Making Tracks - An American Odyssey
For more than a century and a half, American railroads have united the frontier and the factory, the city and the countryside, the urge to ramble and the need for fellowship, even our myths and our reality. But in these days of Amtrak and the superhighway, how much of the railroad's old power remains? Terry Pindell, grandson of an engineer on the crack passenger trains the Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge, set out to travel all thirty thousand miles of America's passenger lines in search of an "integration of past and present, of history and headlines, of mind and memory" Part history and part travelogue, his chronicle of that journey is a fresh portrait of America and of the "steel-riders" who have seen the country up close. Pindell recalls the legendary figures of American railroading—Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Pullman, Fred Harvey (and the Harvey girls)—alongside the name-less thousands whose monumental engineering and architectural feats and sheer hard work created the nation's railways. He also tells the stories of today's rail workers and passengers—the Vietnam vet riding the rails to find peace with his country, the young black man whose job on the train is his ticket out of the inner city's dead end, the attractive mother struggling with an on-board affair during a journey back to one of her two husbands, and many more—instinctively riding the rails, spurred by their own searches for their pasts and futures. With the humor, insight, and com-passion of books like Travels with Charley, Blue Highways, and Out West, this rail's-eye view of America discovers a country at once wonderfully strange and refreshingly familiar.
Hardback with dust jacket, 16x24cm, 400 pages,
Condition: Good
ISBN: 9780802112798
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