, an important book with fresh insights on the spatial and social impact of railroads on ­19th-­century America. 

 is billed as a sequel to that work. According to Stilgoe, railroads are on the cusp of ending the tyranny of highways in the United States and will reclaim their birth­right as the premier mover of people, freight, and ­mail.

,” Stilgoe declares, America will be transformed. “Return [of train travel] will alter everyday life more dramatically than the arrival of personal computers, Internet connections, or cell phones.” His certainty about a rail renaissance is surprising. Passenger trains are few and far between today; in 2005, Americans traveled 900 miles by private vehicle for every mile by intercity rail. The disconnect between Stilgoe’s vision and reality is just evidence of “the final, sickly sweet blossoming of the automobile,” he argues, which only “masks the desperation of real estate developers terrified that people will not buy the last of the structures built according to automobile thinking.”

Some books are of interest because they reveal a mindset that is part of the problem that the author is trying to correct. So far, train advocates have been unsuccessful in wresting America’s heart from SUVs and ­three-­car garages. Despite $3-­a-­gallon gasoline and worry about global warming, debate over transportation priorities hasn't figured in this year’s presidential campaigns. Convincing taxpayers that trains could save them money and improve the environment is a subtle educational ­task.

Stilgoe, a historian of landscape at Harvard, swings a sledgehammer against anyone who does not share his opinions. And some of his opinions are idiosyncratic. In 1962, he writes, the wise men of the Kennedy administration recognized the “futility” of building more highways, but they were thwarted by Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society program. (For the record, today’s Northeast Corridor got its start with the 1965 High Speed Ground Transportation Act, signed by Johnson, who also spurred the development of Washington, D.C.’s Metro subway.) More often, the arguments are simplistic. Amtrak, Stilgoe declares, was organized as an “elegant means of keeping railroad innovation under the control of a Congress controlled by road and airline ­industries—­and by the military.”

After exhausting his prophecies and conspiracy theories, Stilgoe addresses various aspects of train service with more success. There are interesting chapters about the poor state of mail delivery after the Post Office Department abandoned railway transportation in the 1960s and the revival of freight traffic in the past 20 years with the growth of global trade. But the book sidesteps the crucial issue of how we get from here to ­there—­from Amtrak’s thread­bare service (outside the Boston­Washington Northeast Corridor) and freight railroads’ clogged infrastructure to 200-­mile-­per-­hour passenger trains and ­just-­in-­time product shipments. Or, more realistically, how we can build strategic rail links, ranging from 50 to 200 miles, that complement highways and relieve the worst of traffic congestion and ­pollution.

Stilgoe forsakes footnotes and offers instead a laundry list of sources at the end of each chapter. Inexplicably, he fails to cite the work of a number of recognized experts, including Maury Klein, Albro Martin, Joseph Vranich, and a forebear, John W. Barriger III. Back in 1956, Barriger published ­

Super-­Railroads for a Dynamic American Econ­omy

, in which he asked why ­“super-­highways and ­super-­markets and ­super-­everything-­else [are] part of modern America’s burgeoning economic life, while there are no ­super-­railroads.” That question has yet to be adequately ­answered.

, a Wilson Center fellow during 1994-1995, is the former editor of 

"Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape"

 by John R. Stilgoe, University of Virginia Press, 2007. 

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Mark Reutter says books such as John Stilgoe's “Train Time” are “of interest because they reveal a mindset that is part of the problem that the author is trying to correct.”

Back on Track?

Over the rice paddies and tin-roofed villages of coastal China, thousands of sleek, pre-stressed concrete bridge pylons are rising into place like a giant row of dominoes, at a pace that rivals the frenzied advance of the track layers who completed America’s first transcontinental railroad in 1869. The “transcon,” which linked the existing railroads of the East with California, was considered the greatest construction feat of its era. As more track was laid across the United States, wagon trains and stagecoaches faded from the scene, and railroads became the 19th-century’s dominant carrier of passengers and goods.

China has embarked on a program that at first glance looks like a return to the past, but is viewed by government planners as vital to the country’s fast-growing economy. After two decades of highway construction, the focus has shifted to public transportation, with the equivalent of $1 trillion allocated to expand and improve the railway network. The most audacious element of China’s plan is to build 8,000 miles of high-speed railways by 2020. The first segment is already under construction between Beijing and Shanghai: 820 miles, comparable to the distance from New York to Chicago. When the line opens in 2012, trains on elevated rights of way will race at speeds as fast as 235 m.p.h. between the two cities, cutting the trip time from 12 hours to four and a half. Eventually, China wants to connect its rail network to a “supertrain” line to Europe that, carrying both passengers and export goods, would help secure the nation’s future as a global powerhouse.

Since entering service in Japan in 1964, fast trains have been gaining in speed and popularity. The first Shinkansen, or bullet train, traveled between Tokyo and Osaka at a maximum of 130 m.p.h. The latest-generation Shinkansen runs at a top speed of 188 m.p.h., and its ancestor is now in a museum. France launched Europe’s first high-speed railroad between Paris and Lyon in 1981, the Train à Grande Vitesse (“train of great speed”), better known as the TGV. Today, trains doing 125 m.p.h. or more zip across 13 European countries as well as Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia recently let contracts for a European-style supertrain between the western port of Jeddah and the religious centers of Mecca and Medina, while Israel has a new Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem line in the works and Iran is upgrading its main lines out of Tehran to standards exceeding 120 m.p.h.

Since entering service in Japan in 1964, fast trains have been gaining in speed and popularity. The first Shinkansen, or bullet train, traveled between Tokyo and Osaka at a maximum of 130 m.p.h. The latest-generation Shinkansen runs at a top speed of 188 m.p.h., and its ancestor is now in a museum.

By these measures, America’s passenger trains are slowpokes. Even Amtrak’s self-declared high-speed Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington does not qualify as high speed by world standards (defined by the International Union of Railways as regular operation at or above 155 m.p.h. on new or renovated track or 124 m.p.h. on older track). The Acela Express reaches 150 m.p.h. on a short stretch of reconditioned track in Rhode Island, but otherwise is forced to go much slower because of aging infrastructure. Overall, Acela trains average only 67 m.p.h. between Boston and New York City. South of New York, Acela trains operate at a top speed of 125 m.p.h. and an average of 77 m.p.h. Compare this with the 217 m.p.h. maximum and 146 m.p.h. average of Spain’s 386-mile line between Madrid and Barcelona, and the gap between U.S. and European railroads becomes apparent.

This gap only widens in the rest of Amtrak’s 22,000-mile nationwide network. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, there are only four routes where Amtrak trains can run faster than 79 m.p.h.: Los Angeles-San Diego, New York City-Albany, Philadelphia-Harrisburg, and a 100-mile segment in Michigan. Elsewhere, trains are restricted to 79 m.p.h. because locomotives and track are not equipped with signal systems that prevent collisions. After accounting for speed-restricted curves, snail-like crawls through junctions, stops for opposing trains, and other obstacles thrown in their path, Amtrak trains average no better than 50 m.p.h. between terminals—and much less if unscheduled delays are counted. The result is that train service is slower today than it was in the 1940s, when “streamliners” touted for their speed—such as the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Denver Zephyr, and Hiawatha—routinely topped 90 to 100 m.p.h. between station stops. While the rest of the world has advanced, America’s passenger rail has stalled, if not reversed direction.

If President Barack Obama has his way, American passenger rail will pick up speed again. Earlier this year, he called for the creation of a national high-speed rail network. The idea is not to lay track coast to coast, but to focus on heavily populated corridors where short distances between cities let fast trains compete effectively with cars and planes. President Obama allocated $8 billion from the economic stimulus package and requested $5 billion more from Congress through 2014, which would be used as seed money for improved rail service.

After accounting for speed-restricted curves, snail-like crawls through junctions, stops for opposing trains, and other obstacles thrown in their path, Amtrak trains average no better than 50 m.p.h. between terminals—and much less if unscheduled delays are counted. The result is that train service is slower today than it was in the 1940s, when “streamliners” touted for their speed—such as the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Denver Zephyr, and Hiawatha—routinely topped 90 to 100 m.p.h. between station stops.

Ten corridors, ranging in length from 200 to 600 miles, have been designated as potential high-speed routes. These routes would serve city clusters that currently have no through passenger service (such as Miami-Orlando-Tampa), as well as corridors that have built up ridership on conventional Amtrak trains (such as New York-Albany-Buffalo and San Diego-Los Angeles-San Luis Obispo). State governments have subsidized Amtrak trains for years, but attempts to add faster and more frequent service have been thwarted by lack of money and, sometimes, by resistance from Amtrak itself. As an Illinois state senator in the 1990s, Obama witnessed firsthand the state’s frustrating attempts to refurbish Amtrak’s slow and threadbare service between Chicago and St. Louis.

The $8 billion program bypasses Amtrak and will provide funds directly to selected state and regional agencies. The plan follows the precedent of the Interstate Highway System, initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, for which states planned and built the highways according to standards set by the federal government, which picked up 90 percent of the tab. For high-speed rail, though, private investors will also be sought. “This is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future,” Obama observed in introducing his plan. “It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it has been happening elsewhere, not here.”

While maybe not a pie-in-the-sky project, instituting high-speed rail—or even getting train speeds back to 1940s standards—will be a tall order requiring years of commitment and vastly more than $13 billion to pull off. Given Americans’ well-known penchant to jump in a car or head for the airport to get where they’re going, how realistic is Obama’s plan?

Backers cite many gains to be reaped: relieving traffic congestion, promoting economic development, improving safety, and creating jobs for the tens of thousands of workers who will construct and operate the system. Saving energy and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions also are key selling points. Diesel-powered trains use 27 percent less energy per passenger mile than cars and 21 percent less than airliners, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. If high-speed rail lines were operated with nonpolluting electric locomotives, they could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as two million tons annually, according to the Center for Clean Air Policy. “Not since the implementation of the Interstate Highway System have we been afforded such a momentous opportunity to change how this country moves forward,” Edward G. Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania and chairman of the National Governors Conference, told Congress last June.

Not so fast, say critics. According to Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, high-speed rail is a “mirage” that would do little to reduce highway traffic congestion or improve the environment. He and others argue that most congestion involves travel within cities rather than between them, and O’Toole contends that high-speed rail in any event “won’t take more than three or four percent of cars off the highways it parallels.” At best, supertrains would replace commuter airlines, and at worst, the lines would cause a long-term drain on public finances at a time when the United States is in dire fiscal straits.

“Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees,” O’Toole warns. But roads and airports are paid for only in part by those who use them through gasoline taxes and other user levies. For example, airline ticket tax receipts cover airport construction costs, but the costs of safety measures and a portion of air traffic control—more than $2.5 billion per year—are subsidized by all taxpayers, including those who never fly. Intercity trains are likewise subsidized out of tax revenues from the whole population. Last year, Amtrak earned 72 percent of its costs from ticket receipts and received about $1.2 billion in direct federal subsidies.

While there are important issues to be debated about the costs and benefits of high-speed railroads, the numbers on both sides of the equation are notoriously slippery. And longer-term benefits can be impossible to anticipate. Yet the fundamental choice facing the United States is about the longer-term future. The decisions made today about transportation will literally shape the American landscape and economy for decades to come, and in ways that are difficult to predict with any precision. Even the most farsighted planners behind the Interstate Highway System did not anticipate the extent to which the new roads they built would help spawn a burgeoning suburbia, with its far-flung office and industrial parks, edge cities, and immense shopping malls and commercial areas.

High-speed rail doesn't simply proceed from point A to point B; it has the potential to energize the cities and towns where it stops in between. The normal practice is to locate intermediate stations in populated areas roughly 50 miles apart. In Europe, high-speed railroads have generated the most growth in provincial cities, as once remote districts benefit from their newfound closeness to hubs such as Paris and Berlin. In a century that will demand more compact, energy-efficient development, high-speed rail has the potential to establish a new superstructure for growth.

Specialists generally agree that high-speed railways earn a high percentage of their costs when carefully planned. But do fast trains repay their total investment? In a 2009 survey of high-speed lines in Japan and Spain, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that Japan’s core Shinkansen routes fully repaid the initial investment and debt related to their construction. However, three high-speed lines built in the 1990s, when Tokyo was trying to stimulate the economy through very liberal funding of public works, recovered only 10, 52, and 63 percent of their construction costs through ticket sales. In Spain, the original high-speed line between Madrid and Seville has been profitable on an operating basis, but has not yet repaid its original construction costs. Other studies indicate that France’s TGV system operates at a profit, while Germany’s and Italy’s high-speed trains share in the subsidies given to the railway system by the government.

Do fast trains repay their total investment? In a 2009 survey of high-speed lines in Japan and Spain, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that Japan’s core Shinkansen routes fully repaid the initial investment and debt related to their construction. However, three high-speed lines built in the 1990s, when Tokyo was trying to stimulate the economy through very liberal funding of public works, recovered only 10, 52, and 63 percent of their construction costs through ticket sales.

Critics have rightly pointed out that attempting to extrapolate the economic performance of the Shinkansen or TGV in the United States is a dubious exercise. For one thing, expensive gasoline and expressway tolls make driving a much less attractive option overseas. On the other hand, critics have steadfastly refused to look at high-speed rail outside the context of Amtrak or to recognize the phenomenon of “induced” traffic—the traffic that seems to spring up, seemingly from nowhere, when superior technology is introduced. This capacity for growth is a recurring theme of modern transportation dating back to when steamships replaced sailing vessels and jet aircraft overtook propeller planes. The deciding factor is speed or fluidity of movement. And the more customers, the lower the cost per passenger mile.

The debate is confusing in part because few Americans know what fast trains really are, much less how they can best operate. Many people simply assume that Amtrak schedules would magically accelerate if, say, some bullet-shaped trains were placed on the track and their motors revved up.

It’s not that simple. High-speed trainsets are only as good as their supporting infrastructure: right of way, track quality, and propulsion. Requirements for each component become more exacting as the speed of a train increases. Take the matter of track quality. Freight and conventional passenger trains can operate safely with relatively large discrepancies between the level of one rail and the other. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) permits a maximum discrepancy of 1.25 inches for 79 m.p.h. operation. But the French require discrepancies of no more than 0.16 inches for the TGV, and the FRA standard for 120 m.p.h. along the Northeast Corridor is 0.5 inches. “There is nothing impossible about such requirements,” Louis S. Thompson, a former FRA official, has written. “Satisfying them is, however, expensive.”

“Together, the limits on curvature and gradient mean that high-speed rail requires extensive land acquisition and expensive cutting, filling, bridging, and tunneling, especially in hilly areas,” Thompson noted. Expanding such corridors through heavily populated areas presents environmental hazards and NIMBY (not in my backyard) challenges, not to mention costs ranging up to $50 million a mile.

The freight railroads that own the track that Amtrak uses for its passenger trains (except along the Northeast Corridor, which Amtrak owns) have little incentive to upgrade track to high-speed standards. The current track works just fine for them. In fact, many railroads reconfigured their track after Amtrak was formed in 1971, relieving private railroads rocked by the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad of the need to operate passenger trains. Banked curves, which kept the centrifugal force on passengers to a tolerable level at high speed, were flattened to better accommodate slow-moving freights. Amtrak now must brake for curves that streamliners once navigated with ease.

Because a railroad built today will probably still be in operation 150 years from now, rights of way should be engineered for maximum speeds from end to end. Overseas, where many high-speed trains run on dedicated tracks, they are. (In Japan and most of Europe, passenger trains are dominant and railroads carry a relatively small proportion of all freight—the reverse of the situation in the United States. Europe’s freight railroads are hampered by national differences in signaling systems and other technologies.) The sharpest curves permitted for trains operating over 170 m.p.h. are a close approximation of a straight line. Grades are typically restricted to one percent, or a one-foot rise or fall per 100 feet of distance. “Together, the limits on curvature and gradient mean that high-speed rail requires extensive land acquisition and expensive cutting, filling, bridging, and tunneling, especially in hilly areas,” Thompson noted. Expanding such corridors through heavily populated areas presents environmental hazards and NIMBY (not in my backyard) challenges, not to mention costs ranging up to $50 million a mile.

In deciding which high-speed projects to fund, the federal government will need to choose between two types of propulsion systems. Freight railroads—and, by extension, Amtrak—use diesel locomotives. The initial cost of diesel power is far less than that of electric propulsion, which requires overhead electric lines and trackside transformers. While today’s diesel locomotive produces 70 percent less pollution than its 1980 counterpart, electric power uses less energy, emits no pollution, and offers faster acceleration than diesel engines, an advantage at high speeds. Electricity is the standard propulsion for the TGV and other overseas railways, but in the United States it is only available along the Northeast Corridor. Electrifying just one of the high-speed corridors proposed for the Midwest, the 300-mile Chicago-St. Louis line, would cost $1.2 billion, according to TranSystems, a transportation planning firm.

So how much is speed worth? Without a doubt, fast trains attract more passengers. A general rule of thumb is that every minute saved in transit is likely to generate one percent more customers. But does there come a point where increments of speed are not worth the extra outlays of money? This question will be critical to the ultimate success of President Obama’s railroad plan.

The administration has outlined a “three-track investment strategy” to divide up the $8 billion in seed money. The first track is not really high speed at all. It would provide money for incremental “shovel-ready” projects that could nudge up the speed and frequency of conventional diesel-powered trains. Many states are angling for these federal dollars. The goal of North Carolina’s grant submission is 85 m.p.h. service between Charlotte and Raleigh as part of the effort to implement faster rail service along a 450-mile corridor between Washington, D.C., and Charlotte. Oregon wants to upgrade track and crossings so trains between Portland and Eugene can average 65 m.p.h.

The second type of project, known as “emerging high-speed rail,” would boost train speeds to the 110–125 m.p.h. range on existing freight lines. The Association of American Railroads currently requires dedicated track for passenger trains running at 90 m.p.h. and over. An agreement relaxing this policy to permit shared-use trackage could reduce expenses. Still, retrofitting freight lines will not be easy or cheap. A coalition of midwestern governors hopes to use stimulus money to develop lines out of Chicago with train speeds of 110 m.p.h. Wisconsin plans to rehabilitate a rail link between Milwaukee and Madison, at a cost of $600 million. This is part of a plan to reduce a trip between Chicago and St. Paul, now eight hours, to five and a half hours. Refurbishing the Chicago-St. Paul route would cost $2 billion, not counting the price of new trains.

What has stirred the most excitement and controversy is the development of trains capable of 200 m.p.h. over exclusive, built-from-scratch lines. The most ambitious project comes from the state that gave rise to the freeway. Trains have made a steady and little-noticed comeback in the Golden State. The San Diego-Los Angeles-San Luis Obispo corridor is the nation’s second busiest intercity rail line, surpassed only by the Northeast Corridor. Last year, it carried three million riders.

Now the California High-Speed Rail Authority has developed plans for an 800-mile line between Sacramento and San Diego. Trains would operate at a top speed of 220 m.p.h., making the trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours, 40 minutes; the line would attract as many as 100 million riders a year. Last November, California voters approved the sale of $9 billion in bonds for construction. But another $35 billion will be needed. With the state government mired in a fiscal crisis, California’s ability to finance the project has been cast into doubt. The authority is seeking $1.3 billion in federal stimulus money to match hoped-for state aid in order to fund preliminary construction.

Several other states are vying for federal dollars for fast trains. In Florida, advocates are trying to revive plans for a TGV-type railroad linking Tampa, Orlando, and Ft. Lauderdale/Miami. Florida asked for $1.5 billion in stimulus funds to build the first leg between Tampa and Orlando International Airport, to be matched by $1 billion in private investment. In Texas, a fast train has been proposed linking Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.

In 1955, as plans for the 40,000-mile Interstate Highway System were taking shape at the Eisenhower White House, Fortune magazine pointed out that “the administration has a highway plan with but one major flaw—it costs money.” A huge amount of money, in fact. First estimated at $27 billion, the price of the interstate system soon ballooned to $40 billion (about $280 billion in today’s dollars).

Attempts to pay for highways with tolls were successful only in the heavily traveled urban Northeast, where roads such as the New Jersey Turnpike had been completed. In the Midwest, a tollway between Pittsburgh and Chicago was financially viable, but in Texas, promoters of the Sam Houston Turnpike Corporation found it impossible to float bonds. About four-fifths of President Eisenhower’s proposed interstate network was stopped in its tracks due to insufficient funds. Eventually, the administration and Congress developed a “pay as you go” system that relied on federal and state user fees on gasoline and other motor fuels to finance the program, and interstate construction got under way.

President Obama is faced with a similar challenge. Given the fiscal plight of states and the growing federal deficit, government alone probably cannot finance 10 high-speed corridors that ultimately might cost a total of $200 billion or more. The creative use of private capital will be needed to proceed. In Florida, for example, railcar equipment makers have pledged to help finance the first phase of the Tampa-Miami corridor, and private operators are expected to bid for the right to operate the line. In the 19th century, the federal government gave land grants to private investors to jump-start railroad projects. Similar grants of real estate or other benefits, such as access to rights of way along rail lines for building fiber-optic and utility lines, could help spur investment in high-speed projects.

Given the fiscal plight of states and the growing federal deficit, government alone probably cannot finance 10 high-speed corridors that ultimately might cost a total of $200 billion or more. The creative use of private capital will be needed to proceed. In Florida, for example, railcar equipment makers have pledged to help finance the first phase of the Tampa-Miami corridor, and private operators are expected to bid for the right to operate the line.

In his effort to redirect America’s transportation priorities, Obama said he was inspired by an earlier project that changed the course of the country. The transcontinental railroad was an example of “bold action and big ideas” during a period of “economic upheaval and transformation,” he reminded a joint session of Congress in February. Despite the crushing costs of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized a 1,700-mile railroad between Omaha and Sacramento. Because no state governments existed in the lands to be traversed, the federal government subsidized private businessmen, led by Leland Stanford of California and the Ames brothers of Massachusetts, by giving them public land as well as cash bonds for every mile of track completed.

Lincoln did not live to see the ceremonial golden spike driven into a crosstie in a barren corner of the Utah Territory on May 10, 1869, which joined the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads and ushered in what economic historian Walt Rostow called the “takeoff period” of the American economy. But the moment was captured by a telegraph operator who sent a message to a waiting nation that might be repeated someday if Obama’s railway initiative gains traction. It simply said, “DONE.”

, a former Wilson Center fellow, was the editor of 

Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might 

"The Lost Promise of the American Railroad"

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The Obama administration has revived the dream of building high-speed rail lines to rival those of Japan and Europe, but the tracks are littered with political and financial obstacles. 

Bullet Trains for America?

When we think of global power, we think of political or military might or the clout of big corporations. We certainly don’t ponder horsepower, a unit of measure originally developed to compare the output of steam engines with the pulling power of draft horses. Vaclav Smil wants to change that. In 

, he examines the role of diesel and gas turbine engines in the worldwide economy. Both convert the chemical energy of fuel into the mechanical power—horsepower—that drives objects through the air or across water.

These mechanical powerhouses are the Rodney Dangerfields of globalization, suggests Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba and the author of some 30 books. Buried in the bowels of ships, diesel engines move billions of tons of foodstuffs, fuel, and industrial goods between continents. They also propel trains, trucks, and barges. Whirring reliably underneath the wings of planes, gas turbines make possible the flight of jetliners that transport more than five million passengers a day.

While these machines have received little attention, Smil writes, they have “led to epochal shifts in world affairs,” most noticeably the rise of China as the world’s manufacturing hub. A modern container ship such as China Shipping Container Lines’ 

 can transport 24 times more goods than the first container vessels could in the late 1950s. Moreover, it can be loaded and offloaded about 20 times faster than in the days of grappling hooks and sweaty longshoremen, by cranes that are themselves usually powered by diesel engines.

The diesel engine was pivotal in freeing land and sea commerce from the shackles of the thermally inefficient steam engine. German engineer Rudolf Diesel developed the theoretical design in the 1890s, but because the engine’s high-pressure system made unprecedented demands on the working parts, several decades passed before it gained widespread use. By then, diesel production had been commandeered by aggressive U.S. upstarts such as Cummins (trucks), Fairbanks-Morse (ships), and General Motors (locomotives).

The gas turbine for jet propulsion is another case in which technical improvements occurred incrementally after the first big leap of invention. Patented by both British and German engineers in the 1930s, the jet turbine was met with skepticism by military authorities and was not commercialized until a Boeing 707 (using a Pratt & Whitney turbo) took flight in 1954. Subsequently, turbine-powered jets rapidly replaced propeller-driven aircraft.

If diesels and turbines have made it possible to shuttle ever-increasing payloads of cargo and people among the continents, they have also changed commercial relations among nations. Consider that the manufacture of both engines was the exclusive preserve of Western nations (plus Japan) through most of their history. No longer. Nearly all large diesel engines designed by European companies are now made in Asia. This is in keeping with Asia’s rapid rise to dominance of ocean shipping, with China now accounting for nearly half of the traffic handled by the world’s top 20 container terminals.

Backpedaling from his overall claims for the beneficial nature of these two prime movers, Smil adds up the environmental costs of transporting more and more freight and passengers over long distances. In 1996, international shipping accounted for just 1.8 percent of the global carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels. By 2008, ocean shipping was responsible for about four percent. Aviation releases about half the carbon dioxide that shipping does, but jetliners emit greenhouse gases into a more environmentally fragile part of the atmosphere. Still, Smil sees no reliable or affordable alternatives. “Green power” has not found any niche on the high seas or in the air. For the foreseeable future, the global economy will rely on diesel engines and gas turbines.

Smil is a discursive writer who rarely finds a detail about engines that he doesn't want to share, which makes for heavy going at times. And he overplays his insistence that international trade agreements take a subordinate role to diesels and turbines as the drivers of globalization. In fact, both political power and horsepower shape the world’s commerce. One sets the rules, the other delivers the goods.

But his descriptions of the mechanics of modern shipping, as well as earlier waves of globalization propelled by steamships and tall-mast vessels, make for stimulating reading. By scrutinizing common yet often-overlooked technologies, Smil offers a fresh and useful perspective on world economics.

 is a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former Woodrow Wilson Center fellow. He edited 

Making Steel - Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might

"Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines" 

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Gas turbines have received little attention, but have led to epochal shifts in world affairs. 

The Engines of Progress

He rode out of Texas in the depths of the Depression and was credited, during his reign as chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), with saving American capitalism and mobilizing the nation for World War II. “You’d better see Jesse” became a mantra in New Deal Washington, referring to the pug-faced, fast-drawling Houston banker named Jesse Holman Jones.

Under Jones’s watch, the RFC and its subsidiaries lent hundreds of billions (in today’s dollars) to farmers, banks, railroads, and city and state governments, as well as various “incubator” enterprises, such as the Rubber Reserve Company, which pioneered synthetic rubber. Given his unprecedented power—which provides the apt title of Steven Fenberg’s meaty new biography—it’s no wonder that in 1941 Time magazine dubbed Jones the second most powerful man in Washington (after President Franklin D. Roosevelt). Roosevelt himself teasingly called him “Jesus H. Jones.”

Fenberg, a community affairs officer at a Houston foundation Jones founded, has two objectives: to tell the story of this largely forgotten figure and to demonstrate how his ideas could be relevant to our present financial crisis. He is successful on the first count, drawing from archival research a comprehensive account of a man who built much of Houston’s downtown skyline before he went to Washington in 1932 and made his mark there.

The second quest is more elusive. Creating a “usable past” seems a prescription for platitudes. And Fenberg tosses them around in his opening pages—about how government “can help people” and become “a catalytic force for progress”—before he lets the lessons from Jones’s life grow organically out of the narrative.

Born on a Tennessee farm in 1874, Jones dropped out of school at 13 to help run his father’s tobacco business. The urge to see a wider world, spurred by a trip to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, led him to Dallas, where he secured a job with his uncle, and eventually to Houston.

It took Jones several years to channel his energies, diluted by a fondness for poker and fancy clothes, into the art of making money. But once he started, he was unstoppable. He formed the South Texas Lumber Company in 1902 and was a millionaire five years later. From lumber he jumped into construction, erecting some of Houston’s first steel-framed buildings, then blazed into banking, which not only paid for his buildings but was a natural habitat for a mind that “could read and analyze a balance sheet or a financial statement like a high-speed computer,” Fenberg writes.

Lesson 1: Leverage your debt conservatively. When Jones took out a loan, he kept part of it in reserve. Thus he endured unscathed the Panic of 1907, which scalded many of his fellow builders. Lesson 2: Use your powers to “do good” while doing well. For example, Jones championed a joint local-federal effort to straighten and deepen Buffalo Bayou so that Houston could be connected to the Gulf of Mexico, paving the way for the city’s rapid expansion.

Jones’s success as a banker handed him a national platform. As the Depression’s headwinds gathered force in 1932, President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, appointed Jones, a Democrat, to the board of the RFC, which had been established to shore up the country’s financial system by buying the preferred stock of banks. Many conservative politicians, not to speak of bankers, saw the agency as stepping too close to private enterprise. To Jones, though, the RFC “was entirely too timid and slow.”

Calling for bold government lending to farmers, small-town banks, and railroads, Jones became the chair of the RFC and the go-to guy when Roosevelt’s New Deal swept into Washington in 1933. Roosevelt found the structure of the RFC very useful: It had been set up as an executive agency with the ability to obtain funding through the Treasury. Thus, it could finance a variety of projects and programs without obtaining legislative approval. In today’s parlance, the RFC was a “special vehicle” whose transactions were “off the books” and therefore not reflected in the federal budget.

What made a situation fraught with pork barrel politics work, according to Fenberg, was Jones’s resistance to letting others, including Roosevelt, sway his decisions. “Neither a theorist, an ideologue, or an intellectual,” Jones was a banker seeking a reasonable return on his investment. Thus another lesson: Best business practices applied to government lending could yield steady and sometimes spectacular earnings to the taxpayer. This was especially true as the RFC, almost single-handedly, militarized American industry in anticipation of World War II.

The success of the RFC ultimately speaks to the character of its top leadership, not to the elephantine rules and preset formulas that characterize government contracting today. Except for $18 million lost investing in Howard Hughes’s 

 airplane experiment, no major scandal sullied the agency during Jones’s 12 years at the helm.

In 1945, the banker was forced out of the agency in a political reshuffle, and returned home to become a leading Texas philanthropist. When he died, in 1956, he was eulogized with equal reverence by Democrats, Republicans, businessmen, government bureaucrats, and workers. Fenberg’s comprehensive biography should revive interest in this remarkable capitalist and public servant.

"Unprecedented Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good"

 by Steven Fenberg, Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

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FDR himself teasingly called him “Jesus H. Jones.”