Author: Alfred R. FieldPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 748
Book Description
The Hoosac Tunnel Route Compared with the Western Railroad
Author: Alfred R. FieldPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 748
Book Description
Hoosac Tunnel 1865-1868
Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 726
Book Description
Consists of various reports and speeches concerning the Hoosac Tunnel, bound together in a library binding.
The Hoosac Tunnel
Author: Massachusetts. General Court. Joint Committee on Troy and Greenfield Railroad CompanyPublisher: Boston : Thurston, Torry, and Emerson
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
History of the Hoosac Tunnel
Author: Orson DalrymplePublisher: North Adams, Mass. : O. Dalrymple
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel
Languages : en
Pages : 30
Book Description
Summer Excursions
Author: New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway CompanyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : New York (State)
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Buried Dreams
Author: Andrew R. BlackPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174092
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
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