America was made by the railroads. The opening of the Baltimore & Ohio
line -- the first American railroad -- in the 1830s sparked a national
revolution in the way that people lived thanks to the speed and
convenience of train travel. Promoted by visionaries and built through
heroic effort, the American railroad network was bigger in every sense
than Europe's, and facilitated everything from long-distance travel to
commuting and transporting goods to waging war. It united far-flung
parts of the country, boosted economic development, and was the catalyst
for America's rise to world-power status.
Every American town, great or small, aspired to be connected to a
railroad and by the turn of the century, almost every American lived
within easy access of a station. By the early 1900s, the United States
was covered in a latticework of more than 200,000 miles of railroad
track and a series of magisterial termini, all built and controlled by
the biggest corporations in the land. The railroads dominated the
American landscape for more than a hundred years but by the middle of
the twentieth century, the automobile, the truck, and the airplane had
eclipsed the railroads and the nation started to forget them.
In The Great Railroad Revolution, renowned railroad expert Christian
Wolmar tells the extraordinary story of the rise and the fall of the
greatest of all American endeavors, and argues that the time has come
for America to reclaim and celebrate its often-overlooked rail heritage.
