My main purpose in reading this monograph was to get some sense of just what the relationship of this railroad was to the origins of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as the legend is that the highway pretty much followed the railway cut; the answer to that is not to the degree you might imagine. Before that though Harwood throws you into the super-heated world of railroad building in 19th-century America when William H. Vanderbilt of the New York Central, and a coterie of Pittsburgh businessmen (including Andrew Carnegie), decided that they needed to put the screws to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The amazing thing to me is that they actually were going to punch a railroad through some the roughest terrain in the Keystone State, but at a certain point it dawned on the principals that there was no way that this project could be viable and J.P. Morgan finessed a deal that satisfied most of the relevant parties. This monograph will actually be quite interesting to readers other than enthusiasts of railroad history and students of American business, but it doesn't hurt to have driven the Pennsylvania Turnpike a few times just to get a sense of the daring and defiance behind this project! ( )