Route Logic of the Central Pacific Railroad, 1861–1869

The approximate location of the first railroad to reach California from the east had its origins in the congressional debate over slavery prior to the Civil War. The precise location of track took years to define. By comparing two sets of historical maps in the California State Archives, this article examines how the route of the Central Pacific Railroad evolved from a plausible engineering concept to the busy track it is today. This occurred at the hands of Congress, a pharmacist, an engineer, and the engineer’s assistant, in response to national politics, local business concerns, balance sheets, and the limits of railway construction technology in the 1860s.

Centuries of Ballot-Box Transportation Planning in Los Angeles

Since 1980, many have marveled at Los Angeles’“innovation” of funding transportation through ballot measures that are raising billions for transportation improvements. In fact, historically much transportation infrastructure in Los Angeles was financed by local voter-approved revenues. It began in 1868 with a narrowly approved $225,000 bond measure to build the region’s first railroad, followed by an 1876 measure to grant the Southern Pacific railroad a $602,000 subsidy to entice the company to route its transcontinental line through the region. Angeleno voted on an additional 23 different transportation-related ballot measures between the passage of the Good Roads Act (1908) and the end of the New Deal (1937)—a key period of Los Angeles’ history that saw dramatic population increase and with it political contention over the direction of the region’s growth. Overall, these early transportation measures fared well with voters. Of the 25 transportation-related ballot measures in Los Angeles County from 1860 to 1960, only seven (28%) failed to pass, a far better record than nontransportation measures of which 21 of 31 (71%) went down to defeat. Regardless of whether, as some contend, Los Angeles missed a golden opportunity to create the backbone of an effective transit system that would have reduced the need for automobiles and spending many billions on freeways, it is clear that local voters have long faced competing visions for the future of Los Angeles and arguments over whether to fund transportation systems to serve these visions.

Performance-based regulations for safety management systems in the Canadian railway industry: an analytical discussion

The Canadian Railway Safety Act regulations require that railways implement safety management systems (SMS). The intent of this requirement was to promote companies’ safety culture, better management of safety risks, and demonstration of compliance with rules and engineering standards in day-to-day operations, while also reflecting on their processes and becoming more innovative. Yet, the railway disaster at Lac Mégantic in 2013 — which claimed 47 lives — demonstrated that SMS have been applied unevenly by railroads. A Canadian Pacific railroad derailment on 3 February 2019 with strikingly similar circumstances — which claimed 3 lives — demonstrates that these safety issues persist. In this article, we discuss and propose the adaptation of enhanced SMS implementation, within clearer performance-based regulation and risk management methods. We draw from other jurisdictions and research to demonstrate how this would encourage continuous improvement and innovation by railway operators and in concert with partners and relevant stakeholders.

The Means and Meanings of Carceral Mobility

This chapter explores how trains and steamboats—the iconic engines of mobility, freedom, and transcontinental connection—also served nativist designs as the new technology for mobile captivity and national expulsion. Situated between the intersection of settler economy and rapid industrialization, the chapter’s transnational exploration of deportation trains dissects the private–public partnership between state agencies and the Southern Pacific Railroad. This partnership first detained and deported Chinese immigrants in the American West, and from that experience a “hybrid public–private space” was created as an engine of deportability that affirmed national border control through rapid locomotion. After being detained, the state placed Chinese and Mexican noncitizens aboard train cars where moving segregation and speedy expulsion ensured locomotive border control. This chapter argues that historians must adopt a “mobility turn” that moves beyond the permanence of fixed carceral structures and institutions to adopt a more transnational view where the coerced and confined dislocation of people is bound to the blur of carceral motion.

How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood

This essay analyzes how a rhetorical culture emerged in which the Supreme Court of the United States assumed corporations were constitutional persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Approaching rhetorical culture from a networked standpoint, I argue that corporate personhood emerged from Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s networks and alliances with environmental preservationists, politicians, publics, lawyers, judges, and immigrants in the late 19th century. Contributing to literatures on rhetorical culture and agency, this study shows how Southern Pacific Railroad Co., through networks of influence and force, was a rhetorical subject that shaped a networked rhetorical culture that expanded the boundaries of the Fourteenth Amendment even though the Supreme Court of the United States had not worked out the philosophical underpinnings of corporate personhood. Corporate personhood remains theoretically restrained by legal discourses that reduce subjectivity to a singular, speaking, human subject.