Kategoria BISAC: Transportation >> Railroads - History

When, in the late 1980s, the federal government initiated a plan to deregulate the Canadian railway system, lobby groups protested the betrayal of a national mandate. They asserted that the railway was founded to promote a sense of national identity, to provide access to isolated regions of the country, and to ensure a transnational exchange of goods and ideas. In The Philosophy of Railways, A.A. den Otter considers the relationship between nationalism and technology, and shows how the popular rhetoric surrounding the evolution of the Canadian Pacific Railway has mythologized the...

Visionary Railroader chronicles the life of a key figure in the history of rail travel in the United States. As president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Jervis Langdon Jr. had the opportunity to put progressive concepts into practice.
In 1964, Langdon took charge of the Rock Island, and by the time he left in 1970, he had spearheaded major improvements for this struggling carrier. The same year, he became lead trustee for the bankrupt Penn Central and three years later assumed the presidency. From his role in passing the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973 to his work on...

Government regulation of the railroads is probably the most important example of federal intervention in the economy from the Civil War to World War I. It is also a key to an assessment of the impulses and motives behind Progressivism. In Railroads and Regulation, Gabriel Kolko presents a case study of the relationship of the economy to the political process in the United States during the years from 1877 to 1916.

The author discusses the extent to which the railroad industry encouraged and relied on national political solutions--such as the creation of the first significant...

An account of California journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce and his struggle with the railroad octopus controlled by the Big Four (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins). This is the first book to look at Bierce's early muckraking campaign in depth through Bierce's acid journalism and the railroad's private and public reactions. After a brief literature review and biography of Bierce, one of America's greatest wits, journalists, and short-story writers, the study turns to his thirty-year battle with the Central Pacific Railroad, which controlled much of...