Wolmar’s sweeping history of railroads in America is rich in drama—from the first accident in which passengers died (survivors included John Quincy Adams, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Tyrone Power) to headlines, in the nineteen-seventies, about “ ‘dates’ for top executives that took place in parked sleeper cars in a remote part of New York’s Penn Station.” Among the book’s villains are the robber barons, entrepreneurs of bribery and public appropriations who treated the lives of both employees and passengers as disposable. Among relatively few heroes is Herman Haupt, the Union Army’s rail strategist, who in just nine days rebuilt a bridge over the Potomac that the Confederates had destroyed. Wolmar’s analysis of American political culture has some weak and unresolved points, but he makes a good case that the rail system helped create not only America’s economy but its character. ♦