Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (2000) by Stephen E. Ambrose

I certainly wouldn’t rank the late Stephen Ambrose as one of the best American historians of his generation, but he may very well be the best-selling. In “Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869,” he brings his skill at telling the human side of warfare to one of the greatest civil engineering projects of all time.

As mainly a military historian, perhaps it isn’t surprising that Ambrose emphasizes the decisive role that war and military men, both leaders and grunts, played in building the transcontinental railroad. Indeed, he writes that the Civil War was critical to the success of the daunting project for at least four reasons. First, the northern route of the railroad, beginning at the Iowa/Nebraska line and ending in northern California had only be approved by Congress in 1863 after that body had shed its southern members who had vehemently opposed anything but a southern route for a road built with federal funds. Second, without the Civil War the federal government would have lacked the experience and self-confidence to underwrite such a massive undertaking. Third, the war served as a training ground for leaders like Grenville Dodge that made them capable of managing such an enormous and enormously complicated project. Finally, more railroad track was laid down during the war and more men trained on railroad operations than ever before.

The Civil War was also responsible, Ambrose writes, for turning the building of the railroad into a media circus. After four years of life-and-death struggle, a large, experienced and suddenly rather unoccupied corps of veteran reporters latched on to the transcontinental railroad and made it into the biggest news story in the country, tracking the personalities and progress like generals on the march. The fact Congress modified the Pacific Railroad Act soon after the war, turning it into an outright race between the Central and Union Pacific lines only added to the excitement and drama.

Unlike the Civil War, however, the transcontinental railroad produced few national heroes. The author writes that what “should have been regarded as a splendid achievement was widely viewed as full of serious abuse.” And nothing was worse than the Credit Mobilier, the shell company set up by the owners of the Union Pacific as the general contractor for building the railroad. Stock in the UP didn’t sell well and neither did their bonds given that the project required massive upfront investment and wouldn’t turn a profit for years, even if it could be built, which many doubted. However, there was lots of money to be made – and quick – by anyone who secured the contracts to build the railroad. Rather than farm those profits out to the general market, the owners of the UP (and the owners of Central Pacific did the same thing with the Crocker Construction Company) decided to keep it to themselves by funneling all construction contracts through the Credit Mobilier, which quickly paid dividends of up to 300% on invested capital in just one year. Meanwhile, the UP’s treasury was chronically bare, many of its workers and most of its subcontractors going months without pay. Clearly something was amiss and didn’t take long for the public to figure it out and shout for blood. For some reason, which Ambrose never fully explains, the Big Four of the Central Pacific were guilty of the same practice yet escaped scrutiny and justice.

In closing, Ambrose is sympathetic to the businessmen who build the railroad, even in light of Credit Mobilier and the Crocker Construction Company, not to mention the strong armed tactics in New York and Washington of Doc Durant and Collis Huntington. He writes, “An automatic reaction that big business is always on the wrong side, corrupt and untrustworthy, is too easy, and the error is compounded if we fail to distinguish between incentives, for example, and fraud.”