“Follow the Flag”: A History of the Wabash Railroad Company (Railroads in America)

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Description

“Follow the Flag” offers the first authoritative history of the Wabash Railroad Company, a once vital interregional carrier. The corporate saga of the Wabash involved the efforts of strong-willed and creative leaders, but this book provides more than traditional business history. Noted transportation historian H. Roger Grant captures the human side of the Wabash, ranging from the medical doctors who created an effective hospital department to the worker-sponsored social events. And Grant has not ignored the affect the Wabash had on businesses and communities in the “Heart of The usa.”

Like most major American carriers, the Wabash grew out of an assortment of small firms, including the first railroad to operate in Illinois, the Northern Cross. Thanks in part to the genius of financier Jay Gould, by the early 1880s what was then referred to as the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway reached the principal gateways of Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis. In the 1890s, the Wabash gained access to Buffalo and direct connections to Boston and New York City.

One extension, spearheaded by Gould’s eldest son, George, fizzled. In 1904 entry into Pittsburgh caused financial turmoil, in the end throwing the Wabash into receivership. A subsequent reorganization allowed the Wabash to turn out to be a very powerful carrier right through the go-go years of the 1920s and permitted the company to take keep watch over of a strategic “bridge” property, the Ann Arbor Railroad.

The Great Depression forced the company into another receivership, but an effective reorganization right through the early days of World War II gave rise to a normally robust road. Its famed Blue Bird streamliner, introduced in 1950 between Chicago and St. Louis, became a widely recognized symbol of the “New Wabash.” When “merger madness” swept the railroad industry in the 1960s, the Wabash, along side the Nickel Plate Road, joined the prosperous Norfolk & Western Railway, a merger that worked well for all three carriers.

Immortalized in the popular folk song “Wabash Cannonball,” the midwestern railroad has left important legacies. Today, forty years after becoming a “fallen flag” carrier, key components of the former Wabash remain busy rail arteries and terminals, attesting to its historic value to American transportation.


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