Great American Railroad Stories gives readers a look at railroading history as presented by the writers of Trains magazine over 75 years. It includes rare, first-hand accounts that give historical insight into riding passenger trains, working on the railroad, and growing up in the era of steam trains. This book also focuses on the finest writing and includes historical photos. It features the writings and reflections of founding editor Al Kalmbach, David Morgan, Lucius Beebe, and other well-known names. All readers will be drawn-in by the many American railroading stories from those who actual lived it.

This richly comprehensive history by a self-proclaimed "low-brow" historian features more than 100 photographs and contemporary prints of America's railway system. Stewart H. Holbrook presents a dramatic, highly readable chronicle of the development of the backbone of the country's commerce and industry. Abounding in episodes of ingenuity and achievement, the growth of the railway system required constant improvements in techniques, devices, and machines, from the first wood burner that traveled on wooden rails to modern streamliners and diesel-powered giants. In addition to technological innovations, the colossal enterprise required courage and resolve to battle challenges posed by nature as well as by political maneuvering and corruption. This fascinating survey draws upon many hitherto unknown original sources and new data, in addition to firsthand accounts from hundreds of brakemen, conductors, engineers, and other railroad employees. Sound and authoritative, it constitutes a definitive history of America's railroads.

The history of railroading in North America is as much a story of boardroom intrigue as it is a story of the brute force that stamped thousands of miles of train track across a rugged continent. Today’s nine U.S. and Canadian Class I railroads are the result of well over a century of convoluted bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, and expansions. North American Railroad Family Trees marks the first time in book form that this major aspect of railroad history has been presented in a clear, graphic format, helping the railfan make sense of the many smaller train lines that shaped North American rail as it is today. In these pages, renowned rail author Brian Solomon takes a visual and chronological approach, presenting 50 “family trees” in the style of human lineages. The story begins with the railroads of the “Golden Age” (1890–1930), continuing through the second wave of consolidations between the World Wars, the merger mania of the 1950s through the 1970s, the creation of major passenger networks, and the megamergers of the last three decades that have left railroading close to its current incarnation. Solomon even offers a selection of maps tracing the evolution of the North American rail system and diagrams proposing what-if scenarios for the industry’s future. Including chapter-by-chapter narrative overviews of key eras, along with a selection of rare photography and period advertising to lend historical context, North American Railroad Family Trees provides an unprecedented retrospective of the continent’s iconic rail network.

As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads—attacked by newspapers as the greedy “octopus”—and the expansion of citrus agriculture transformed the struggling region into a vast, idealized, and prosperous garden. New groves of the latest citrus varieties and new towns like Riverside quickly grew directly along the tracks of transcontinental railroads. The influx of capital, industrial technology, and workers, especially people of color, energized Southern California and tied it more closely to the economy and culture of the United States than ever before. Benjamin Jenkins’s Octopus’s Garden argues that citrus agriculture and railroads together shaped the economy, landscape, labor systems, and popular image of Southern California. Orange and lemon growing boomed in the 1870s and 1880s while railroads linked the region to markets across North America and ended centuries of geographic isolation for the West Coast. Railroads competed over the shipment of citrus fruits from multiple counties engulfed by the orange empire, resulting in an extensive rail network that generated lucrative returns for grove owners and railroad businessmen in Southern California from the 1890s to the 1950s. While investment from white Americans, particularly wealthy New Englanders, formed the financial backbone of the Octopus’s Garden, citrus and railroads would not have thrived in Southern California without the labor of people of color. Many workers of color took advantage of the commercial developments offered by railroads and citrus to economically advance their families and communities; however, these people also suffered greatly under the constant realities of bodily harm, low wages, and political and social exclusion. Promoters of the railroads and citrus cooperatives touted California as paradise for white Americans and minimized the roles of non-white laborers by stereotyping them in advertisements and publications. These practices fostered conceptions of California’s racial hierarchy by praising privileged whites and maligning the workers who made them prosper. The Octopus’s Garden continues to shape Southern Californians’ understanding of their past. In bringing together multiple storylines, Jenkins provides a complex and fresh perspective on the impact of citrus agriculturalists and railroad companies in Southern Californian history.