A different focus

books:

	• Union Pacific: Volume I, 1862-1893 Maury Klein Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006 - 820 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A different focus

This book focuses almost entirely on financial and corporate politics of the Union Pacific and how that plays out with other railroads and the government. Less than 20% of this book is devoted to locomotives, freight cars, track, issues of building new lines, technology, passengers, stations, the products shipped, dispatching, or what it was like to work on the railroad. You won't find anecdotes or stories of battling the elements or dealing with wrecks. An exception is a description of the Salton Sea and the railroad's efforts to control the flooding that threatened the communities around the sea. But the transition from steam to diesel, for example, gets perhaps a page at most.

The personality of Harriman dominates the first part of the book and we get - in great detail - his battles with other railroad presidents. Financing issues, struggles with the always clueless ICC - that's what the focus is on. The author is a little prone to see things entirely from the Union Pacific perspective but since that is probably underrepresented in other writings, so it may be OK.

To be sure, as the book moves into the 20's and 30's there are chapters on labor and other topics -- the streamliners get a little play too. But the author's focus is almost always on the top leaders and how they are dealing with each other as much as anything else.

So am I not recommending the book? No, the book can be a useful antidote to too much railroad fan-based writing that excessively focuses on pain schemes and the shape of air filters. But it is not a fully-rounded portrait of the company as a transportation enterprise and the culture it created.

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The Union Pacific Railroad is renowned as America?s first transcontinental railroad and is one of the strongest companies in the railroad industry today. The laying of the golden spike in Promontory, Utah, in 1869 marked not only the opening of the continent to settlement but also the transformation of the United States from an agricultural nation to an industrial one. Maury Klein, America?s foremost railroad historian, re-creates the powerful personalities and dramatic events that led to the construction of this legendary railroad. Fully illustrated with over one hundred historic photographs and maps, Union Pacific details the feat of engineering and human strength that conquered the terrain of the desert and mountains and also the colorful wheelings and dealings that were waged in executive boardrooms in New York and Boston and in the chambers of Congress as dreamers and scoundrels, politicians and patriots forged a pioneering enterprise in transportation. Maury Klein is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Life and Legend of Jay Gould.

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