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For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

I bought a railroad during this period of time.

My father was a railroad man his entire life; 43 years for Southern Railroad.

When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period.

Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship.

The construction of extensive railways, however, and particularly the consolidation of small, experimental lines into large systems, dates from the days of the discovery of gold in California.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.