Richard White, "Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age," Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 1943.
Baskin, "Development of Corporate Financial Markets," 209, 215-18.
CPH to Crocker, Jan. 8, 1870, Huntington Letters, 3:57.
Heywood Fleisig, "The Central Pacific Railroad and the Railroad Land Grant Controversy," Journal of Economic History 35 (Sept. 1975): 555-56 .
Poor, Manual, 564, 682 .
"The Railroad Problem in American Politics," August 1, 1874, in Crane, ed., Newton Booth of California, 161.
For turnover and Speaker, see Thompson, The "Spider's Web," 71-93.
In the 1870s the percentage of first term members ran at or near 50%,
Nelson W. Polsby, "The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives," American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968), 146.
For Senate, Rothman, Politics and Power, 11-42.
Albert V. House, The Speakership Contest of 1875: Democratic Response to Power, Journal of American History 52 (Sept. 1965): 252-74.
Thompson, Spiders Web, 177.
The literature on this is enormous and starts with Leo Marx's classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).