Free The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar Page B

Americans, however—free from the shackles of tradition and unencumbered by obstructive government—took to the new method of transportation with far more gusto and enthusiasm than their European peers.
    The Civil War, covered in Chapter 4 , was the first true railroad war and was particularly lengthy and bloody as a result. Key battles were fought around railroad junctions, railroad sabotage became a key tactic of the war, and troops were transported huge distances in a way that would have been impossible even a decade previously. The North, industrially stronger than its rival, was lent a key advantage by its superior railroads, which, crucially, were far better managed during the war than those of the South. The Unionists quickly realized that the operation of the railroads could not be left to chance and placed them under military control early in the conflict. By contrast, the secessionists never established government rule over their railroads, with the result that they operated far less efficiently. The war would also witness remarkable examples of derring-do on the railroads: the Andrews Raid (or Great Locomotive Chase) in April 1862—in which Union volunteers commandeered a locomotive on the Western & Atlantic line, deep in Confederate territory, and created mayhem as they drove it north—has entered American folklore but somewhat obscured the true story of the railroads in this conflict.
    The fifth chapter tells the story of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The dream of a coast-to-coast line had first been mooted as early as 1820, but it was not until the 1850s that the idea was seriously considered; its start was delayed by the Civil War, although ironically it was the absence of the Southern politicians that allowed the legislation to be passed by Congress. It was by far the most ambitious railroad project of this period in the world—to be surpassed thirty years later only by the Trans-Siberian, the subject of my next book—but its exact purpose was somewhat unclear. To reach the Pacific Ocean, three thousand miles away, was an obvious ambition for the federal government in Washington seeking to unify the new nation, but it was never going to be a commercial proposition. Thanks to lobbying by a remarkable young dreamer, Theodore Judah, who gained the political backing of Abraham Lincoln, Congress passed the act to build the line in 1862. The law also allowed for massive subsidies in the form of both cash and land grants to the two companies building the line, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific.
    Like much of the story of the US railroads, the building of the transcontinental encompassed both the best and the worst aspects of pioneering American culture. On the one hand, there was the extraordinary achievement of building nearly two thousand miles of line through two mountain ranges and a long stretch of desert, making it by far the longest railroad in the world up to that point; on the other, there was the shameless corruption that allowed the directors of both companies to make extraordinary riches through the simple expedient of contracting the work through dummy construction companies. Crédit Mobilier of America, established in 1864 by Dr. Thomas Durant, was at the center of the scandal that broke in 1872, when it was revealed that a number of congressmen had received cash bribes or shares in the company. There was, too, the excess of competitive zeal that saw, at one point, the ridiculous phenomenon of the two railroad companies grading parallel lines in order to maximize the land grants paid by the government. Nevertheless, the celebration to mark the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869 must be seen as one of the turning points of US history.
    In Chapters 6 and 7, the amazing exponential growth of the railroads during the rest of the nineteenth century is explored against the