Out West On The Overland Train Author:Richard Reinhardt This is a story of three journeys to the West. The first began on an April evening in 1877 with the pop of champagne corks and the crackle of fireworks. It lasted five months, cost a fortune, and generated an outburst of illustrated articles that ran for almost two years in one of the country's leading weeklies. Although transcontinental rail... more »road travel was something of a novelty at the time, this Grand Tour would never be surpassed: the classic first encounter between the elegant snobs of Fifth Avenue and the western wilderness of the overland route.
The second was a quiet trip in the dead of winter in 1967. It was a wistful, rather furtive journey, undertaken at a time when economists and engineers were saying that railroad passenger travel was an outgrown style of transportation that could not survive another decade. As an historic event, it neither attracted publicity nor established precedent, but it did prove that the trains are still running, whatever you may have heard.
The third, which can be found only between the lines, is the journey of the overland train though the history of the American West. if the economists and engineers are right, the story is almost over, and chapters 1877 and 1967 stand near the beginning and the end.« less