James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest (The Oklahoma Western Biographies Book 12)

We left him with best wishes. I realized more than ever that Henry Ford was better off without him. The Wills-St. Clair was a beautiful piece of engineering but utterly unsuitable for the times, and a prime reason for its failure was that few garage mechanics of those days knew how to service it.

That same morning Henry Flagler, now eighty-two, left his home, Whitehall, in Palm Beach. He was frail and his sight was failing, but nothing was about to stop him. Not after spending $12 million on a series of hotels, $18 million on his land-based railroad, and another $20 million or more on his “railroad across the sea.” On this day he would boar

The flip side of the railroad genius was dismissiveness and distaste for corporate protocol. Harrison had little patience for boards. Put simply, they were a pain, a waste of time and money. They didn’t increase shareholder value or improve the operating ratio (OR), the key metric for a railroad that’s constantly scrutinized by investors.

It’s hard to over-emphasize the impact railroads have had in the United States and Canada. In the US, they opened up the west and connected the huge population centers of the east, providing a transportation network to service the world’s largest economy. Canadian Pacific Railway helped forge a nation, not only tying it together but encouraging set