The History Of The Union Pacific 4

The History Of The Union Pacific
America's Great Transcontinental Railroad
published by Crescent Books (a division of Crown Publishers, Inc.)

There are few railroads that evoke the legends of early American railroading as do those that were joined at Promontory, Utah by the epochal driving of the golden spike. The Union Pacific formed the eastern portion of that historic union, and its story has grown with that of the United Stated itself. As the American frontier expanded across the continent, settlers bravely journeyed across the Great American Desert in search of a better life on the West Coast. The journey was long and arduous, and the wagon trains that carried those first settlers across the nation inspired a vision of a great railroad spanning the continent. For the country to survive and prosper, its borders had to be linked, and thus was born the dream of the Union Pacific Railroad. The sweat of many men went into the building of the nation's first transcontinental railroad, and when the final spike was driven at Promontory the dream of a transcontinental railroad was realized; the event itself symbolized, to that generation, what landing on the moon would do to a later generation. Much has happened in the history of America's first trancontinental railroad. From the days of Grenville Dodge to the new expansions of the 1980s, the history of the Union Pacific has been a long, but never uninteresting, progression toward challenges of the future.

Contents

• Introduction
• Early History
• How We Built The Union Pacific
• Meeting at Promontory and After
• The Credit Mobilier Scandal
• The Golden Age of Railroading
• The UP Under Jay Gould
• The Presidency of Charles Francis Adams Jr
• The Harriman Era
• The Early Twentieth Century
• The Years Between the World Wars
• World War II and Beyond
• Mergers and Consolidations
• The Union Pacific and the Railroad Industry Today