Quotes About Railroads

the government moved swiftly to mandate that all trains should have "positive train control," an electronic signaling system that will automatically stop or slow down a train to prevent a crash if the engineer misses a red signal. Although the system may ultimately benefit the railroads marginally by making it possible to run extra trains, effectively they are being asked to pay several billion dollars

Interstate Commerce Commission

The railroads complained that the truckers were effectively subsidized, as the roads they drove on were state funded and the lack of regulation—and initially unionization—allowed them to operate without restraint.

The growth of the railroads was intimately bound up with the wider development of America as a powerful economic force, and ultimately this process would ride roughshod over parochial concerns.

Railroads are a long-term business that play a crucial role in the areas they serve and therefore cannot be allowed to flourish or founder solely on the basis of unfettered market forces. Convincing American politicians of the strength of this argument would always be an uphill task.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's reaction to the plan is a good illustration of the wider attitude of the railroads. The Pennsy, as it was known, was the leading railroad of the age and saw itself as a cut above the others, a view encapsulated by its calling itself the "Standard Railway of the World.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

But the railroads are a new force. No hatred is in their history. They heal the wounds of the past, and they reach toward the future.

In 1900, 45 steamship lines served Galveston. Twenty-six foreign governments had consulates there. The storm damaged its reputation as a safe place for substantial investment by railroads then seeking to dominate various trans-continental routes.

A descendent of Basque ranchers, the mayor came from the small circle of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants who had been his father's oldest customers and friends. Perhaps Malburg told Jim the story of how Vernon got its start in 1905, when John Baptiste Leonis, a French Basque hog rancher, persuaded the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads to extend tracks to his city to attract new factories, their preferred freight-hauling customers.

by 1890 there were 166,703 miles of railroad (and more to come) and a single railroad corporation might have as many as 36,000 employees. This

If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

Like other booster papers across the West, the weekly Tribune was a major instrument for town building, even if—or precisely because—it "sometimes represented things that had not yet gone through the formality of taking place."39 Western newspapers, like western railroads, often ran well ahead of settlement—a process that, in many bleak locales, was still waiting to happen.

Trains tap into some deep American collective memory.

It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use.

Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?

The reason for the greater number of crosstown streets than up- and downtown avenues was self-evident to planners of the early nineteenth century but might not be so obvious to us today—intra-Manhattan commerce flowed east and west. In the days before railroads, dirigibles, and airplanes, the preeminent form of long-distance transportation and hauling was by water, and the piers and wharves along the East River had to link up with those along the Hudson if commerce was to flourish.

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, regulating the railroads, was one of the first federal regulatory acts in American history. The Act began with a bill introduced in the House by Democratic Representative James H. Hopkins of Pittsburgh, in 1876 at the behest of a group of independent oil producers of western Pennsylvania.

The ICC was therefore in keeping with the law when, to the delight of the railroads, it decided to give its sanction and imprimatur to the freight rates worked out by the railroad rate associations—in short, to use the federal government to ratify rates decided upon by private railroad cartels.

The liberal state was not all that liberal when it came to the establishment of the external conditions for the free flow of economic entrepreneurship. Roads, railroads and regulating the poor became essential.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.