divinity from Harvard, has used oral history and archival research to write a cultural history of Navajos' work on the railroad and the roles their religious traditions play in their lives of hard labor away from home.

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