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xiii Preface My interest in railroads and their safety began when I was about five years old, in 1946. My mother would take my sister and me down to the Amherst, Massachusetts, Central Vermont Railroad station to meet the train on Saturday mornings.We got to know the engineman, Jim Thurston—Engineer Jim to us—and he would let us get into the cab as he took on water in those last days of steam. I was hooked and have been a railroad buff ever since. Several years later my father took me to the Boston & Maine switch yard in East Deerfield; we got to ride in the cab of one of the new diesel switchers and the engineman even let me “run” the train. As the locomotive started to rumble and move out, I became scared: “How do you stop this thing?” I wailed, to the immense enjoyment of both men. I like to think that my interest in railroad safety dates from this encounter. But being a railroad enthusiast by no means ensures that one will be interested in the safety of railroads, except perhaps in the avoidance of train wrecks. However, I am also an economic historian—a profession that has always been concerned with the evolution of well-being, of which personal safety is an important part. I have written elsewhere on work safety among railroaders. In doing that research I discovered that railroad safety extended beyond the obvious areas of work and travel and affected the lives of virtually all Americans as they crossed or walked the tracks. The rise and fall of railroad safety as a public concern is intriguing and important whether one is a railroad buff or not. So I hope that this story will instruct and entertain not only railroad enthusiasts but also those who are not especially railroad lovers—who wouldn’t know a fishplate from a railroad frog and who think a highball is just a drink and the Johnson bar is where you get one. The evolution of railroad safety is very much a matter of economics —of labor markets, resource allocation, information flows, innovations, trade-offs, and costs and benefits. So this book contains economic themes and economic analysis. Indeed, one of my central arguments is that early American railroad safety followed a separate path because product and labor market forces on this continent were fundamentally different from those in Europe. But if this is a work of business and economic history, I have also tried to write in English, not social science blah. The book does contain some simple statistical analysis, but that is part of the supporting cast, not the star of the show, and it has been corralled in the notes and appendixes . Political economy is a better term to describe my approach than economics, for it suggests the more interdisciplinary perspective that I have chosen. The history of railroad safety is inevitably intertwined with the history of technology and I have made a serious effort to understand how technologies actually worked. For without the nuts and bolts one cannot grasp dangers or safety or problems of diffusion. The evolution of railroad safety also reflects information problems, organizational change, and political pressures—subjects that economic historians have only recently begun to study—as well as ideology and changing attitudes toward risk and public/private boundaries, topics often reserved to cultural or intellectual historians. All studies contain gaps and biases and this one is no exception. I have spent little time on the struggle to require air brakes or automatic couplers, for those chestnuts have been roasted and served many times, including once by me, but I have taken a fresh look at their consequences. I have done no statistical analysis of the political coalitions for and against various safety laws. There is little here on full crew bills and much other legislation. Because of a lack of data, there are no quantitative cost-benefit analyses, but I have not shrunk from qualitative assessments where the evidence seems compelling. No doubt critics will find it easy to add to this list of omissions. Railroad safety has never been simply the stuff of vast impersonal forces, for real people chose bridge designs, and invented train rules, and switched cars, and stole rides, and real men and women died in accidents by the thousands. They too are part of the story. Inevitably, however, the available sources ensure that we see only glimpses of dangers...

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