The best accounts of railroad work and the struggle over it are Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987),

and Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983).

Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006), 1-50.

See, e.g., Chandler, Visible Hand, 108.

Licht, Working for the Railroad, 58-59.