Free The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

Introduction

    America was made by the railroads. They united the country and then stimulated the economic development that enabled the country to become the world’s richest nation. The railroads also transformed American society, changing it from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse in the space of a few decades of the nineteenth century. Quite simply, without the railroads, the United States would not have become the United States.
    The extraordinary growth of the railroads changed the very nature of America. From modest beginnings in the 1830s, the mileage grew to cover nearly two hundred thousand miles by the turn of the century, more than in any other country in the world. Yet the epic tale of the growth of the railroads and their influence on the development of the nation is now largely forgotten and ignored. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the automobile and the airplane continued their relentless march toward domination of the US domestic transportation network, the historical importance of the railroads was being written out of the nation’s consciousness. Passenger railroads were reduced to a loss-making irrelevance. Mention the American railroads to most people, and they will talk about them as a spent force. Yet railroads still flourish in the United States and are a vital part of the infrastructure. The tracks are still there, but even when the huge freight trains run through town centers, they somehow remain invisible to the American public. It is a surprising fact that America’s railroad network remains the world’s largest and is the bedrock of the country’s freight transportation system. There are, too, signs of a revival in passenger railroads, with money available from the federal governmentthanks to President Obama’s welcome, if flawed, stimulus package of 2009 and a rise in passenger numbers on Amtrak services. America may have gradually disowned its railroad heritage—but now is the time to reclaim and reinstate it. This book attempts to do just that.
    Although there are countless tomes on railroad history, few have tried to tell the story of the American railroads and their impact in one concise narrative. That has meant taking a very selective approach, and inevitably many facets of the rich story of America’s railroads have been left out. Inevitably, it has been impossible to be comprehensive, and I have had to be selective on what aspects to cover in detail. I have, for example, chosen particular railroads to look at in some depth as examples, since there is no way that any book of a reasonable length could adequately cover the history of 250,000 miles of track, which was America’s route mileage at the railroads’ height. Obviously, most of the prominent companies are mentioned in the book, but there are numerous omissions for reasons of space or repetition.
    As with several of my other books, I have focused more on the nineteenth century than the twentieth. That is deliberate. It was in the nineteenth that the railroads were being built, and they reached their zenith soon after the turn of the century. The story of the twentieth is one largely of decline and waning influence, a time when railroads were losing their importance and where opportunities to make the best use of this historic legacy were missed. Although this period is covered in less detail than the earlier times, I try to explain why what started out as a love affair between the American people and their railroads has turned out so badly and why an industry that makes such a positive contribution to America’s economy today is largely ignored or even reviled.
    I have highlighted for particular attention the role of a few of the individuals who created or ran the railroads, but again for reasons of space I have left out many other great characters who have contributed to the making of American railroads during its near two centuries of existence. I make no