For Forbes, see John L. Larson, Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age, expanded Edition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), particularly 53-109.

Supple and Johnson, Boston Capitalists, 197-98.

Richard Overton, Perkins/Budd: Railway Statesmen of the Burlington (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 3.

Cootner argues that railroads responded to rather than instigated demand and business cycles, but he does not address the issue of the transcontinentals. It is hard to see what demand they were addressing in the 1860s and 1870s

Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization, 45-46, 50, 96.

Fogel, Union Pacific, 58-60, 97.