A history of the building of the railroads through the American West, as seen through two of its fiercest competitors, even including Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, who also get their due here. A lively, engaging prose style propels this narrative over a 12-year race to achieve the holy grail of reaching the Pacific Ocean by a line other than the extremely proprietary Central Pacific Railroad and a destination other than San Francisco.

L.A. The only city in the world that goes just by its initials, like the self-assured global celebrity it is…Unlike virtually everywhere else in America, to say nothing of America itself, L.A. has no founding myth to define it…Although L.A. likes by the sea, it did not begin life as a port. Nor was it birthed by the river that runs through it from the San Gabriel Mountains or a natural resource like the gold that brought prospectors surging into San Francisco…No, the city in fact owes its origin to something so foreign to its self-conception that it represents a violation of its existential code. It was started by a railroad. Los Angeles is a railroad town.

The two fierce competitors are William Barstow Strong of the Santa Fe Railroad and General William Jackson Palmer of the Rio Grande Railroad. Palmer was raised “a thee-thouing Quaker” and went on to become a soldier, a spy, and a hero in the Civil War. Strong didn’t serve. Palmer hired exclusively from the men he served with during the war. Strong hired the best men available regardless of relationship or background. Palmer was determined to run what can only be described as a boutique railroad, insisting on sticking to narrow gauge tracks (three feet wide).  Strong stuck with the standard gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches, as set by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Palmer built his own personal three-car train.

The first car held a fully staffed kitchen and dining room, the second offered berths for four guests, and the third was reserved for himself, with a glassed-in observation deck trailing behind.

Sounds like Elon Musk’s jet. Plus ca change. 

But you can see where this is going. Palmer and Strong met three times, which was quite enough for both of them and more than enough to make the Santa Fe the first into Los Angeles. It really isn’t that much of a race, but

It made quite a ball of fire, this frenzied competition, a blind, stupid, and utterly destructive jealous rage. 

There is some fascinating detail, including the “rotation” of the entire continent from north-south to east-west with a Supreme Court decision that allowed the railroads to build bridges across the Mississippi.

When the Supreme Court sided with the trains, the whole country rotated. No longer would America run north-south with the Mississippi and the Atlantic coast. Now it would go east-west with the trains. The lawyer for the Chicago and Rock Island who won this victory? A former Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln.

The first transcontinental railroad

did something even more astounding. It altered the popular understanding of space…The early eastern lines just compressed distance, bringing Chicago, for instance, much closer to New York, once trains joined them. But when the Pacific Railway came in to speed people to the far coast, it annihilated any mental idea of distance at all, in part because the country was so unimaginably wide, and replaced it with the more comprehensible measure of time. After the first transcontinental was completed, San Francisco was no longer a head-bending three thousand miles from New York, but a tidy seven days away. Before long it would be three and  a half…And then time fell away as the measure, too, for a journey was tabulated instead what was becoming the universal unit in that hyper-capitalist era, its price. No longer was the question how far or even how long. It was “how much?” Distant places seemed nearer as the price of a ticket dropped and farther if the price rose…What God hath wrought civil engineers would now revise.

Indeed, transcontinental travel helped my own profession along.

Aboard a rollicking stagecoach, to say nothing of horseback, no one could possibly have read a book in any language. Bit it turned out that train rides were for reading. Indeed, railroads did much to expand the publishing business, both because train travelers provided a new market for publications of all sorts—books, magazines, newspapers—and because the trains could disseminate them more widely. The trains spread the news, and enlightenment with them.

Sedgwick falls in love with characters who don’t have much to do with the race to the Pacific, going off on too-long, tangential disquisitions on Palmer’s wife Queen and Henry Tabor the Silver King, but all in all an entertaining and instructive read. Recommended.

Book Review Monday Chatter From the River to the Sea John Sedgwick