Abraham Lincoln, who had worked as a riverboat pilot before turning to politics, knew a thing or two about the problems of transporting goods and people from place to place. He was also convinced that the United States would flourish only if its far-flung regions were linked, replacing sectional loyalties with an overarching sense of national destiny.

Building a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's "Big Four"--Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford--to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their "dreadful vitality" figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks.

In the end, Ambrose writes, Lincoln's dream transformed the nation, marking "the first great triumph over time and space" and inaugurating what has come to be known as the American Century. David Haward Bain's Empire Express, which covers the same ground, is more substantial, but Ambrose provides an eminently readable study of a complex episode in American history. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
Eminent historian Ambrose notes that he once viewed the investors and businessmen who built the transcontinental railroad as robber barons who bilked the government and the public. But in his rough-and-tumble, triumphant sagaAsure to appeal to the many readers of Ambrose's bestseller Undaunted CourageAhe presents the continent-straddling railroad, yoking east and west at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, as a great democratic experiment, a triumph of capitalist organization, free labor, brains and determination that ushered in the American Century, galvanized trade and settlement, and made possible a national culture. To critics who charge that the railroad magnates were corrupt and grew obscenely rich and powerful through land grants and government bonds, Ambrose replies that the land grants never brought in enough money to pay the bills and, further, that the bonds were loans, fully paid back with huge interest payments. But this argument fails to convince, partly because Ambrose does a superlative job of re-creating the grim conditions in which the tracks were laid. The Central Pacific's workers were primarily Chinese, earning a dollar a day. Union Pacific workers were mostly Irish-American, young, unmarried ex-soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy. Accidental deaths were commonplace, and the two companies, notwithstanding strikes, slowdowns and drunken vice, engaged in a frantic race, mandated by Congress, as the winner got the greater share of land and bonds. As a result of the haste, an enormous amount of shoddy construction had to be replaced. Native Americans, who wanted the iron rail out of their country, hopelessly waged guerrilla warfare against railroad builders who talked openly of exterminating them. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, telegrams, newspaper accounts and other primary sources, Ambrose celebrates the railroad's unsung heroesAthe men who actually did the backbreaking work. 32 pages of b&w photos. 6-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The transcontinental railroad was the greatest American engineering feat of the 19th century. It awed legions of reporters, photographers, and others in its own day and historians thereafter for its scale, innovation, and sheer brute strength. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage) is among those latter-day admirers. Relying on newspaper reportage, he presents the project through the eyes of the men working for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific and marvels at the blasting, gouging, grading, hauling, and more that transpire as the rival railroads punched through mountains, straddled gorges, and strode across the Plains in the race to link the continent. The cast is largeDarmies of skilled and eager Chinese workers, visionaries like surveyor Theodore Judah, and engineers and builders like Grenville Dodge, who marshaled huge sums of capital and solved intricate technical problems. Ambrose adds little to a much-told tale (his book does not supplant David Haward Bain's Empire Express, LJ 10/1/99), and he blinks at the ruthlessness and misery that made fortunes for the train barons. But in his hands every sledgehammer blow hits hard and every blast echoes. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-DRandall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
"The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space. After it came, and after it crossed the continent of North America, nothing could ever again be the same." Ambrose honors the men who brought the nation together East and West. Chinese and Irish, veterans of the Confederate and Union armies, they spanned the prairies, pierced the Rocky Mountains with black powder and by hand. This audio edition includes a stirring introduction by the author himself. DeMunn's full-text reading is clear and well modulated. The book is chocked with piquant detail. Did you know, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln had imagined the Transcontinental Railroad before he ever saw a train? B.H.C. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The transcontinental railroad, whose completion was symbolized by the Golden Spike 131 years ago, is mostly abandoned, its function replaced by interstates and Internets. Yet the original roadbed can still be visibly traced across the plains, mountains, and deserts. And seeing it was no doubt the most enjoyable part of the research that Ambrose did for his gripping book about its construction. As in his suite of World War II books, Ambrose lauds the exertions of ordinary men, the Chinese and Irish laborers whose brawn built the first transcontinental railroad. He then gives more detailed portraits of the chief surveyors and engineers who managed the enterprise. On the Union Pacific end, Grenville Dodge was the key figure. A Union general who rebuilt tracks and trestles, Dodge thought like Lincoln when the subject was railroads: the country had to have them, and the government had to subsidize them. Ambrose describes how the two met in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1859, and talked of their shared vision of the iron horse puffing to California. The animating personality for this vision was Theodore Judah who, in addition to designating the route, rounded up some Sacramento shopkeepers with names like Stanford and Huntington to form the Central Pacific Railroad. Judah died of yellow fever before much track was laid, in spirit a casualty of construction because he contracted the disease in Panama, a route the railroad was intended to replace. Of the construction's other casualties, mostly anonymous, Ambrose makes commiserative note. This muscular yet flowing telling of the railroad's physical construction, will be a sure winner with the author's legions of readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
Acclaimed historian Ambrose (Comrades, 1999, etc.) takes on one of the biggest and most influential engineering projects in American history-the building of the transcontinental railroad. Ambrose begins his tale with the fascinating "bureaucratic" history of the railroad-the struggles to gain a federal mandate for the construction of the road and to fix starting points for it at a time when there was little going on in Washington except, first, the precursors to the Civil War and, later, the war itself. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman are all shown to be "railroad men" and influential to the project. Ambrose then moves on to immense fiscal maneuvers necessary to finance the railroad, and to the ensuing Credit Mobilier scandal (regarding the financing of the railroad, and of the fortunes that were made, Ambrose makes a salient point when quoting historian Charles Francis Adams Jr., who claimed that "when the Pacific Railroad was proposed, [no one] regarded it as other than a wild-cat venture . . . those men went into the enterprise because the country wanted a transcontinental railroad, and was willing to give almost any sum to those who would build it"). It is when the human drama of the actual construction of the railroad begins that Ambrose's narrative picks up speed. Although not many first hand accounts exist from railroad workers, what material he does have is woven skillfully into the whole to create a picture of various ethnic groups working together (and frequently warring with each other as well).A master historian and writer takes on another pivotal epoch in American history -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Bob Minzesheimer USA Today Historian Stephen Ambrose has done it again....Ambrose should be read as much for his muscular prose and talent to get at the heart of the matter as for his research.


Book Description
Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks. The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.


Download Description
The Union had won the Civil War; slavery was abolished. Lincoln, an early champion of railroads, would not live to see the next great achievement. It took brains, muscle, and sweat in quantities and scope never before ventured and required engineers and surveyors willing to lose their lives in the wilderness; men who had commanded and obeyed in war; workers from China, Ireland, and the defeated South; and capitalists betting their money for possible great profit. The government pitted the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution.Locomotives, falls, and spikes were shipped from the east through Panama, around South America, or lugged across the country. The railroad was the last great building project to be done by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels. Nothing like this great railroad had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Peak, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific joined tracks. Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the nation one.


About the Author
Stephen E.Ambrose is the author of The Wild Blue, Citizen Soldiers, Undaunted Courage, D-Day, and Band of Brothers, as well as biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. He is the director emeritus of the Eisenhower Center and founder of The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. He lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and Helena, Montana.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
What is there to say about the transcontinental railroad? That it was really long and very hard to build and took an awful lot of hammer-pounding? That's just the beginning....

Stephen Ambrose, author of such immensely popular histories as Undaunted Courage and D-Day, has created an enthralling account of the building of the transcontinental railroad, one riddled with ideas and facts, personalities and scandals.

By the 1860s, there were a few powerful men who decided they wanted to see the railroad built and wanted to make a killing in the process. As Congress balked at sponsoring any one particular railroad route, these men formed two private companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, one at either terminus of the track-to-be. Ambrose details the political intrigue, bribery, and cajoling that went on between these men and members of government to get the money, land, and support needed to build this seemingly impracticable transcontinental track.

But the narrative goes beyond politics and finances. After the introductory chapters, we take a year-by-year journey through the construction of the railroad itself, alternating chapters between the workings of the two companies. Ambrose describes the physical undertaking of finding a route through the mountains without the benefit of a bird's-eye view or a map, the men carrying their food and water and, never knowing what would lie ahead. He writes of the deadly hazards of using black powder to blast, inch by inch, through the Sierra Nevada range. We watch workers grade the road, lay the rails, and hammer the spikes to make the track grow, by manpower alone, at the astounding rate of one to two miles per day. We learn of the Chinese and Chinese-American workers who lived entire seasons in burrows beneath six feet or more of snow, drinking tea and exploding tunnels in the rock to lay track. We learn of the Irish and Irish-American workers building from the other terminus despite violent raids by furious Native Americans. In large part, this book is the story of the physical construction of the railroad and therefore an illustration of the audacity, perseverance, and even idealism of the men who built it.

Kate Montgomery is a writer living in Brewster, New York. She is the coauthor of Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

SYNOPSIS

In this account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a historical successor to his universally acclaimed Undaunted Courage, which recounted the explorations of the West by Lewis and Clark.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad — the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life.

The U.S. government pitted two companies — the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads — against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomo-tives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. This was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels through mountains.

At its peak, the workforce — primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific, Irish on the Union Pacific — approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand workers on each line. The UnionPacific was led by Thomas "Doc" Durant, Oakes Ames, and Oliver Ames, with Grenville Dodge — America's greatest railroad builder — as chief engineer. The Central Pacific was led by California's "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, were latter-day Lewis and Clark types who led the way through the wilderness, living off buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope.

In building a railroad, there is only one decisive spot — the end of the track. Nothing like this great work had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks were joined.

Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men — the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary — who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

On May 10, 1869, telegraphers sent the word done from Promontory Point, Utah, throughout the nation, signaling the completion of what Walt Whitman referred to as "the road between Europe and Asia." The transcontinental railroad, which connected the vast American territories, cut the trip from New York City to San Francisco from many months to seven days. Ambrose's (Undaunted Courage) epic account, diligently and powerfully read by DeMunn, details the incredible mobilization of manpower and financing that was "the very embodiment of system." He tells it all with verve: the financial finagling, the impulse to simplify by "exterminating" Native Americans, the backbreaking work and the fierce competition between railroad companies that fueled the effort. This gritty, momentous tale of the personalities that pressed across the wild American West with rail and tie celebrates the feat that brought the U.S. into the modern age. Simultaneous release with the S&S hardcover and trade paperback. (Forecasts, July 3). (Aug.)n Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The transcontinental railroad was the greatest American engineering feat of the 19th century. It awed legions of reporters, photographers, and others in its own day and historians thereafter for its scale, innovation, and sheer brute strength. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage) is among those latter-day admirers. Relying on newspaper reportage, he presents the project through the eyes of the men working for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific and marvels at the blasting, gouging, grading, hauling, and more that transpire as the rival railroads punched through mountains, straddled gorges, and strode across the Plains in the race to link the continent. The cast is large--armies of skilled and eager Chinese workers, visionaries like surveyor Theodore Judah, and engineers and builders like Grenville Dodge, who marshaled huge sums of capital and solved intricate technical problems. Ambrose adds little to a much-told tale (his book does not supplant David Haward Bain's Empire Express, LJ 10/1/99), and he blinks at the ruthlessness and misery that made fortunes for the train barons. But in his hands every sledgehammer blow hits hard and every blast echoes. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/00.]--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

AudioFile

"The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space. After it came, and after it crossed the continent of North America, nothing could ever again be the same." Ambrose honors the men who brought the nation together East and West. Chinese and Irish, veterans of the Confederate and Union armies, they spanned the prairies, pierced the Rocky Mountains with black powder and by hand. This audio edition includes a stirring introduction by the author himself. DeMunn's full-text reading is clear and well modulated. The book is chocked with piquant detail. Did you know, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln had imagined the Transcontinental Railroad before he ever saw a train? B.H.C. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Henry Kisor - New York Times Book Review

Ambrose's scholarship seems impeccable, supported by copious notes and an extensive bibliography. He writes a brisk, colloquial, straightforward prose . . . [It] may be a popular history, but it is also a complex one.

Montgomery

Nothing Like It in the World

What is there to say about the transcontinental railroad? That it was really long and very hard to build and took an awful lot of hammer-pounding? That's just the beginning....

Stephen Ambrose, author of such immensely popular histories as Undaunted Courage and D-Day, has created an enthralling account of the building of the transcontinental railroad, one rich ideas and facts, personalities and scandals.

By the 1860s, there were a few powerful men who decided they wanted to see the railroad built and wanted to make a killing in the process. As Congress balked at sponsoring any one particular railroad route, these men formed two private companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, one at either terminus of the projected track. Ambrose details the political intrigue, bribery, and cajoling that went on between these men and members of government to get the money, land, and support needed to build this seemingly impracticable transcontinental track.

But the narrative goes beyond politics and finances. After the introductory chapters, we take a year-by-year journey through the construction of the railroad itself, alternating chapters between the workings of the two companies. Ambrose describes the physical undertaking of finding a route through the mountains without the benefit of a bird's-eye view or a map, the men carrying their food and water and, never knowing what would lie ahead. He writes of the deadly hazards of using black powder to blast, inch by inch, through the Sierra Nevada range. We watch workers grade the road, lay the rails, and hammer the spikes to make the track grow, by manpower alone, at the astounding rate of one to two miles per day. We learn of the Chinese and Chinese-American workers who lived entire seasons in burrows beneath six feet or more of snow, drinking tea and exploding tunnels in the rock to lay track. We learn of the Irish and Irish-American workers building from the other terminus despite violent raids by furious Native Americans. In large part, this book is the story of the physical construction of the railroad and therefore an illustration of the audacity, perseverance, and even idealism of the men who built it.

Kate Montgomery is a writer living in Brewster, New York. She is the coauthor of Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean.