Welcome aboard! Travel back in time to join the workers of the Union Pacific Railroad as they pounded west and those from the Central Pacific Railroad as they charged east to build the first transcontinental rail line in the United States. They were racing to meet in Utah, and it was high drama all the way. Workers had to burst through rocky outcrops while hanging in baskets and sleep in tents on top of railroad cars or in barracks buried in snow. Bouncy, short verse highlights the steps it took to finally bring the tracks together, and powerful illustrations capture the landscape and the labor.
In picture and text this book tells of the locomotives involved in the building of the first transcontinental railroad and its completion with the driving of a golden spike into a laurel tie at Promontory Utah, May 10, 1869. The rolling stock is described; the locomotive builders too long neglected, are presented and the writer brings to the reader interested in the Pioneer West, many "happenings" along the line which have hitherto not been published. This book also includes many rare and unpublished photographs of construction times, locomotives, and scenes along the route by such acknowledged cameramen of the time as Andrew J. Russell, S. ). Sedgwick, Charles 11. Savage, and Alfred A. Hart. There are maps, timetables and documentary reproductions, a complete roster of motive power of the Central Pacific to 1891 mid the Union Pacific to 1885 and scale model drawings of Central Pacific No. 60 Jupiter and Union Pacific No. 119.
A "masterly" account of the origins of the transcontinental railroad (Douglas Brinkley) by the author of the bestselling The Admirals. After the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, the rest of the United States was up for grabs, and the race was on. The prize: a better, shorter, less snowy route through the American Southwest, linking Los Angeles to Chicago. In Iron Horses, Borneman recounts the rivalries, contested routes, political posturing, and business dealings that unfolded as an increasing number of lines pushed their way across the country. Borneman brings to life the legendary robber barons behind it all and also captures the herculean efforts required to construct these roads -- the laborers who did the back-breaking work, the brakemen who ran atop moving cars, the tracklayers crushed and killed by runaway trains. From backroom deals in Washington, DC, to armed robberies of trains in the wild deserts, from cattle cars to streamliners and Super Chiefs, all the great incidents and innovations of a mighty American era are made vivid in Iron Horses.
For use in schools and libraries only. In an act of bravery and defiance against the white men encroaching on their territory in 1867, a group of young Cheyenne braves derail and raid a freight train.
"Keith L. Bryant Jr. and Fred W. Frailey present a comprehensive history of the financing, construction, growth, and management of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway"--
The definitive account of the life and tragic death of baseball legend Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig was a baseball legend—the Iron Horse, the stoic New York Yankee who was the greatest first baseman in history, a man whose consecutive-games streak was ended by a horrible disease that now bears his name. But as this definitive new biography makes clear, Gehrig’s life was more complicated—and, perhaps, even more heroic—than anyone really knew. Drawing on new interviews and more than two hundred pages of previously unpublished letters to and from Gehrig, Luckiest Man gives us an intimate portrait of the man who became an American hero: his life as a shy and awkward youth growing up in New York City, his unlikely friendship with Babe Ruth (a friendship that allegedly ended over rumors that Ruth had had an affair with Gehrig’s wife), and his stellar career with the Yankees, where his consecutive-games streak stood for more than half a century. What was not previously known, however, is that symptoms of Gehrig’s affliction began appearing in 1938, earlier than is commonly acknowledged. Later, aware that he was dying, Gehrig exhibited a perseverance that was truly inspiring; he lived the last two years of his short life with the same grace and dignity with which he gave his now-famous “luckiest man” speech. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man shows us one of the greatest baseball players of all time as we’ve never seen him before.
