The North American Railroad: Its Origin, Evolution, and Geography (Creating the North American Landscape)

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive, scholarly tome which makes one point!
Review: James Vance's knowledge of his subject matter is staggeringly obvious. This thick, academic work proves it. I should recommend this as a useful library addition. However, for the average reader, Vance has made a grevious, common error. His book is simply tiresome to read; Filled with typical university verbage, making it nearly impossible to read more than a few pages at a sitting. Take this example on page 4 in the Introduction:"It is from looking at geographical aspects of railroading that we ultimately become aware of perhaps the most significant of all dichotomies associated with railroad history, that between the spatial aspects of the railway as it emerged in England and Wales in the first quarter of the ninteenth century and those of the railroad as it emerged less than a decade later in North America, particularly the United States."That was one sentence. There are an endless number of those in this book of over 300 pages. At the end of all that, the reader is left with essentially one point. The U. S. did not follow the British is developing its railroads, the U. S. did its own thing! Certainly this is simplistic. If one needs to know how and why this continent built its railroads the way it did, one need look no farther than this book. Just be prepared to take a while reading it

Rating:
Summary: Why railroads were built where they were
Review: This hefty tome falls under the topic of 'historic geography of transportation,' in which Vance addresses the question of why railroads were built where they were. He examines the 'big picture' of why, for instance, the first transcontinental passed through Cheyenne and Ogden, instead of further north or further south. He also takes a 'micro' perspective and explains how a specific railroad route was planned to reach a given mountain pass, while keeping gradients, overall length, and tunnels to an absolute minimum. The reader gains a new appreciation of how difficult it was to plan railroads before the era of aerial surveys, since even a tenth of a percentage point in gradient (an additional rise of a few yards over a mile) can make the difference between profit and financial disaster. The book focuses solely on the planning issues -- look elsewhere for descriptions of operating practices or rolling stock.

Three-fourths of the book cover the US, while one-fourth addresses Canada. Northern Alberta and northern British Columbia receive disproportionately heavy attention, undoubtedly because the author has a summer cabin there. There are over a hundred b&w photos and fifty maps. However, when the author engages in a mile-by-mile description of why a certain route was laid out as it was, the book cries out for even more detailed maps so that the reader can follow the author's description of topography.