Gregory L. Thompson's Passenger Train in the Motor Age (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993) has been reviewed widely. Here are some excerpts.
"There are no other comparable studies. . . . The book provides the only detailed analysis of how two railroads reacted to the rise of the motor vehicle. It is well written and extremely well documented, providing excellent references to previously unused material, together with general literature on the decline of railroad traffic and broader studies of business history."All in all, The Passenger Train in the Motor Age is highly useful for persons interested in current issues relating to Amtrak, and for planning suburban and short distance intercity rail vs. bus service. Much of the cost analysis, for example, is directly relevant to the issue of how much Amtrak should pay the railroads for the use of track, and how much the states should pay Amtrak for providing service on state-subsidized lines. Thompson's book is also a major contribution to economic and transport history."
John F. Due, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in The Journal of the American Planning Association 62 (Autumn 1996): p. 539.
"The title of this book inaccurately conveys the contents. . . Although Gregory Thompson's book is about passenger trains and buses in California prior to the Second World War, his study really is an analysis of the management of three of America's most venerable and visible corporations: the Southern Pacific Company, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, and the Greyhound Corporation. This extremely well-documented work . . .is one of the most significant business studies produced in the last decade and should be of interest to all students of business history, economic history, and the economic behavior of large corporations. .. . Thompson's findings raise disturbing questions about the evolution and nature of business bureaucracies in general, not just at railroads. His book should be required reading by all students undertaking a Master of Business Administration degree."
Stephen Salsbury, dean of the faculty of economics and professor of economics at the University of Sydney, in the Harvard Business School's Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994):155-158.
"Thompson is right to expose railroad managers for their shortcomings, and it is entirely plausible that they lost some potentially profitable passenger business earlier than they need have done. This is an important book which should be read by all serious railway historians on both sides of the Atlantic."
Terry Gourvish, Business History Unit, London School of Economics, in the Journal of Transport History 16 (Sept. 1995):204-205.
"Business historian Gregory Lee Thompson has written a deeply researched history of competing modes of travel in California. He relies especially on the records of state and federal regulatory agencies, a valuable source because the adversarial process in rate hearings assures a more accurate picture than the internal corporate records he also uses. Thompsons argues that the railroads lost business in the 1920s largely because their corporate culture led executives to adopt faulty cost-accounting techniques. . . . Thompson more than adequately documents these defects of corporate culture and accounting. . . . Thompson also convincingly demolishes the theory--- popularized by Roger Zemeckis's film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)---that General Motors conspired to destroy rail transportation. . . . Thompson has made a valuable contribution to transportation history. The materials on the rise of the long-distance bus industry are especially valuable. His discussion of managerial cultures is superb."
Clay McShane, Northeastern University in the American Historical Review (December 1996):1634-1635.
"This book helps to fill a void in the literature of 20th-century transportation history. Coverage of bus activities in the Golden State is especially welcome since scholary volumes on the subject are few. Thompson cogently presents his case, although he could have strengthened or modified it had he used internal railroad documents rather than public testimonies. A reasonably well-written and sensibly structured work, Thompson and Ohio State University Press can take pride in their product"
H. Roger Grant, Department of History, University of Akron in Journal of the West XXXV (October 1996): 117-118.
"Thompson's discussion of the failure of railroad cost accounting and its consequences is excellent, and he makes an invaluable contribution to understanding the decline of rail passenger service.. . . It will be invaluable to anyone interested in railroad history and in corporate decision making in declining industries."
David J. St. Clair, California State University, Hayward, in the Journal of Economic History 54 (December 1994):945-946.
"It has been posited that the decline of U.S. rail passenger transportation, a downward trend coming on the heels of a Golden Age of rail passenger service that featured glamorous streamlined trains, was caused by the automobile. Others believe that the passenger train was solely the victim of wrongheaded economic regulation, while some see a plot hatched by General Motors to put the passenger train out of business and thus increased the sales of automobiles."In his book The Passenger Train in the Motor Age, Gregory Lee Thompson does an excellent job of dispelling these mistaken perceptions and presents instead a compelling story and intelligent analysis of what really happened. . . . Professor Thompson has written an intriguing book, which has much to tell us about how management failed to come to grips with the reality of its environment and of market forces, largely because its culture prevented it from doing so. . . . The book provides information and lessons for those interested in both rail and bus passenger service as well as for students of management curious about what happens when management is out of touch with reality.
"Professor Thompson presents a most readable book, with highly detailed appendices and extremely detailed notes to help the reader who wishes to plunge more deeply into the subject."
George M. Smerk, Professor of Transportation and Director, Institute for Urban Transportation, Indiana University, in Transportation Research Part A 29A (July 1995):328-330.
"The 1990s have been a rewarding decade for students of California's transportation history. Added to William Deverell's Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad (1993) and two fine books about Henry E. Huntington, by William Friedricks (1992) and James Thorpe (1994), we now have Gregory Thompson's solid monograph. . . . The presentation includes a heavy complement of charts and tabular material (the narrative itself constitutes only about sixty percent of the book), and yet for all the straightforward tone of that data, this is an intensely judgmental work, with much to say about why the strategies of bus lines succeeded and those of the railways failed. Thompson is meticulous about placing his analysis in historiographical perspective, disputing the literature which contends that the railroads were crippled by punitive regulation, as well as persistent charges of a conspiracy to kill the passenger train which involved General Motors and the Greyhound Corporation. . . . Thompson argues a compelling thesis about 'what went wrong' in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, one must ask what difference shortsighted management really made for the railroads, when only a generation later the federal government would be instituting colossal measures to subsidize air transport and fund superhighways."
Robert C. Post of the Smithsonian Institution in Pacific Historical Review (November 1995): 17.
"Professor Thompson's study addresses one of the most heated questions of 20th century American transport history--namely, how competently railway managements responded to America's adoption of the automobile. . . .While acknowledging the critical role of government ownership of public roads and state sponsorship of highway development, Thompson assembles a convincing case that railway managements at least in California incompetently addressed challenges that confronted their passenger services. . . The SP, the Santa Fe, and other rail carriers, for example, tended to favor overweight cars (even in the streamliner era) and to respond to increased ridership by adding to train lengths (rather than enhancing load factors). . . No one interested in 20th century American transport history can afford to ignore Thompson's work. For them--that is, for most of us--the book is a must read. It is thoroughly grounded, well argued, superbly written."
Timothy R. Jorgenson, Traindex, in The Lexington Quarterly (March 1996), pp. 2-3.
"Obviously, this is a complex book. It isn't hard to follow, though. Thompson explains economic and railroad topics clearly, and presents data using helpful charts and schematic maps. Well-chosen photographs show how improved highway realignments compared with railroad rights of way. Statistics on operating costs and revenue are gathered with explanatory text in an impressive thirty-five page Appendix, followed by thirty-three pages of end notes. Interesting to historians and to railroad enthusiasts, too, Thompson's well-informed, detailed book ought to become a benchmark for future research."
Walter Bethel, Department of Philosophy, California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, in Southern California Quarterly (forthcoming).
"Greg Thompson needs no introduction to readers of this journal, who will remember his pioneering work in the 1991 issue on product costing on American railways, and the extent to which railroad analysis mis-perceived the relationship between fixed and variable costs. His article in this issue carries on that debate and explores the causes of the decline in passenger profitability on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the middle third of the present century. The nature of railroad cost structure was crucial to the miscalculations and unsuitable policies that were adopted." John Armstrong, "Editorial," Journal of Transport History 16 (September 1995):115.
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