The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America

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 status.

Every American town, great or small, aspired to be connected to a railroad and by the turn of the century, almost every American lived within easy access of a station. By the early 1900s, the United States was covered in a latticework of more than 200,000 miles of railroad track and a series of magisterial termini, all built and controlled by the biggest corporations in the land. The railroads dominated the American landscape for more than a hundred years but by the middle of the twentieth century, the automobile, the truck, and the airplane had eclipsed the railroads and the nation started to forget them.  

In The Great Railroad Revolution, renowned railroad expert Christian Wolmar tells the extraordinary story of the rise and the fall of the greatest of all American endeavors, and argues that the time has come for America to reclaim and celebrate its often-overlooked rail heritage.
 

• The Iron Road: An Illustrated History of the Railroad
• The Story of American Railroads: From the Iron Horse to the Diesel Locomotive
• The Historical Guide to North American Railroads, 3rd Edition (Trains Books)
• Train: The Definitive Visual History
• Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869
• Lost Railway Journeys from Around the World
• Railroads Across North America: An Illustrated History
• Jim Shaughnessy Essential Witness: Sixty Years of Railroad Photography
• DK Eyewitness Books: Train: Discover the Story of Railroads from the Age of Steam to the High-Speed Trains o from the Age of Steam to the High-Speed Trains of Today
• To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad