Somehow I got started reading books about railroads, and I couldn’t stop. The photo you see with this review shows my sister sitting by the railroad tracks in Ferguson, Iowa, the town I grew up in. My father’s grain elevator would fill boxcars with corn or soybeans or oats during the harvest season. I was often in the railroad car to make sure the spout didn’t plug up and would continue filling the railroad car with grain.

The first book is “Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow,” by Dee Brown, c 1977. The quote at the beginning of the book, by Henry David Thoreau, is “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man.”

This quote gets me started on a review of this book that does include more quotes from names we are familiar with, and interesting descriptions of towns the railroad is going through. We read about the railroad being built in Abilene, Kansas, that was a town of 40 saloons (p. 83). The songs being sung in saloons were “The Dying Cowboy,” “Get Along Little Dogies (or Doggie),” and “The Railroad Corral.”

Another historical reference on many pages throughout the book is about Native Americans who are on land where the railroad is being built. On page 85 we read about the “hunting parties of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho.”

Often the railroads are being built with “a mile of new track each day” (p. 103). One of the references to an evening meal for the builders is “lamb with green peas, roasted antelope, and Chinese duck, all washed down with Champagne” (p. 70).

Abraham Lincoln signed many land grants for building the railroad. In 1859 he was in Council Bluffs, Iowa, regarding railroad grants. At this time, he owned land in the Council Bluffs area.

The next book I’ll describe more briefly is “Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railroads Transformed the World,” by Christian Wolman, c 2010.

In the Introduction we read that Britain was “home to the world’s first major railway” (p. xiv). In many countries the distance between rails was 5 feet, 6 inches. In Britain the distance was 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

The British used the term “railway.” Americans used the term “railroad.” The need for building railroads went back and forth between hauling such items as coal and being a service for passengers.

Railways were developed more than fifty years before road vehicles (p. 6).

In a book I have, “American History in Song,” by Henry Eisenkramer, c 2020, I can sing the song published here; the title is “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

I’ve been working on the railroad

All the livelong day;

I’ve been working on the railroad,

To pass the time away.

Don’t you hear the whistle blowing?

Rise up so early in the morn.

Don’t you hear the captain shouting,

“Dinah, blow your horn!”

There is a lot of history about how the name Dinah was used in this song.

When I looked up the song on syncopatedtimes.com, I found a detailed historical description of music written and sung about railroads. I’ll end with a meaningful reference to teaching this song, which was first published in the 1890s :

The proud, hardworking and newly free Black men and women who helped build our country by working on the railroad deserved to be memorialized. A catchy song, sung from their point of view, is an excellent way to bring this history into the elementary school classroom. That is exactly what the civil rights workers who introduced the song in 1950 were trying to do.

Many people are fascinated by the lure of riding the rails. Here are more titles that might set you on your own iron horse adventure: DVDs you may enjoy include: “Murder on the Orient Express”; “Dream Trains Short Hops & Whistle Stops” 625.261 DRE. Books include: “Rails to the North Sta: a Minnesota railroad atlas” by Richard S. Prosser 385.097 PRO, MN Collection; “Nothing like it in the world: the men who built the transcontinental railroad,” 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose. 395.0973 AMB All Aboard! marshalllyonlibrary.org