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For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

I had a great job with the railroad, a good salary.

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

My dad was a telegraph operator for the Cotton Belt Railroad. He worked seven nights a week from 4 until midnight, no vacation.

I could go back to the railroad. I liked that job.

I come from a line of railroad men. My great-grandfather was a surveyor for the Burlington Railroad.

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.

I wanted to build businesses from the time I was little.

My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.