Bookshelf Ideas

摘要

Celebrated in history and song, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad-the Rock Island Line-was a powerful Midwestern railroad that once traversed thirteen states with its fast freights and Rocket passenger trains, but eventually succumbed to government regulation and a changing economy. Gregory Schneider chronicles the Rock Island's painful decline and along the way reveals some of the key problems within the American railroad industry during the post-WWII era. Schneider takes readers back to a time when railroads still clung to a storied past to offer new insight into the devastating impact of economic policymaking during the 1960s and 1970s. Schneider recounts the largest railroad liquidation in American history, as well as one of the most successful reorganizations in American business, to depict the demise and ultimate collapse of Rock Island as part of a broader account of hard times in the railroad industry beginning in the 1970s.