Kategoria BISAC: Transportation >> Railroads - History

This new study brings together leading experts to show how the modern world began with the coming of the railway. They clearly explain why it had a greater impact than any other technical or industrial innovation before and completely redefined the limits of the civilized world.

While the effect of railways on economic development is self-evident, little attention has been paid to their impact on international relations. This is unfortunate, for in the period from 1848 to 1945, railways were an important element in the struggle between the Great Powers. This took many forms. Often,...

Explore Ontario's rich railway heritage -- from stations and hotels to train rides, bridges, water towers, and roundhouses.

Rails Across Ontario will take the reader back to a time when the railway ruled the economy and the landscape.

Read about historic stations, railway museums, heritage train rides, and historic bridges. Follow old rail lines along Ontario's most popular rail trails. Find out where steam engines still puff across farm fields and where historic train coaches lead deep into the wilds of Ontario's scenic north country. Discover long forgotten but...

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...

St. Paul Union Depot was among the busiest and best-known places in the city--one of the largest depots in the nation and St. Paul's link to the world. It had nine platforms, twenty-one tracks, and well over 140 trains coming and going each day. At its peak in the 1920s, the Union Depot processed more than twenty million pieces of mail each year. Construction of the new depot began in 1917, among the burned remains of the previous depot, and was finally finished in 1926 as both a monument to St. Paul's urban growth and its gateway to the Northwest.

Practical rather than...

In this engaging social history of the impact of railroads on American life, H. Roger Grant explores the railroad's "golden age" of 1830-1930. To capture the essence of the nation's railroad experience, Grant looks at four fundamental topics--trains and travel, train stations, railroads and community life, and the legacy of railroading in America--illustrating each topic with carefully chosen period illustrations. Grant recalls the lasting memories left by train travel, both of luxurious Pullman cars and the grit and grind of coal-powered locals. He discusses the important role railroads...

On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad's eastbound New York Express derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of...

In 1901, the Northern Pacific was an unlikely prize: a twice-bankrupt construction of the federal government, it was a two-bit railroad (literally--five years back, its stock traded for twenty-five cents a share). But it was also a key to connecting eastern markets through Chicago to the rising West. Two titans of American railroads set their sights on it: James J. Hill, head of the Great Northern and largest individual shareholder of the Northern Pacific, and Edward Harriman, head of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific. The subsequent contest was unprecedented in the history of...

Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of the greater city of New York, broke ground for the first subway line by City Hall on March 24, 1900. It took four years, six months, and twenty-three days to build the line from City Hall to West 145th Street in Harlem. Things rarely went that quickly ever again. The Routes Not Taken explores the often dramatic stories behind the unbuilt or unfinished subway lines, shedding light on a significant...

In this visually stunning and comprehensive photographic essay, railroad historian and photographer Donovan L. Hofsommer records the end of branchline passenger service, the demise of electric railroads, the transition from steam to diesel power, as well as the end of common carrier freight service on the Colorado narrow gauge. Off the Main Lines carries readers along out-of-the-way railways in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, and South Dakota to see the changes that occurred on these lines from the 1940s to the 1990s.

The Indiana Rail Road Company is a story of extraordinary success among the scores of independent short line and regional railroads spawned in the wake of railroad deregulation. Christopher Rund chronicles the development of the company from its origins as part of America s first land grant railroad, the Illinois Central, through the political and financial juggling required by entrepreneur Tom Hoback to purchase the line when it fell into disrepair. Reborn as a robust, profitable carrier, the INRD has become a model for the new American regional railroad. This revised edition, with a new...

This original, deeply researched history shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.