All Aboard!: The Railroad in American Life

_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 th

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.