Author: Dave Peel Publisher: ISBN: 9781905505319 Category : Locomotives Languages : en Pages : 80
Book Description
The years 1901-68 cover the heyday of locomotive testing from the advent of the first dynamometer car through to the end of British Railway's activities in this area. In 1948, BR inherited the revamped Swindon test plant together with the three dynamometer cars from 1901 (GWR), 1906 (NER) and 1913 (L&YR) around which testing had revolved for decades. With the Rugby testing station soon to be opened, the following years were set to become the busiest and most interesting testing years of all. Most of the book relates to this period.
Author: Mark Aldrich Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801854057 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 450
Book Description
The first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. In 1907, American coal mines killed 3,242 men in occupational accidents, probably an all-time high both for the industry and for all laboring accidents in this country. In December alone, two mines at Monongah, West Virginia, blew up, killing 362 men. Railroad accidents that same year killed another 4,534. At a single South Chicago steel plant, 46 workers died on the job. In mines and mills and on railroads, work in America had become more dangerous than in any other advanced nation. Ninety years later, such numbers and events seem extraordinary. Although serious accidents do still occur, industrial jobs in the United States have become vastly and dramatically safer. In Safety First, Mark Aldrich offers the first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. Aldrich, an economist who once served as an OSHA investigator, first describes the increasing dangers of industrial work in late-nineteenth-century America as a result of technological change, careless work practices, and a legal system that minimized employers' responsibility for industrial accidents. He then explores the developments that led to improved safety—government regulation, corporate publicizing of safety measures, and legislation that raised the costs of accidents by requiring employers to pay workmen's compensation. At the heart of these changes, Aldrich contends, was the emergence of a safety ideology that stressed both worker and management responsibility for work accidents—a stunning reversal of earlier attitudes.
Author: Albert J. Churella Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812207629 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 970
Book Description
"Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise," Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people—more than double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad of the World," this colossal corporate body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship between business and government to advances in technology and transportation. Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.
Author: Dave Peel
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Author: Mark Aldrich
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Author: Albert J. Churella
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Author: COLONEL COL. H. C. B. ROGERS
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