Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 by Mark Aldrich
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Overview: For most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and they captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, claiming that year the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others.
In Death Rode the Rails Mark Aldrich explores the evolution of railroad safety in the United States by examining a variety of incidents: spectacular train wrecks, smaller accidents in shops and yards which devastated the lives of workers and their families, and the deaths of thousands of women and children killed while walking on or crossing the street-grade tracks.
The evolution of railroad safety, Aldrich argues, involved the interplay of market forces, science and technology, and legal and public pressures. He considers the railroad as a system in its entirety: operational realities, technical constraints, economic history, internal politics, and labor management. Aldrich shows that economics initially encouraged American carriers to build and operate cheap and dangerous lines. Only over time did the trade-off between safety and output – shaped by labor markets and public policy – motivate carriers to develop technological improvements that enhanced both productivity and safety.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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