This argument while largely true had a caveat. A freight car on a long haul route would not be switched just once but potentially would be switched every one hundred miles or so at each divisional point.
William Z. Ripley, Railroads: Rates and Regulation (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916), 101-103.
George H. Miller, Railroads and Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 109.
The hot stove joke was a common one in the Gilded Age.
Harry James Brown and Frederick D. Williams (eds), The Diary of James A. Garfield. 4 volumes (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967-1981), Dec. 7, 1873, 2: 256.
Vance contends regional rather than national integration was determined in part by geographical route ways, in North American Railroad, 111-15.
George Rogers Taylor and Irene Neu, The American Railroad Network, 1861-1890 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), 53-57, 49-83.
The idea of attracting small investors for public debt was not unheard of at the time. The initial investments in the Erie Canal came from middling investors. See Larson.
The best account of the operation of the loan is still Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, 1: 133-325, especially 151, 163-64, 187-88, 193, 229, 231.
Stanford was probably worth $250,000. Huntington's net worth may have been $50,000, and Crocker and Hopkins, $30,000 each.
Lavender, Great Persuader, 95, 388.