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Great Machines Poems & songs of the American Railroad by Hedin Soft Cover 1996
The Great Machines Poems & songs of the American Railroad by Hedin Soft Cover 1996 251 pages Indexed
To countless Americans of not so long ago, the railroad was much more than the historic curiosity it is today. To many, it represented the very spirit of America itself, and its bold, uncompromising presence meant change, modernity, and an unchecked future.
More than any other innovation of the nineteenth century, the railroad helped shape the American experience, transforming the wilderness into civilization, the country into a nation of consolidated lands, and it redefined in almost inexplicable ways our fundamental notions of time, distance, and community, if not the very nature of ourselves. Indeed, the histories of the railroad and of America are so inextricably bound they are essentially one and the same. For generations the railroad was, as Walt Whitman characterized it, "the pulse of the continent," reigning supreme as the dynamic symbol of an expanding American empire.
The long and storied history of the railroad in the United States dates from 1829 when the first locomotives were imported from England by Horatio Allen for the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company. Being little more than boilers on wheels, they were nothing compared to the enormous steam engines that would roam the American landscape a hundred years later, some so long they would have to be hinged at the girth in order to pass around mountain curves. For many, in fact, these crude seven-ton contraptions proved to be sources of ridicule, and few at the time believed they could ever wrestle the control of the booming trade routes of the Northeast from the canalboat and the newly opened Erie Canal.
Following the first successful run of the Torn Thumb, a much sleeker locomotive built by inventor Peter Cooper in 1830, many short-run railroads began to appear, and by 1835 more than 200 rail lines were in design or construction, with over 1,000 miles of track in operation. By 1850, railroad investments in the country had reached nearly $4,000,000, and the total mileage nationwide had grown to almost 9,000, easily surpassing that of the canals. The eastern seaboard was linked to the Great lakes in 1850, to Chicago in 1853, and to the western side of the Mississippi in 1856.
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