The Rock Island Line

Author : David Rhodes
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : City and town life
ISBN : 6612877804

Get Book

Rock Island Line by David Rhodes Pdf

Raised in an idyllic Iowa town, young July Montgomery is rocked by the tragic death of his parents. Fleeing to Philadelphia, he fashions a ghostly existence in an underground train station. When a young woman appears to free him from his malaise, they return together to the Iowa heartland, where the novel soars to its heartrending climax. First published to enormous acclaim in 1975, Rock Island Line brings Rhodes's striking characterizations and unparalleled eye for the telling detail to this tale of paradise lost - and possibly regained.

Author : Bill Marvel
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9780253011312

Get Book

The Rock Island Line by Bill Marvel Pdf

Explore the rich history of the legendary railroad that spanned the American Midwest in this beautifully illustrated volume. Beginning operations in the mid-nineteenth century, the Rock Island Line served farms and small-town America for more than 140 years. One of the earliest railroads to build westward from Chicago, it was the first to span the Mississippi, advancing the frontier, bringing settlers into the West, and hauling their crops to market. Rock Island’s celebrated Rocket passenger trains also set a standard for speed and service, with suburban runs as familiar to Windy City commuters as the Loop. For most of its existence, the Rock battled competitors much larger and richer than itself. When it finally succumbed, the result was one of the largest business bankruptcies ever. Today, as its engines and stock travel the busy main lines operated by other carriers, the Rock Island Line lives on in the hearts of those whom it employed and served.

Author : Gregory L. Schneider
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2020-02-05
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9780700629626

Get Book

Rock Island Requiem by Gregory L. Schneider Pdf

Celebrated in history and song, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company—the Rock Island Line—was a powerful Midwestern railroad that once traversed thirteen states with its fast freights and Rocket passenger trains but eventually succumbed to government regulation and a changing economy. Gregory Schneider chronicles the Rock Island’s painful decline and along the way reveals some of the key problems within the American railroad industry during the post–World War II era. Schneider takes readers back to a time when railroads still clung to a storied past to offer new insight into the devastating impact of economic policymaking during the 1960s and 1970s. Schneider recounts the largest railroad liquidation in American history—as well as one of the most successful reorganizations in American business—to depict the demise and ultimate collapse of Rock Island as part of a broader account of hard times in the railroad industry beginning in the 1970s. Schneider weaves a complex story of how business, politics, government bureaucracy, and individual greed helped to limit the economic possibilities of the railroad industry and catapult the Rock Island Railroad into oblivion. Weakened by a troubled economy, the Rock fell victim to inept management and labor union intransigence; but Schneider also reveals how government regulations and price controls prevented innovation, hindered capital acquisition, and favored other forms of transportation that lie beyond the scope of regulation. Railroads were even hurt by taxation of property and real estate while competitors were able to use government-subsidized highways and airports without having to pay taxes to fund them. Now that America has gone on to witness the collapse of such mammoth firms as Enron and Lehman Brothers, not to mention the bankruptcy and bailout of General Motors, the story of the Rock provides an instructive lesson in how a major American enterprise was allowed to fall victim to forces often beyond its control—while the bailout of the Penn Central, at the expense of smaller lines like Rock Island, helped initiate the era of “too big to fail.” For economic historians and railroad buffs alike, Rock Island Requiem is a well-researche

Author : Billy Bragg
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05-30
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780571327768

Get Book

Roots, Radicals and Rockers by Billy Bragg Pdf

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZERoots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is the first book to explore this phenomenon in depth - a meticulously researched and joyous account that explains how skiffle sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it. It's a story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Billy traces how the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s.Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early '50s, skiffle was adopted by kids who growing up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. These were Britain's first teenagers, looking for a music of their own in a pop culture dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC. Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of 'Rock Island Line' and soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year. Like punk rock that would flourish two decades later, skiffle was a do-it-yourself music. All you needed were three guitar chords and you could form a group, with mates playing tea-chest bass and washboard as a rhythm section.

Author : David Rhodes
Publisher : Milkweed Editions
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781571318008

Get Book

Driftless by David Rhodes Pdf

“A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”—The Wall Street Journal The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America. “[Rhodes’s] finest work yet . . . Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”—Chicago Tribune “Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life.”—The New Yorker “Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”—Booklist (starred review) “A welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction . . . A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.”—Kirkus Reviews “It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”—Publishers Weekly

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 616 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1964
Category : Electronic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105128585044

Get Book

Rock Island Lines News Digest by Anonim Pdf

Author : Dean Klinkenberg
Publisher : Travel Passages
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2019-12-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780990851813

Get Book

Rock Island Lines by Dean Klinkenberg Pdf

Frank Dodge, disgruntled and desperate for a story to write about, has a hot tip: Miguel Ramirez could be one of the last surviving descendants of a brutal gangster named John Looney. Dodge sees this as a good story to sell, so he concocts a plan to meet the young man. When Ramirez is found floating in the Mississippi River, Dodge finds himself without a story and on the wrong side of a murder investigation. As Dodge and his buddy, homicide detective Brian Jefferson, go over the surprising events of the night Ramirez died, clues about the death of Ramirez will come from an unlikely source: the life of John Looney.

Author : H. Roger Grant
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9780253049896

Get Book

A Mighty Fine Road by H. Roger Grant Pdf

The Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad's history is one of big booms and bigger busts. When it became the first railroad to reach and then cross the Mississippi River in 1856, it emerged as a leading American railroad company. But after aggressive expansion and a subsequent change in management, the company struggled and eventually declared bankruptcy in 1915. What followed was a cycle of resurrections and bankruptcies; a grueling, ten-year, ultimately unsuccessful battle to merge with the Union Pacific; and the Rock Island's final liquidation in 1981. But today, long after its glory days and eventual demise, the "Mighty Fine Road" has left behind a living legacy of major and feeder lines throughout the country. In his latest work, railroad historian H. Roger Grant offers an accessible, gorgeously illustrated, and comprehensive history of this iconic American railroad.

Author : Edvard Hoem
Publisher : Milkweed Editions
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2022-03-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781571319814

Get Book

Haymaker in Heaven by Edvard Hoem Pdf

From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century. The year is 1874. Nesje is a recent widower with a young son, working as a haymaker on an estate in the town of Molde and steadily clearing his own small holding. Then he meets Serianna—an outsider, looking for work, who takes him fishing and smokes a pipe and is thoroughly unlike anyone he’s met before. Soon the two fall in love and marry, and Nesje begins to dream of a prosperous future. But prosperity is hard to come by. Some Norwegians—including Serianna’s spirited sister, Gjertine—have begun to immigrate to the American West, attracted by the glimmer of land and commerce. One of Nesje’s sons follows, while another moves to the city and becomes a wealthy merchant, and another is adopted by Serianna’s childless brother and sister-in-law. In Norway and in America, however, the turn of the century is approaching: mechanization is superseding skilled labor, the moneyed classes are growing ever more powerful, and sacrifices don’t always deliver what was promised. Haymaker in Heaven is a sprawling saga—drawn from Edvard Hoem’s own family history—and a vivid portrait of two countries at a critical moment of intersection.

Author : Ricky Tomlinson,Stephen Aintree
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2007-01
Category : Rock musicians
ISBN : 1407404377

Get Book

Reading My Arse! by Ricky Tomlinson,Stephen Aintree Pdf

Hot on the heels of the hugely popular books Football My Arse! and Celebrities My Arse!, comes an exciting, off-beat novel by Ricky Tomlinson, the much-loved comedy actor who doubles as a bestselling author. Inspired by Ricky's love of reading, it tells the thrilling story of one young man's quest to cross the Atlantic from Liverpool in search of the Rock Island Line, the legendary American railway, and follows the adventures that change his life for ever. Reading My Arse! is guaranteed to make you laugh and sigh, and want to keep listening...

Author : United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce. Subcommittee on Surface Transportation
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1975
Category : Electronic
ISBN : LOC:00101496752

Get Book

Financial Condition of the Rock Island Railroad by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce. Subcommittee on Surface Transportation Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 1979
Category : Electronic
ISBN : NWU:35556030152896

Get Book

Purchase of Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Company Line Between Santa Rosa, NM and St.Louis, MO by Anonim Pdf

Author : United States. Congress. Senate. Commerce Committee
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1975
Category : Electronic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105021057042

Get Book

Financial Condition of the Rock Island Railroad, Hearing Before the Surface Transportation Subcommittee Of..., 94-1, Mar. 10, 1975 by United States. Congress. Senate. Commerce Committee Pdf

Author : Michael E. Hibblen
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
Page : 1 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : History
ISBN : 9781467125383

Get Book

Rock Island Railroad in Arkansas by Michael E. Hibblen Pdf

For nearly 80 years, the Rock Island was a major railroad in Arkansas providing passenger and freight services. A decline in rail travel after World War II and an increase in trucks hauling freight over government-subsidized interstates were among factors that left the railroad struggling. Efforts to merge with other railroads were stalled for years by federal regulators. The Rock Island filed for bankruptcy in 1975 and attempted a reorganization, but creditors wanted the assets liquidated, with a judge shutting it down in 1980. Most of the tracks that traversed the state were taken up, but a few relics, like the Little Rock passenger station and the Arkansas River bridge, remain as monuments to this once great railroad.

Author : United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Subcommittee on Surface Transportation
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 1980
Category : Railroad law
ISBN : UOM:39015083086515

Get Book

Rock Island transition act by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Subcommittee on Surface Transportation Pdf