"Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business
enterprise," "Forbes" magazine informed its readers in May 1936.
"Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century,
the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business
corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two
hundred thousand people--more than double the number of soldiers in
the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad
of the World," this colossal corporate body underwrote American
industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social
environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was
fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to
geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public
policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become
the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates
broad themes in American history, from the development of
managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship
between business and government to advances in technology and
transportation.Churella situates exhaustive archival research on
the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and
technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America,
chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a
developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of
the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the
1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a
private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of
the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the
nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor
unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads
and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of
stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such
architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City.
The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World
War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in
previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company
through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.
General
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