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When Railroads Were New Charles Carter HARD COVER EX LIBRARY BOOK
When Railroads Were New By Charles Carter Hard Cover 1926 CENTENARY EDITION HARD COVER 324 Pages
EX-LIBRARY BOOK
PREFACE
CONCERNING certain aspects of the railroad, such as its finance, both high and ordinary, its construction and operation from a technical viewpoint, its moral turpitude and its predilection for manslaughter, whole libraries have been published. 'the fact that more libraries are constantly being added indicates a sustained interest in the subject which is not at all surprising, considering how intimately the railroad enters into the life of everybody, from the hosts who look directly to it for their bread, to the farmer and the manufacturer whose products it takes to market, the baby who depends upon it to bring the daily supply for his bottle, and the millionaire who expects it to furnish him an income.
What is surprising is that the general reader might search in vain throughout the wilderness of words for any satisfactory account of how the railroad came to America; of how Smith and Jones and Robinson quarreled first about what a railroad was, then about its desirability, then about how to build and run it; how they struggled with poverty, ignorance, and other inevitable obstacles, blundered and struggled on again until they had at last developed a method of transportation that, measured by its influence in accelerating the march of Progress, is the greatest achievement in the annals of the race.
Such human-interest stories of the railroad as have been preserved are but disjointed fragments constitoting a delirium of contradictions. It seems as if every statement ever made about the history of the railroad by any one has been disputed by some one else. For example, the honor of inventing the link motion of the locomotive is claimed for three different men. The invention of the four-wheeled truck is also claimed for three men. One of them obtained a patent for the device, then spent a fortune trying to protect it only to find out that he was not entitled to it.
The man who made the first trip on a locomotive in America gives a date for the event that contemporaneous data proves to be wrong.
The management of the greatest locomotive works in the world asserts that the first engine built by their founder ran only on fair days at the outset of its career, being replaced by horses on rainy days by its proud but prudent owners. On the other hand, the engineer who claims to have had charge of this first locomotive declares he ran it every day, rain or shine.
Dates that vary a whole year are given for so recent an event as the running of the first through passenger train over the Canadian Pacific Railway.
A former auditor of the Lake Shore in attempting to give the date of the Ashtabula wreck, in a historical paper presumably prepared with care, errs regarding the day of the month, the month, and the year. Yet auditors are popularly supposed to be the most distressingly accurate of men. Even this was outdone by a minister, who achieved the truly remarkable feat of writing a book about the same wreck without disclosing the date thereof or the number killed and injured therein.
In this volume an attempt has been made to gather the floating fragments of railroad history having a human interest into a coherent narrative of the worka-day trials and triumphs of the pioneers in the planning and the building of the railroad that would he neither a dry historical treatise nor a collection of anecdotes. It is not designed to be comprehensive in the sense of including details of all the early railroads, or even of all the important ones that have survived; for such a work would be as wearisome as it would be profitless. It is hoped, however, that it is sufficiently comprehensive to present a homely picture of the development of the railroad in America under various representative types of conditions.
Much of the material was published in a series of articles in the Railroad Man's Magazine by the Frank A. Munsey Company, New York, through whose courtesy it is reproduced here.
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