hered all
available cars, taking them away from their ordinary routes, and rushed
them from all parts of the country to the great grain producing States.
All other kinds of shipments were discontinued; officials and employees
from the highest to the lowest worked day and night; and presently the
huge supplies of the indispensable food started towards the Atlantic
coast. So successful was this operation that, on the 12th of March,
the supplies so exceeded the shipping capacity of the Allies that
6318 carloads of food stood at the great North Atlantic ports awaiting
transportation. This dramatic movement of American food supplies was an
important item in winning the war and fairly illustrated the great part
which the American railroads played in turning the tide of battle from
defeat to victory.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

General literature on the history of American railroads is surprisingly
scarce. While numerous volumes have been written in recent years on
special phases of the railroad question, few histories of any real value
are available. Probably the best outline history of American
railroad development as a whole is still Arthur T. Hadley's "Railroad
Transportation, its History and its Laws" (1885), but this necessarily
covers only the earlier periods of railroad growth and its discussions
are limited to the problems which confronted the carriers many years
ago. An extremely valuable book (now out of print) giving a very
complete picture of railroad building and expansion in the pre-Civil
War period is "The Book of the Great Railway Celebration of 1857", by
William Prescott Smith. This is primarily a description of the opening
of the Ohio and Mississippi Railway, which connected the Mississippi
Valley for the first time with the Eastern seaboard. A volume of real
value, but somewhat technical, giving a complete and accurate view of
the reorganization period of the great railroad systems, from 1885 to
1900, is "Railroad Reorganization", by Stewart Daggett (1910). This book
contains outline sketches of the histories of nearly all of the
large systems, as well as very accurate details of the financial
reorganizations of all of the defaulted properties. The most
comprehensive history of any American railroad system is "The Story of
Erie", by H. S. Mott (1900), but even this is partially unreliable and
much of it is compiled from unofficial sources. On the financial history
of the Erie Railroad, the really valuable