The Great Railway Revolution by Christian Wolmar

The iron road across America was a revolution in itself. It opened up the country to settlement on an epic scale, cruelly crushing the claims of the native Indian peoples and encapsulating the dream of American colonisation.

It also ensured victory for the North in the American Civil War.

Wolmar is the foremost grand strategist on railways worldwide — as depicted in his earlier saga Blood and Iron, which showed how locomotive power transformed the globe. As his new eagle-eyed view of America reveals, there was a price to pay for such a revolution.

Mostly it came in the form of slave labour, sometimes fatal — 15,000 workers were hired on the southern railroads while chain gangs toiled in the 1880s — and in the corrupt, avaricious battle for territory, with hellish shanty towns springing up along the tracks.

Against this was the luxury of travel itself, which would certainly rival the Blue Train today, red carpet treatment and grand meals with even a barber and stenographer in attendance.

Eventually the automobile and aeroplane became the railways’ biggest enemy. Its death knell almost came in the 1950s and 1960s but today has largely recovered through the Amtrak system. However, above it all is the pioneering vision that grips the reader. Wolmar is so passionate about his subject that one cannot help but be swept along.

Certainly there was romance and great adventure, but this is also a story of danger as each section was laid across trestled bridge and wilderness.

As you travel from coast to coast, you may spare a thought for the treachery and sacrifice that accompanied the track-laying epic of the transcontinental railroad.

In the UK, the author is chairman of Railfuture, which is campaigning for an Oxford-Cambridge rail link. He recently presented an award to the Cotswold Line Promotion Group for its campaigning.