Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise,
Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. Think of it as a
nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad
was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In
1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people--more than
double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the
self-proclaimed Standard Railroad of the World, this colossal corporate
body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic,
political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR
was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to
geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy.
Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the
authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad
themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices
and labor relations to the relationship between business and government
to advances in technology and transportation.
Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania
Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history
of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first
volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works,
devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal.
Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line
foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846.
Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial
expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with
rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and
John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure
of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such
architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The
volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I,
as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades
proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly
tumultuous economic and political waters.