Mr. Ambrose leads with facts, colors in with stories and ends with stats. You know how many spikes, ties, snake plates, rails and carloads of ballast build a mile of track. You learn if Jeff Davis had not lead the house and senate members of the soon to be Confederacy out of the capitol when Lincoln was elected president, the bill to locate our first intercontinental rail line north of the Mason/Dixon line would not have passed.
Of course you know the CP started West from Omaha (the rail bridge over the mighty Mo came 2 years after the tracks joined in Utah), and the UP started East from Sacramento. The UP has to blast their way through Sierra Nevada granite. Supported by skilled Chinese labor who knew a thing or two about black powder blasting, the UP overcame one engineering obstacle after another.
The financial arrangements were egregiously crooked, making a few men wealthy and triggering senate investigations. The line was built as fast as humanly possible: if the choice was between completing miles of finished track and any other consideration, fast always won. The term “Hell on Wheels” referred to a traveling tent city set up at the rail-head, supplying booze, broads and bacon to workmen. The whole plan proceeded due to the US government’s ownership of the vast majority of land west of the MO. That meant US could grant the entrepreneurs (who risked capitol to pay for grading and track) land. Alternating sections of land to the right and to the left of the track right of way was the prize that spurred on this project.
A tapestry of larger than life personalities (railroad, money men and politicians) is woven over the historic frames of reference. Civil war finishes, so a flood of available men used to taking orders, Noble had just patented nitroglycerin, Lincoln, avidly pro railroad, assassinated but not before he signs the bill, Native Americans pushed from subsistence living, steam locomotive and telegraph technology, all came together with American Exceptualism, aspiring to build a transcontinental railroad across trackless wilderness and three mountain ranges.
No question, the book passed my acid test. Did I want to keep on reading? You bet.
-Dave
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