Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
railroads
When he’s not taking care of a majestic marshaling of toy trains, Graham Claytor gets to play with the real thing.
The spare and vigorous gentleman on the opposite page, William Graham Claytor, Jr., superintending the departure of a local out of South Sun-Porch Station, D.C., at his brick house in Georgetown, is the only man in Washington, or anywhere else in the country for that matter, wh
They created towns and became the center of Western life, enabling wheat, cattle, and minerals to flow out of the West.
Half a century after engines touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West. Some enthusiastic real-estate promoters and railway officials even claimed that the railroads invented the West—or at least the national image of the West.
Where two lines raced to drive the last spike In the transcontinental track
Overrated For a hundred years the armor-plate scandal of the 1890s has been offered up as a definitive example of corporate greed. In fact it’s a better example of government incompetence.
A century and a half of the U.S. economy, from the railroad revolution to the information revolution
Cotton, Gold, and Flesh
Paying For Union
The Age of Steel
Building the transcontinental railroad was the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Was it also the biggest swindle?
Introduction:
Two unique trains provide the chance to relax into the luxury that travel by rail once promised.
One day toward the end of his, life Henry Ford was talking with a local boy named John Dahlinger about the state of things, and they got onto the subject of education.
Light rail was an attractive, economical, and environmentally sound technology until the auto companies crushed it. That, at any rate, is what a lot of people believe, and now the nation is spending billions to re-create an imaginary past.
In a crucial scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the murderous Judge Doom reveals a “plan of epic proportions” for transforming metropolitan Los Angeles.
A great and living monument to commerce, engineering, art, and human ingenuity
In 1929's You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote that “few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and…there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station
George Selden never built a car himself, but he did manage to secure a patent on every auto manufactured.
The usual image of invention is of the solitary genius struggling in his garret with an idea only he has faith in. One day, he shouts, “Eureka!” and the world changes. Sometimes this is actually the case.
How Peter Cooper managed to make himself deeply rich and deeply beloved at the same time
It’s a story that has been told many times. The Hewlett-Packard Company was founded by two gifted tinkerers, David Packard and William Hewlett, in a garage in PaIo Alto, California, in 1938, with $538 in capital.
In a classic model of government corruption, the promoters placed shares of the company's stock “where it will do most good"—in the pockets of key Congressmen
In 1820, their daily existence was practically medieval; 30 later, many of them were living the modern life.
It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans.
The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national preoccupation because it has always been a necessity. Faxes and Federal Express are just the latest among many innovations for getting the message across.
Reaching out and touching someone hasn’t always been easy—especially if it was necessary to hand that person something in the process.
William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–85), president of the New York Central and numerous other railroads, was a quiet, honest, modest, and, above all else, moderate man.
A trackside album of celebrities from the days when the world went by train
A person used to enter New York City “like a god,” said the art critic Vincent Scully, but “one scuttles in now like a rat.”
A lot of people still remember how great it was to ride in the old Pullmans, how curiously regal to have a simple, well-cooked meal in the dining car. Those memories are perfectly accurate, and that lost pleasure holds a lesson for us that extends beyond mere nostalgia.
Not long ago, I received a very angry letter from an old friend. It was a response to my suggestion that liberal arts colleges might give students some instruction in technology; that is, give them some feeling for how the world they are living in works.
Magnificently impractical and obsolete almost as soon as they were built, the cable lines briefly dominated urban transportation throughout the country.
Beloved of San Franciscans for more than a century now, the sturdy cable cars cling tenaciously to the hills of their birth.
During the 1920s the city spurred local rail traffic with an unparalleled run of superb and stylish posters
Surprisingly little is known about the posters shown on these pages. Springing up practically overnight in the mid-1920s, they bloomed for a short while, four or five years at most, and then their season, was over.
A pioneer locomotive builder used pen and ink, watercolor, and near-total recall to re-create the birth of a titanic enterprise
TOWARD THE END of his life, in the 1880s, David Matthew could go across the bay from his San Francisco home and see the long transcontinental trains rolling into Oakland.
Today more Americans live in them than in city and country combined. How did we get there?
ABOUT SUBURBS, ONLY COMMUTERS know for sure.
Was it science, sport, or the prospect of a round-the-world railroad that sent the tycoon off on his costly Alaskan excursion?
The railroad tycoon Edward Harriman was a man of large vision and mysterious ways. When, on a day in March of 1899, he strode into the Washington office of Dr. C. Hart Merriam, chief of the U.S.
How a Whole Nation Said Thank You
They arrived in America chocked and chained, deep in the hold of a French merchant ship early in February of 1949.
The John Bull Steams Again
In early September of 1831, Isaac Dripps, master mechanic of the nascent Camden and I Amboy Railroad, stood staring at a miscellaneous assortment of bolts, levers, and pipes I that he was expected to assemble into a working locomotive.
It was called “the most extraordinary and astounding adventure of the Civil War”
On the pleasant Sunday evening of April 6, 1862, the men of Company H, 33rd Ohio Infantry, were relaxing around their campfires near Shelbyville, Tennessee, admiring the Southern springtime and trading the latest army rumors.
Mile for mile, it cost more in dollars—and lives—than any railroad ever built
It was not long after the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855 that Bedford Clapperton Pirn declared with perfect composure that of all the world’s wonders none could surpass this one as a demonstration of man’s capacity to do great things against imposs
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