Quotes About Railroads

Like all Americans," he said, "I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.

Jersey City's railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging "war on the railroads that ruled his state.

There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. "I prefer hypocrisy to poverty." "Come to think of it, there is a rationale. Leng didn't make his money from killing. He made it from speculating in railroads, oil, and precious metals." Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "I did not know that." "There is much you still don't know about him.

The railroads are not run for the benefit of the dear public. That cry is nonsense. They are built for men who invest their money and expect to get a fair percentage of the same.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.

both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation's railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.

a bill banning railroad rebates to large industrial companies

Monopolists always defend their monopolies by arguing that competition is wasteful. When the railroad barons completed their monopoly, they argued it would be wasteful to have competing rail lines, AT&T said the same thing. But today, the size and scope of these monopolies is different.

Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business.

America is a series of river crossings; these rivers made us rich. They left the soil that has made us the breadbasket of the world, whether it's the James or the Ohio, the Mississippi or the Missouri. The great rivers define us and made transportation possible until the railroads revolutionized life in the 1830s and 1840s.

Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico.

Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities.

For just one little minute she almost wished that Pa was a railroad man. There was nothing so wonderful as railroads, and railroad men were great men, able to drive the big iron engines and the fast, dangerous trains. But of course not even railroad men were bigger or better than Pa, and she did not really want him to be anything but what he was.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.

The moment was highly polarizing. Populists agitated for an income tax, tariff reform, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators (who were chosen by the legislatures). Workers erupted in sometimes violent strikes—notably, the Pullman strike of 1894, which halted much of the nation's rail traffic and led to rioting and acts of sabotage, and was ultimately suppressed by federal troops.

Benson's solution suited Rockefeller just fine: Tidewater, instead of cutting rates to compete with the railroads, would collude with them to raise rates.

For a long time, he had resisted an irreversible shift to pipes for fear of antagonizing the railroads, but this concern had lost its force. When Standard Oil constructed four pipelines from western Pennsylvania to Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo, he pressured the railroads to grant it right-of-way concessions, even though the pipelines signaled their doom.

The meeting dealt a blow to Rockefeller and Watson, for the railroads agreed to abrogate the SIC contract, end rebates and drawbacks, and institute uniform rates for all shippers.

Far sooner than Rockefeller, the railroads had foreseen the political reaction and inevitable defeat.

By 1900, the nation's railroads were consolidated into six huge systems controlled by Wall Street bankers, principally J. P. Morgan

The banker was strong because the railroads were weak, and however much Pierpont deplored railroad instability, he thrived on such chaos.