Kategoria BISAC: Transportation >> Railroads - History

Analyzing the origins, growth, and eventual dismantling of the Iowa Central Railway, which traversed the state from Ackley to Zearing and Mason City to Marshalltown, Don Hofsommer examines how this unremarkable, "plain vanilla" railway was an...

In the 1860s, land speculators in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory expected that a great city would rise where the railroad crossed the Red River of the North. In 1872, after the Northern Pacific Railroad laid its first tracks across the river, it brought settlers, capital, and access to Eastern markets and gave birth to the twin cities of Moorhead and Fargo.

Historian Carroll Engelhardt's Gateway to the Northern Plains chronicles the story of Fargo and Moorhead's birth and growth. Once just specks on the vast landscape of the Northern Plains, these twin cities...

First there was a single experimental coach, then an entire fleet. Soon Hiawatha was a railway legend. Loved for their radically new, streamlined look, the Hiawatha's Art Deco engines were a hallmark of American industrial design--a genre of passenger cars from Tip Top Tap to Touralux to the glass-encased Skytop. For Midwestern passengers from Chicago to Aberdeen, the Hiawatha represented speed, comfort, and luxury, offering spectacular views of the rolling landscape. From 1935 to 1970 it carried countless passengers and even more memories. Richly illustrated...

"Railroads were the country's first big business providing the nation's vital cardiovascular system, setting the tempo of life everywhere. All of it was reflected locally. . . . Rails to the North Star is a masterful catalog of data, a treasure-house of useful information, offering 'one-stop shopping' in a field central to Minnesota's history. All aboard " --Don L. Hofsommer

In the 1960s, Richard S. Prosser prepared Rails to the North Star, the first work to trace the routes of Minnesota's railways. From the first land grants for the construction of railroads in...