Volume 31, Number 4 · March 15, 1984
Closely Watched Trains
By Leo Marx
Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene
by John R. Stilgoe
Yale University Press, 397 pp., $29.95
Of all the great modern innovations, the railroad may well be the one to which historians have accorded the most dramatic and far-reaching influence. No sooner had the first passenger railroads begun operations in England and the United States, around 1830, than the public was seized by what was called, even then, 'railroad mania.' For ten or fifteen years the press kept up the excitement with stories about every imaginable aspect of the new machine, and practitioners of the popular arts contributed songs and pictures, poems and fictions, to the hubbub. The prevailing tone was enthusiastic, not to say celebratory, and the hearts of speculators in land and mines and railroads were made glad.
Review, 2822 words
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