'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title. Bain's vigorous, well-written narrative does much to restore those overlooked actors to history.

Others died penniless and nearly forgotten in the wake of political maneuverings and bad deals. Some of the men who came after Whitney, such as Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford, amassed great fortunes in realizing this dream.

Along the way Bain looks closely at the entrepreneurial men who foresaw the possibilities of a vast nation joined by a steel ribbon-most memorably the hit-and-miss businessman Asa Whitney, who proposed to Congress an ingenious scheme to fund the building of the railroad through commercializing the right of way. Clean blue boards with metallic lettering on spine. That rail line made possible the mass settlement of the West, and, as those who conceived it well knew, it changed the course of American history.ĭavid Haward Bain's superb narrative of westward rail history, weighing in at 800 pages, ends not with this great achievement but with the political and financial scandal that would almost overshadow it. First edition, first printing, signed by author, in clean unclipped jacket. Tired to the bone, the two groups laid down the last of countless wooden ties, bought at the exorbitant cost of six dollars apiece, and thus joined two great rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to form a single transcontinental route.

On the morning of May 10, 1869, a gang of Irish immigrants met a party of Chinese laborers on a windy bluff northwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad is a book written by David Haward Bain, published in 2000. Publication date 1999 Topics Railroads - United States - History, West (U.S.) - History Publisher Viking Collection inlibrary printdisabled internetarchivebooks china Digitizing sponsor Internet Archive Contributor Internet Archive Language English.

Empire Express by David Haward Bain