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Railroads of America By Frank Donovan Dust Jacket 1949
The Railroads of America Edited By Frank Donovan Dust Jacket 1949 244 pages
These are stories of the arteries of American commerce. The writers are as scattered as the railroads they write about. Both large and small rairloads are included. Among the chapters are inside stories on roads which came dangerously close to abandonment, but instead were headed by new, aggressive management, and were developed into modern, money making traffic routes.
Railroads of America is a cross section of our typical Class 1 carriers with some short lines and some atypical roads thrown in for good measure. It is written by people like you and me; people who enjoy riding trains; who get a thrill out of seeing the local freight shunting cars in the yards or who pause to watch the limited thunder by. Like the roads themselves the contributors to this volume are scattered in many parts of the nation. One or two are on railroad payrolls but for the most part their gainful employment comes from other sources. You may be sure, however, that each has his own Pennsy or Ma & Pa or Great Eastern which to him is the friendliest and most fascinating line of all.
Stories about properties large and small are included in this collection - ranging from the Pennsylvania with its busy four-track main line and close headways to the Pacific Great Eastern's curving rails and triweekly operation in sparsely populated British Columbia. Somewhere in between come the "transcontinentals," roads such as the Southern Pacific whose right of way stretches over two-thirds of the United States, or the Northern Pacific which binds the Twin Cities with the great Northwest. Of comparable size, too, is the sprawled out Southern Railway whose main line cuts across the South from Washington to New Orleans like a huge Sam Brown belt.
Again we have roads which specialize in handling one commodity. Take the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range, for example. Its very name gives it away as an iron ore road. Up in eastern New York and Pennsylvania's northeast corner the historic Delaware & Hudson has from its beginning regarded coal as its No. 1 meal ticket. These are some of the principal one-commodity carriers forming a specialized role in the nation's transportation picture.
Different still are roads which, because of their geographical location and a good measure of traffic aggressiveness, become valuable terminal properties or lucrative "bridge" lines. The century-old Reading Company does not haul tonnage very far on its own rails, but it does originate or terminate enough freight to make it one of the country's blue chip investments. The Minneapolis & St. Louis, long regarded by experts as a doomed railroad, found that by making its line an intermediate carrier for east-and-west freight, it could come out on the black side of the ledger. There you have it, two railroads, one concentrating on terminals and the other by-passing them, and both earning a comfortable return on their investments.
Just as the East differs from the West, so there is a world of contrast between the Susquehanna's streamlined rail units, and Pacific Electric's all-red interurban cars. Both roads cater to commuters, but each in its own way. And so it goes, each road having its own personality and peculiar type of service best geared to the territory it serves.
These articles then are of characteristic American railroads. They illustrate what the Iron Horse means to you and to me, and to our country. Whether your favorite is the story of the Pere Marquette's rise from a shambling lumber road to a mighty arm of the Chesapeake & Ohio; the saga of the Western Maryland which George Gould nearly made a part of his almost-completed ocean-to-ocean rail dynasty; or the wholesome tale of grass roots railroading in the 77-mile Ma & Pa - it is all a sector of American industry and an integral part of the American Scene.
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