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Buried Dreams - The Hoosac Tunnel and the Demise of the Railroad Age (Hardcover)
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Buried Dreams - The Hoosac Tunnel and the Demise of the Railroad Age (Hardcover)
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The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern
Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction
marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad,
and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the
time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851-1875),
almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to
build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of
economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known
today. Andrew R. Black's Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of
the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came
to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and
the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special
case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced
repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac
Tunnel was just one of the state's efforts in this cycle of decline
and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also
explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the
spoils of western expansion in the post-Erie Canal period. His
study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between
Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and
collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics.
The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War
heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it
was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had
given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism.
Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts
eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a
private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America's
reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of
technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors
untempered by humility.
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