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The first week of the first Labour Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, saw a national strike by members of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF). Most of their footplate colleagues in the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) did not stop work, a division that produced considerable inter-union acrimony. The senior official of each union had experience in British politics: John Bromley of ASLEF and Jimmy Thomas of NUR. A shared political partisanship did not soften inter-union rivalries, and Bromley's commitment to the Labour Party did not reduce his readiness to protect his members' wage standards in the context of a Labour Government. The 1924 labour disputes occurred in a relatively buoyant economic context, but from 1929 deepening economic depression made industrial action a statement of despair as much as a bargaining tactic. From 1925 to 1930, the Labour leadership was given a backing by the trade unions that was remarkable in both breadth and depth.

A massive Corliss steam engine served as the United States centennial celebration's centerpiece. It was an appropriate symbol of a young nation on the move. The young Republic had started the 19th century as a weak sister of Great Britain and other western nations. The transformation of the Lake copper industry at the hands of steam power started early. The first steam locomotive arrived on the Keweenaw in 1864, when the jointly managed Pewabic and Franklin mines purchased a small engine and put it to the task of delivering rock to their stampmill inclines. Harnessed steam power radically transformed the Lake Superior copper mining industry after the mid-1840s. It drove shop machinery and air compressors. Observers often noted that the Lake mines modernized their surface operations more than their underground ones and they observed precisely.

This chapter presents the text of Lamed Shapiro's short fiction titled Between the Fields. It explains that the story is about a locomotive that accidentally destroyed a cornfield after its rail was disconnected.

This chapter examines the labor banking movement. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) attempted to establish labor banks to move labor's battles from the “picket line to the board room.” Other unions followed the lead of the BLE, whose president, Warren Stone, became a symbol of the labor banking movement. Ultimately, the BLE's financial empire crashed and an ill-timed investment in Florida real estate nearly destroyed the union. The union's foray into banking demonstrates not only its activism, but is also labor's boldest attempt to move beyond its traditional boundaries while remaining within a capitalist framework. Railroad labor did not view itself as part of an American working class, but rather as part of the burgeoning middle class.

This chapter describes the appearance of a predecessor firm to the Wabash Railroad west of the Mississippi River that took somewhat longer than it did in the Old Northwest. On August 20, 1852, an excited crowd gathered at the St. Louis waterfront to watch dock hands unload from the steamboat Tuscumbia the twenty-two-ton locomotive Pacific, a product of the Taunton Locomotive Works in Massachusetts. Four months later, this archetypical American standard-type locomotive made its maiden run over the newly installed five miles of broad-gauge iron rails of the Pacific Railroad Company between downtown St. Louis and suburban Cheltenham, making this the first railroad operation in the state. While construction crews of the Pacific Railroad headed for Jefferson City and beyond, building the initial stem of the future Missouri Pacific Railway, and its promoters fantasized about a transcontinental line extending westward from St. Louis, the first segment of the Wabash in Missouri appeared. On August 2, 1855, after nearly thirteen months of somewhat sporadic construction, the North Missouri Railroad Company opened nineteen miles of broad-gauge line.

This chapter talks about the Wabash for nearly nine decades, which affected countless people in a myriad of ways, doing so in two distinct fashions. The first included the public's contact with its trains, personnel and overall presence in community life. The other covered the multitude of experiences involving thousands of men and women who worked for the company. For a vast number of midcontinent residents, the Wabash was their railroad, the “Good Ole Wabash.” Americans have long associated a distinctive flag logo with the Wabash. Yet it took a decade or so for this enduring hallmark to evolve. Most roads commonly selected a circle, diamond, rectangle, square or shield, and in 1884 the company placed the Wabash name in a rectangle directly in the forward glare of a locomotive headlight, an eye-catching technique that some nonrailroad firms also used. Usually “THE GREAT WABASH ROUTE” phrase accompanied this artwork, which the railroad duly registered with the U.S. Patent Office.

As the B&O intensified its competition with other railroad companies for trade, it sought to remake the urban environment so as to facilitate the movement of goods and passengers. But municipal regulations, particularly restrictions on the use of steam power, frustrated railroad executives’ visions of unimpeded circulation. This chapter looks at efforts by the B&O and other rail lines to accommodate the city to the locomotive. Some of these efforts involved creating new types of infrastructure at the urban periphery, but others took the railroad into the urban core in new and disruptive ways, as the company targeted a predominantly African American neighborhood as the site for its new downtown depot.