The North American Railroad: Its Origin, Evolution, and Geography by James E. Vance, Jr. (review)

The North American Railroad: Its Origin, Evolution, and Geography James E. Vance, Jr. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 Reviewed by C a r l o s A . S c h w a n t e s University of Idaho, Moscow 83844 I t is hard to avoid superlatives when describing James Vance’s new book on North American railroads. Physically, it is very impressive: the book is attractively designed and well illustrated. The modem maps are models of clarity, conveying enormous amounts of infor­ mation about railroad strategy simply and effectively. The North American Railroad will be the place to look for an overview of the railroad history of both Canada and the United States, and to that end Vance provides a detailed index. The book, however, is much more than a reference tool or anno­ tated compilation of maps. The text offers fresh insights into early railroad technology and into the municipal and corporate strategies that led railroads to build where they did. The historical material is fascinating to read because Vance compares developments in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada in a way that encourages us 184 SCHWANTES: Review of The North American Railroad 185 to rethink many aspects of railroad development usually accepted as givens: something so basic as the design of rails and ties was stan­ dardized only after a lengthy period of experimentation. One of Vance’s primary concerns is to examine how Great Brit­ ain and the United States developed quite distinct railroad technologies in response to geographic differences, such as the need of American railroads to extend service into sparsely settled hinterlands well in advance of the volume of traffic that made the solid, British-style construction feasible. His argument suggests to me how the disci­ plines of geography and history often operate in parallel universes. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin examined the same differences thirty years ago in his trilogy, The Americans. Boorstin believed that Ameri­ cans built their railroads more “rapidly and flimsily” because of differences in national attitudes: “The British confidence in the fu­ ture, and in its resemblance to the present, made it hard for Britishers even to imagine obsolescence. But belief in obsolescence became an article of American faith.” Vance, the geographer, explains techno­ logical differences by carefully relating them to different rates of national development, and thus he offers a more convincing ratio­ nale than B oorstin’s emphasis on national attitudes toward obsolescence. The North American Railroad is part of a series on creating the North American landscape. Yet as comprehensive as Vance’s book is, it does not examine in detail the railroads’ many land-development activities that redefined the landscape of the American West, or the railroads’distinctive landscape itself. These, however, are minor quibbles that should in no way detract from Vance’s accomplish­ ment of relating railroad technology and strategy to North American geography. ...