Invisible Giants is the Horatio Alger-esque tale of a pair of reclusive Cleveland brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, who rose from poverty to become two of the most powerful men in America. They controlled the country's largest railroad system -- a network of track reaching from the Atlantic to Salt Lake City and from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eve of the Great Depression they were close to controlling the country's first coast-to-coast rail system -- a goal that still eludes us. They created the model upper-class suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its unique rapid transit access. They built Cleveland's landmark Terminal Tower and its innovative "city within a city" complex. Indisputably, they created modern Cleveland.

Yet beyond a small, closely knit circle, the bachelor Van Sweringen brothers were enigmas. Their actions were aggressive, creative, and bold, but their manner was modest, mild, and retiring. Dismissed by many as mere shoe-string financial manipulators, they created enduring works, which remain strong today. The Van Sweringen story begins in early-20th-century Cleveland suburban real estate and reaches its zenith in the heady late 1920s, amid the turmoil of national transportation power politics and unprecedented empire-building. As the Great Depression destroyed many of their fellow financiers, the "Vans" survived through imaginative stubbornness -- until tragedy ended their careers almost simultaneously. Invisible Giants is the first comprehensive biography of these two remarkable if mysterious men.

Early in the 19th century, growing American cities began to experience transportation problems. One solution was the horse-drawn streetcar, developed in 1832, but it soon proved inadequate. The first elevated train was transporting passengers above the streets of Manhattan by 1871; the first subway opened 25 years later in Boston; and similar systems soon followed in Philadelphia and Chicago. Rapid transit was confined to these few cities until after World War II, when a new generation of systems began to appear. In the 1970s, light rail became an economical alternative to conventional rapid transit. By century s end, some three dozen cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico operated metropolitan rapid transit or light rail systems that transported five billion urban passengers annually, and still more were under construction or planned.
These diverse systems include elevated lines ranging from Chicago s "L" to the fully automatic Skytrain metro of Vancouver, B.C.; subways from New York City s thundering tunnels the world s largest underground system to the thoroughly modern metro of Guadalajara; and light rail from lovingly restored New Orleans streetcars to the sleek, articulated vehicles of Silicon Valley.

Metropolitan Railways is a large-scale, extensively illustrated volume that deals with the growth and development of urban rail transit systems in North America. It traces the history of rail transit technology from such impractical early schemes as a proposed steam-powered "arcade railway" under New York s Broadway through today s sophisticated systems. Rapid transit enthusiasts as well as residents of cities that are potential candidates for rapid transit or light rail systems will find this book indispensable."

The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first public railway to be empowered to convey goods and passengers by steam traction, has been dismissed by historians as fulfilling little more than a precursory role in the inauguration of the ‘Railway Age’. This book establishes its claim to recognition as a significant element in the maturing phase of Britain’s industrialisation after 1830, through an examination of its critical role in the contemporary national debate on the merits of steam power and its direct effect on the economic growth of south Durham and north-east Yorkshire, a region which became the most important iron-producing centre in the world, partly as a result of the Stockton and Darlington Railway’s role as a ‘fuel artery’. The experience of the company is of direct relevance to economic historians concerned with the regional basis of Britain’s industrialisation.

This comprehensive history of North American railroad electrification has been out of print for many years. Now, Indiana University Press is proud to announce its return in an new, updated second edition.

For most of the first half of the 20th century the United States led the way in railroad electrification. Before the outbreak of World War II, the country had some 2,400 route-miles and more than 6,300 track-miles operating under electric power, far more than any other nation and more than 20 percent of the world s total. In almost every instance, electrification was a huge success. Running times were reduced. Tonnage capacities were increased. Fuel and maintenance costs were lowered, and the service lives of electric locomotives promised to be twice as long as those of steam locomotives. Yet despite its many triumphs, electrification of U.S. railroads failed to achieve the wide application that once was so confidently predicted. By the 1970s, it was the Soviet Union, with almost 22,000 electrified route-miles, that led the way, and the U.S. had declined to 17th place.

Today, electric operation of U.S. railroads is back in the limelight. The federally funded Northeast Corridor Improvement Program has provided an expanded Northeast Corridor electrification, with high-speed trains that are giving the fastest rail passenger service ever seen in North America, while still other high-speed corridors are planned for other parts of the country. And with U.S. rail freight tonnage at its highest levels in history, the ability of electric locomotives to expand capacity promises to bring renewed consideration of freight railroad electrification.

Middleton begins his ambitious chronicle of the ups and downs of railway electrification with the history of its early days, and brings it right up to the present which is surely not the end of this complex and mercurial story."

The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union\u2019s First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic \u0022backwardness\u0022 of the USSR\u2019s minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation. Built between December 1926 and January 1931 by nearly 50,000 workers and at a cost of more 161 million rubles, Turksib embodied the Bolsheviks\u2019 commitment to end ethnic inequality and promote cultural revolution in one the far-flung corners of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan. Trumpeted as the \u0022forge of the Kazakh proletariat,\u0022 the railroad was to create a native working class, bringing not only trains to the steppes, but also the Revolution. In the first in-depth study of this grand project, Matthew Payne explores the transformation of its builders in Turksib\u2019s crucible of class war, race riots, state purges, and the brutal struggle of everyday life. In the battle for the souls of the nation\u2019s engineers, as well as the racial and ethnic conflicts that swirled, far from Moscow, around Stalin\u2019s vast campaign of industrialization, he finds a microcosm of the early Soviet Union.

Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway
History and Steam Locomotives

Richard E. Prince

Richard E. Prince s long out-of-print encyclopedic study of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway, "The Dixie Line," with hundreds of vintage photographs, schematics, maps, and rosters.

Railroad buffs, historians, and casual readers alike will be delighted by the reappearance of Richard E. Prince s Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. It was originally published in 1967, and its reputation as the foremost work on this railroad is still unchallenged.
The NC&StL Railway originated in 1845 as the Nashville and Chattanooga RR. Taken over by the Union Army during the Civil War, it suffered extensive damage from Confederate attack but was rebuilt and operated by the U.S. Military Railroad for over two years. Returned to its owners in September 1865, it became the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. in 1873, after absorbing the Nashville & Northwestern RR.
During the next 25 years, it became known to the public first as the Tennessee Line, then as the Lookout Mountain Route. In 1890 it gained entrance into Atlanta as lessee of the state-owned Western & Atlantic RR. Paducah and Memphis were reached in 1896, when lines of the former Paducah, Tennessee & Alabama RR were leased from L&N. At its zenith in the 1920s, it operated approximately 1,259 miles of track, from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1880, to eliminate the threat of competition that was developing between the two companies, the Louisville & Nashville RR acquired control of the NC&StL Ry., much to the dismay of the citizens of Nashville, and for the next 77 years it operated as a prosperous subsidiary of the Old Reliable. It was actually absorbed by the L&N organization in 1957 to become part of the Nashville and W&A divisions. But it will always be remembered by the people of Tennessee and Georgia as the original Dixie Line the route of such Chicago-Florida passenger trains as the Dixie Flyer, Dixie Limited, Dixie Express, Dixie Mail, Dixieland, Dixie Flagler, and Dixiana.
Maps, schedules, rosters, diagrams, and hundreds of photographs supplement historical information on the company and technical information on the trains.

Richard E. Prince attended Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta. During World War II, he joined the Merchant Marine and sailed on steam Liberty ships. He worked in several capacities for the L&N Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad. Prince retired in 1983 and lives in Omaha, Nebraska. He has written ten books on railroads.

May 2001
196 pages, 348 b&w photos, 8 1/4 x 10 3/4, index
cloth 0-253-33927-8 $59.95 t / 45.00

Contents
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. Historical Sketch
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. The Tennessee Line
Western & Atlantic Railroad
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. -Lookout Mountain Route
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. The Dixie Line
Steam Locomotives Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry.
Steam Freight and Passenger Trains NC&StL Ry.
Steam Locomotive Diagrams"

Louisville & Nashville Steam Locomotives
Revised 1968 Edition
Richard E. Prince

A revised new edition of an encyclopedic study.

"For over one hundred years the steam locomotives provided the principal motive power on the Louisville & Nashville RR. During this period over 2000 different steam engines were owned by the Old Reliable." Thus begins Richard E. Princes encyclopedic study of the Louisville & Nashville s Steam Locomotives.

First published in 1959 and revised in 1968, this is the crucial book for the Louisville and Nashville Locomotive's many steam fans. With hundreds of vintage photographs, detailed rosters, and schematic drawings it is an invaluable resource for railroad buffs and historians. But even casual readers will be swept up in Prince s history of the growth and diversification of the L&N.

Richard E. Prince is author of nine railroad books. He attended Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta. During World War II, he joined the Merchant Marines and sailed on steam Liberty ships. He worked in several capacities for the L&N Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad. He is now retired and lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Among his many books are Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and Seaboard Air Line Railway (Indiana University Press)."

Although concentrating on the former Southern Railway lines that ran in both valleys, this book will appeal not only to the railway enthusiast, but also to all who have an interest in this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The photographic journey starts in Plymouth and explores the area by train and road.

During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia by rail, this alliance created one of the largest corporations in the world, engendered bitter political struggles, and transformed the South in lasting ways, says Scott Nelson. Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan's most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy. |Focusing on the Reconstruction era, this book links the expansion of Southern railways by Southern planters and northern capitalists to issues of State's rights, racial violence, and big business.

A history of the Pennsylvania Railroad and its predecessor companies in Indiana. Few corporate institutions had such widespread impact upon Indiana's people or their way of life the "Pennsy" once operated one-fourth of the state's rail mileage. Highlights of its story include coverage of its famous passenger trains, its impact upon the state's economy, the railroad's contributions to Allied victory in World War II, and the post-war decline which led to its merger into Penn Central. Illustrations recreate images of its speedy passenger trains and heavy-tonnage freights, as well as advertising and other promotional materials dating back to the 1840s."

When the American Railway Union went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894, it set into motion a chain of events whose repercussions are still felt today. The strike pitted America's largest industrial union against twenty-four railroads, paralyzed rail traffic in half the country, and in the end was broken up by federal troops and suppressed by the courts, with union leader Eugene Debs incarcerated. But behind the Pullman case lay a conflict of ideologies at a watershed time in our nation's history.

David Ray Papke reexamines the events and personalities surrounding the 1894 strike, related proceedings in the Chicago trial courts, and the 1895 Supreme Court decision, In re Debs, which set important standards for labor injunctions. He shows how the Court, by upholding Debs's contempt citation, dealt fatal blows to broad-based unionism in the nation's most important industry and to any hope for a more evenhanded form of judicial involvement in labor disputes-thus setting the stage for labor law in decades to come.

The Pullman case was a defining moment in the often violent confrontation between capital and labor. It matched wealthy industrialist George Pullman against Debs and gave a stage to Debs's fledgling attorney Clarence Darrow. Throughout the trial, capital and labor tried to convince the public of the justice of their cause: Debs decrying the company's treatment of workers and Pullman raising fears of radical unionists. Papke provides an analytically concise and highly readable account of these proceedings, offering insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the law at the peak of industrial capitalism, showcasing Debs's passionate commitment to workers' rights, and providing a window on America during a period of rapid industrialization and social transformation.

Papke shows that the law was far from neutral in defending corporate interests and suggests what the Pullman case, by raising questions about both the legitimacy of giant corporations and the revolutionary style of industrial unions, can teach us about law and legal institutions in our own time. His book captures the passions of industrial America and tells an important story at the intersection of legal and cultural history.

It took ten years of laborious planning and exhaustive negotiations to create the mammoth Penn Central Railroad, the largest railroad in United States history. When the leviathan was finally born of a merger between the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads on February 1, 1968, the event was hailed as a great day for railroading. But the baby giant survived only 367 days. The crash of the Penn Central set a new record, this time for the largest bankruptcy the United States had ever seen.

"The Wreck of the Penn Central" provides a close-up view of the events that brought the Big Train to bankruptcy court--over-regulation, subsidized competition, big labor featherbedding, greed, corporate back-stabbing, stunning incompetence, and, yes, even a little sex.

Though Cuba was among the first countries in the world to utilize rail transport, the history of its railroads has been little studied. This English translation of the prize-winning Caminos para el azucar traces the story of railroads in Cuba from their introduction in the nineteenth century through the 1959 Revolution. More broadly, the book uses the development of the Cuban rail transport system to provide a fascinating perspective on Cuban history, particularly the story of its predominant agro-industry, sugar. While railroads facilitated the sugar industry's rapid growth after 1837, the authors argue, sugar interests determined where railroads would be built and who would benefit from them. Zanetti and Garcia explore the implications of this symbiotic relationship for the technological development of the railroads, the economic evolution of Cuba, and the lives of the railroad workers. As this work shows, the economic benefits that accompanied the rise of railroads in Europe and the United States were not repeated in Cuba. Sugar and Railroads provides a poignant demonstration of the fact that technological progress alone is far from sufficient for development. |Traces the history of railroads in Cuba through the 1959 revolution, showing how the sugar industry controlled the location of railroads and determined who would benefit from them.

The Louisiana & Arkansas Railway, known as "The Better Way," ran its first trains at the turn of the century and expanded over the years to connect New Orleans to Dallas. Well-maintained and enduringly profitable, this regional railroad succeeded because of the tenacity of three men who consecutively oversaw all aspects of operations. The story of the L&A is largely a collective biography of William Edenborn, William Buchanan, and Harvey Couch—the men who built and extended the line by shrewd acquisitions. These successful businessmen combined wisdom, foresight, and propensity for hard word—traits they had first demonstrated in other careers—with their longtime love for trains. Each applied remarkable talents for industry and commerce toward the development of the L&A to mold it into a model regional railroad. In this first history of the L&A, Fair traces the line's development from the early boom days of railroading to its dissolution in the modern era of takeovers. Although for much of its existence the L&A operated under the control of a parent company, the KCS, it long maintained independence. The eventual takeover by the superline in 1992 finally dissolved the L&A entirely.

The Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were officially joined on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, with the driving of a golden spike. This historic ceremony marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Spanning the Sierras and the "Great American Desert," the tracks connected San Francisco to Council Bluffs, Iowa. "A Great and Shining Road" is the exciting story of a mammoth feat that called forth entrepreneurial daring, financial wizardry, technological innovation, political courage and chicanery, and the heroism of thousands of laborers.