****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
"Rival Rails" by Walter R. Borneman is a sweeping work that fills a number of gaps in the story of U.S. railroading. In this excellent volume, Borneman presents the American railroad saga with a focus on the West, and covers it with a sure hand. From early dreamers, politicians, and surveyors through the Civil War and the transcontinentals, this book literally gives the reader the "Big Picture" of railroad development across half the continent and updates it to the present. His final well-placed comments include observations of Warren Buffet and the purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Borneman puts it all in perfect professional perspective: in this narrative, Buffet's part is really just the same as those played by Jay Gould and E.H. Harriman in their own time.I cannot speak highly enough of this excellent book. Borneman's prose and style read like a novel. The titans of industry who pass through his story are real people to the reader, and their decisions, right and wrong, are explained frankly and without bias. The scope of his canvas is huge, and though the story obviously chooses the Santa Fe as the ultimate winner of the "best " all-time route between Chicago and the Pacific, the myriad of other roads that played (and continue to play) a part are well represented, from household-famliar entities like James Hill's Great Northern to the wonderful sprinkling of colorful early Colorado roads.Borneman's own love of Colorado and his roots there show nicely: I have never read a historical work that wove the Denver, South Park & Pacific or the Colorado Central into the Big Story of the American Railroad battles in the West, let alone seen the narrow gauge Denver & Rio Grande's struggle for regional position so frankly presented. And few books on this subject have mentioned my own personal hero, David Moffat, the dreamer and gambler whose Denver Northwestern & Pacific tried to break the Harriman hold on Colorado by building straight West and challenging the Front Range of the Rockies. Moffat's spectacular failure in the eternal blizzards, steep grades, and snowsheds on Rollins Pass are stories that my own grandfather told me as I sat at his knee wide-eyed beside the woodstove in his cabin at Grand Lake. Though only a footnote, it's a feather in Borneman's cap that he gives this kind of detail to a history that often is painted with just a broad flat brush. An essentially "Santa Fe" history has never been about all of the other competeing roads around it, and how they all evolved.This is not meant to be a definative work, but it has a perfect place in any library of Western American Railroad work. I recommend it to any historian, or to anyone interested in American railroads.I can't wait for Walt Boreman's next book. And if you like this one, I also highly recommend his definative work on the history of Alaska: "Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land" (2003, Harper Collins). I can say that I keep Walt's Alaska book on my shelf as a ready historical research reference. Nothing beats it that has been written to date on the subject.Good reading to one and all!I hate to disagree with the other reviewers, but after my high hopes this is an incredibly dull book. I give it 3 stars because of the amount of research it took to write it, but that research often gluts the thesis. There is hardly a mention of the golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, which linked the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. There is no mention at all of James Eads who built the first bridge that could carry a train across the "unbridgeable" Mississippi, at St. Louis. I have always loved trains from the first time I rode one as a kid. I fremember going into the St. Louis Union Station, marching up to the ticket-taker for the Wabash Cannonball and asking 'how fast does this baby go?' Disappointng answer: 'no faster than any other train.' The author stays for the most part west of the Mississippi inspecting railroads now long out of business and were simply links between the major lines like the Union Pacific and the Santa Fe. The are too many railroads in this book, too many entrepreneurs who wanted to build them. After a while I lost track (no pun) of who was involved with which railroad, though to the author's credit there is a glossary of builders at the front. There is much to learn here if you can keep it all straight. The style is quite colloquial at some spots, annoyingly so at times. So are the chapter names. Those in themselves reveal how disorganized this book is: one chapter deals with the Royal Gorge at Canon City and the battle for land rights to string rails through it. The very next Chapter is titled "Handshake at Deming," a small town in southern New Mexico, 500 miles from the Royal Gorge. One thing I had never given much thought to was railroad ties that held the rails down and kept them properly spaced. It was tough to get across a state like Kansas which had a paucity of trees to turn into ties. There is an old silent film called "The Iron Horse" which climaxes with Promontory Point with the two "original locomotives" nose to nose as the famous as the famous photo from 1867 shows them. Hogwash, says the author, because the film was made around 1920, and those two engines had been retired in 1910. The is not much tribute to the Chinese workers who did much of labor from the west. The reviewer above who says the book "reads like a novel" does not consider someone like me who had to whip himself through it. There is too much information, too many characters, too many locations, and most of all too many railroads. I think this will become a reference book for scholars doing research on any given one. It does not read smoothly.
