The Great Iron Trail

The Great Iron Trail brilliantly recounts how the blood, sweat, tears and dollars of the dreamers, explorers, inventors, iron men, graders and financiers combined to build America’s first transcontinental railroad. Only a century ago, the United States consisted of two littoral encampments on the East and West coasts. The perilous sailing trip around Cape Horn took from four to six months; the plague-ridden shortcut across the Panama Isthmus required five weeks; on the trails crossing the 2,000