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No chapter in railroad history can rival the popular appeal of the wood-burning era. Its great funnel-shaped smokestack, gallant red paint, and polished brass have endeared the wood burner to generations of Americans.
Our half-known new western empire was mapped, in a great mass exploration, by the Army’s Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853
The Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853 —a grand national reconnaissance extending over half a continent and led by men who would later be counted among the most prominent soldiers and scientists of the Republic
Locomotive whistles had a language all their own
The switchmen knew by the whistle’s moansThat the man at the throttle was Casey Jones.
The Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory—and the nation had truly been railroaded
At Promontory, Utah Territory, on the raw afternoon of May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, the beefy, pompous president of the Central Pacific Railroad, hefted a silver-plated sledge hammer while David Hewes, a dedicated railroad booster from San Francisco, stood by the golden spike
To a culinary wilderness Fred Harvey brought civilized cooking—and pretty girls to serve it.
In a thousand tank towns and junctions across the land, he was a man boys wanted to be when they grew up.
The steamship clerk of Pig’s Eye, Minnesota, built a railroad empire from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound
Long before his death, more than forty years ago, Jim Hill had become a legend in the American West. Whether lie was hero or villain matters little.
Snowshed crews on the Central Pacific, battling blizzards and snowslides, built “the longest house in the world”
Opening the mail route to California, the Butterfield coaches flew across the rugged, wild Southwest in twenty-five exhausting days
Single-track lines run by one-track minds gave the reformers of Boston their biggest cause since abolition
So long as it remained in public consciousness it was known as the Great Revere Disaster. Written or spoken it deserved the adjective, and the capitals. Worse railroad wrecks had happened before; worse were to come after.
John W. Garrett turned the pioneer Baltimore & Ohio into a great instrument for tapping the treasure of the West
The iron horses that built America are nearly all gathered on the other side of Jordan
It was the way they worked the cord and changed the steam pressure that made the whistle almost seem to talk.
For decades the private railroad car was the great symbol of wealth. Here is what it looked like in its heyday.
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