Customer Reviews

All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It seems as if this book was slapped together in a week from the author's trivia catalog and then submitted to the publisher. There was no apparent editing of the manuscript evidenced by the sloppy punctuation, incomplete sentences and the horribly repetitious material. The two following sentences illustrate these three flaws and the trivial nature of the information presented throughout the book. Page 54 (hardcover) contains this sentence: "It was not unheard of that the station agent doubled in brass as the barber, postmaster, express agent, real estate dealer, seed salesman, druggist, florist, cemetery manager, even dentist."(sic) Then on page 274, this sentence appears: "In some communities, the agent doubled as postmaster, and it was not unknown for him to be the barber, the seed dealer, or even the dentist."

Finally, the author makes a factual error about recent history which calls into question the accuracy of the rest of the book. Near the merciful end on page 393, the author comments that "... the airline industry ... had become 'deregulated' under the very same Reagan administration." In fact, the U.S. airline industry was deregulated in 1978 during the Carter administration. Pretty basic stuff.

The book reminds me of many a term paper written in college - loads of fluff, not much substance and sloppy. After reading that the author is a professor of English, I couldn't help thinking what grade he would give his own book.

If you buy one book about trains in your lifetime, make sure it is NOT this book.

The framework of this book attempts to relate the railroad to American life, but provides very few specific insights. Changes such as standard time, commuting, etc. are minimally covered. As a general railroad history, it is superficial. Essentially it tries to cover too much, and it is not tightly written. A fast reader or one cursed with a good memory will see constant repitition of minor interesting points in several chapters, making the book feel padded. I'd pass on this one

ALL ABOARD! was a gift to me from a fellow volunteer at our local historical museum, and he himself had received it as a gift from the first owner, the late Klink Garrett, former official of the Railway Express Agency and co-author of Ten Turtles to Tucumcari, a fascinating account of his wide-ranging experiences with the REA. With this history behind the copy I was given, I was determined to read it, and, after three months, I have. Unfortunately, that time span is very indicative of the readability of the text and of the level of interest it engenders in the reader.

Another reviewer in this forum has already castigated Douglas for the grammatical errors in the book, and I must agree with that reviewer to an extent. The first hundred or so pages are indeed replete with egregious misspellings, creating words that are totally and nonsensically out of place. These errors, which are indeed distracting to any careful reader, appear to be the result of Douglas' having employed a poor typist and the absence of competent proofreading. However, the author must have engaged a more competent typist or at least a more professional proofreader, for these errors thankfully diminish and recur only occasionally in the following 300 pages. Still, I must admit that, only three pages from the end of the narrative, the well-known and widely published railroad author Lucius Beebe appears as "Beebee."

These typographical errors aside, Douglas' writing lacks imagination. While it may be too harsh to describe his style as plodding, neither is it creative or scintillating. "Lackluster" is perhaps the most accurate descriptor of the author's vocabulary and sentence structure. When I wrote that I was determined to read the book, my own word choice may have been influenced by the fact that finishing all 399 pages of narrative did require determination.

The book does enjoy its strong points, however. Too many published railroad histories are hopelessly mired in a plethora of minutiae: dollar amounts of loans and company indebtedness down to the actual cent, miles of track constructed in each year down to the tenth of a mile, names of every unknown functionary who ever sat on a governing board, and so on. Douglas' book never enters that trap, focusing as it does on the broader influences that the railroad has exerted on culture, society and mind set in the United States.

The writer paints the railroad history of this country with a fairly broad brush, yet, in so doing, does present some surprising revelations, such as the fact that suburbia began as a result of the availability of rail transport and was not a child solely of the automobile as I had supposed. Similarly, Douglas explains that the origins of the very word "commuter" lie with the railroad, which reduced, or "commuted," the cost of tickets for frequent riders. I find that facts such as these go far in redeeming the book from its other flaws, and I cannot totally condemn any book from which I have learned something new, despite its other shortcomings.

Ironically, though, it may be the extensive bibliography in this book that argues most strongly against it. So much has been written about the history of railroading that one is forced to ask whether yet another book on the same subject is really justified. To enter such a competitive field successfully, an author must produce a genuinely outstanding work, the result of research that has uncovered new insights into the subject and which is expressed in captivating prose. Douglas' book, unfortunately, falls short of both criteria. In fact, its greatest contribution may be its bibliography, which can guide the inquiring reader to other and more satisfying books on the continuing saga of the railroad.

I applaud Douglas for breaking away from the typical approach to railroad history. It seems like every other book follows the "all hail the railroad" model. Douglas tries to tie railroading into the social fabric of American history. I think it is an approach that is long over due.

_All Aboard!: The Railroad in American Life_ by George H. Douglas is a history of the development and use of the railroad and its impact on American culture, society, politics, war, and the economy. It is a richly illustrated book with endnotes and an extensive bibliography (yet easily read by the average, non-specialist reader).

The central them of this book is that the railroad made the country what it is today. Prior to railroads, travel between cities and states was costly, long, uncomfortable, difficult, and sometimes dangerous. Roads in many areas were virtually nonexistent or almost totally unusable, sometimes no better than game trails. There was virtually no interstate (or even intercity) commerce, as each region had to be virtually autonomous, as only the wealthy could import goods and even then rarely in great quantity. As late as the 1830s, the U.S. was a "disjointed nation composed of lonely and self-sufficient farmers."

The railroads changed all of this forever. Cities that once took days to travel between suddenly took only hours. Many once isolated communities became forged into one national community. In addition to linking towns, cities, and regions, the railroads gave rise to whole new communities, literally "something from nothing." New towns sprung up where the railroads went, either arising on their own thanks to the advantages offered by rail transport, or created by the railroads themselves, first in the Midwest, later in the Far West. Confounding European visitors, these "railroads to nowhere" opened up vast sections of the country, provided land for many thousands of Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants (many railroad had agents in Eastern port cities or even Europe itself to encourage and aid immigrants), and by opening such tremendously fertile land, providing rail transport and such innovations as refrigerated cars for milk and meat, enabled American agricultural output to dwarf that of the rest of the world.

Douglas wrote that the railroad was what "brought the United States into being," creating the nation with which we are familiar with today. In addition to creating a national identity of being an American, making long distance travel safe (and later quite comfortable) and long distance trade economically feasible, settling the Midwest and the Far West, and making America the breadbasket of the world, the railroads brought into existence the suburbs (well before cars and paved roads became commonplace, a myriad of commuter lines served small towns, allowing people to live in one place and work somewhere else; the very word commuter arose from the concept of "commuted" fares in the 1840s, when railroads offered lower ticket prices as a reward to regular patrons). Railroads also gave us the shopping mall (most of the great 19th century and early 20th century urban train stations had a multitude of shops, restaurants, and other services), the modern vacation (railroads were the first to publicize such places as our national parks, Niagara Falls, and the beaches of Florida as well as provide cheap transportation to them), and even country music (Jimmy Rodgers, the "Father of Country Music," was for a time a rail worker, writing many songs about life on the train and was heavily influenced by music he heard while working on the railroad, particularly from cowboys, work songs, and the music of black railroad workers).

Douglas covered many aspects of the technical development of railroads, though he tended to be light on technical details and focus more on the economic, cultural, and societal impact. He covered such things as the evolution of passenger accommodations, from the early days of hard wooden seats in coaches without springs (often a rough ride) to the development of luxurious Pullman sleeper cars and even more palatial private railway cars, the advent of the vertical end frame for passenger cars (which reduced the violent movement of cars, particularly from starting and stopping), vestibules that covered the platforms of railcars (which allowed people to safely travel from car to car, a vital invention that enable the dining car to come into being), the automatic coupler (patented in 1868 by Eli Hamilton Janney, this device saved the lives of thousands of brakemen), and the air brake (introduced by George Westinghouse in 1868, it allowed trains to run faster and heavier and was safer than risky hand brakes).

The types and jobs of people on the railroad was discussed at length, including the importance of the station agent (for decades a very important man in small towns, sometimes serving also as a barber, postmaster, druggist, and even dentist), the conductor (for many years the principal public relations contact with the general public and often becoming locally very well known as they often rode the same trains for decades), and the news agent (or news butcher, young men who supplied newspapers, books, candy, drinks, and other niceties to passengers).

Throughout the book, the author provided interesting comparisons with European railroads. European railroads grasped the idea of grand urban stations and fences and other protections along tracks and crossings much earlier, but shied away from trains entering the hearts of cities (unlike the Americans, who once had plans for a depot on the Mall in Washington D.C.) and disliked the Pullman sleeping cars (much preferring separate and closed sleeping compartments).

Trains in art, literature, and popular culture are covered, Douglas discussing everything from Frank Norris's _The Octopus_, the novels of Theodore Dreiser, and the railroad prints of Currier and Ives to the legend of Casey Jones, the movie _The Great Train Robbery_ , the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and Lionel model trains.

The decline and later partial rebirth of the railroads was also covered. Not only did airplanes, cars, and trucks provide competition, but even the bicycle and the interurban and city street car (which itself largely perished due to the automobile) provided problems for the railroads. Fortunately, railroads were able to tap new markets for freight shipment and cities belatedly realized the great importance of keeping commuter trains running in highly congested urban areas.