As a Gilded Age United States of great fortunes and booming commerce enters the twentieth century, the rich, sprawling railroad empires—the nation’s first great corporations—are an unparalleled power unto themselves. None is more powerful than the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), its thousands of miles of track serving the nation’s biggest cities and monopolizing the industrial heartland. For thirty years the Pennsylvania Railroad has sought some means—other than its huge fleet of ferries from New Jersey—to bring tens of millions of passengers straight into water-locked Manhattan, America’s commercial heart and most important city. In 1900, there is no bridge or tunnel that spans the Hudson River.
In the first half of this epic history, PRR president Alexander Cassatt, a cultured, steely engineer, fights to find way to get his railroad across the mile-wide Hudson. Solution finally in hand, Cassatt and his railroad prepare to embark on the most monumental and consequent engineering feat of the age, an enterprise that will forever transform the physical and psychological geography of Gotham. And yet, Tammany-run New York’s most corrupt politicians and robber barons seek to derail his plans. Like President Theodore Roosevelt, Cassatt believes in an America of such dynamism and promise he sees no reason to truckle to “successful dishonesty.” When the battle is joined, it becomes yet another chapter in the ongoing war over whether the United States will be an honorable republic or a corrupt plutocracy.