"The building of the Pacific railroad is an epic story, often recounted but never so thoroughly, authoritatively and engagingly as in EMPIRE EXPRESS....[This book] is well researched, well written, refreshingly revisionist where the sources indicate, illustrated by well-chosen photographs and studded with beautiful topographical maps indispensible to the construction story. The book promises to endure as the standard history of the Pacific railroad." "EMPIRE EXPRESS, an extremely thorough history of the competition between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroad companies, is rich with scandal, tragedy and visionary characters. In it, David Haward Bain brings alive a freer--that is, more ruthless--era of homegrown capitalism, when hardly anybody worried about little things like ecocide or conflict of interest." "...[this book] is an breathtaking tale enthusiastically told--of vision, greed, adventure, courage, betrayal, and accomplishment....EMPIRE EXPRESS is a spirited telling of a complicated tale." "Bain has written by far the best account of the building of the Pacific railroad, as the nineteenth-century Americans called the first trancontinental railroad in the United States."