Autographed photograph handwritten letter envelope America John Frank Stevens (born April 25, 1853; died June 2, 1943) was an American engineer who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States. In 1889, he was hired by James J. Hill as a locating engineer for the Great Northern Railway. He was the first European American to discover the Marias Pass over the Continental Divide. During his time at the Great Northern, Stevens built over a thousand miles of railroad, including the original Cascade Tunnel. In 1905, he was hired by Theodore Roosevelt as chief engineer on the Panama Canal. Stevens' primary achievement was to build the infrastructure needed for the completion of the canal. The digging, he said, is the least thing of all. He proceeded immediately to build warehouses, machine shops, and piers. Communities for the personnel were planned and built to include housing, schools, hospitals, churches, and hotels. He authorized extensive sanitation and mosquito-control programs that eliminated Yellow Fever and other diseases from the Isthmus. Reflecting his background, he saw the early stage of the canal project itself as primarily a problem in railroad engineering, which included rebuilding the Panama Railway and devising a rail-based system for disposing of the soil from the excavations. Stevens resigned suddenly from the Canal project in 1907, to Roosevelt's great annoyance, as the focus of the work turned to construction of the canal itself. As a railroad engineer, Stevens had little expertise in building locks and dams, and may have realized he was no longer the best person for the remainder of the job. Stevens would also have been aware that the original great Cascade Tunnel, for which he was responsible, was in hindsight built in error too close to the ruling grade and was perhaps turning from a credit to a debit. The true reasons for his resignation have never been known. Following the collapse of Imperial Russia in 1917, Stevens was selected to chair a board of prominent U.S. railroad experts sent to Russia to rationalize and manage a system that was in disarray; among his work was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal in 1930. He then retired to Southern Pines, North Carolina, where he died at the age of 90 in 1943.

One of America's foremost civil engineers of the past 150 years, John Frank Stevens was a railway reconnaissance and location engineer whose reputation was made on the Canadian Pacific and Great Northern lines. Self-taught and driven by a bulldog tenacity of purpose, he was hired by Theodore Roosevelt as chief engineer of the Panama Canal, creating a technical achievement far ahead of its time. Stevens also served for more than five years as the head of the US Advisory Commission of Railway Experts to Russia and as a consultant who contributed to many engineering feats, including the control of the Mississippi River after the disastrous floods of 1927 and construction of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam. Drawing on Stevens's surviving personal papers and materials from projects with which he was associated, Clifford Foust offers an illuminating look into the life of an accomplished civil engineer.

A fascinating encyclopedic survey of the Spanish-Cuban/American War, the Philippine War, and the small wars between 1899 and the end of the occupation of Haiti in 1934. The name changes themselves are instructive. The usage of "Spanish-American War" ignores the fact that the war in Cuba had been la

Describing and detailing the boring of major railroad tunnels throughout Canada, the United States, and Mexico, this book covers the period from the creation of Virginia's Blue Ridge Tunnel in the 1850s to Copper Canyon's Continental and El Descanso tunnels in the early 1960s. Other notable tunnels featured here include Massachusetts' notoriously expensive and slow-progressing Hoosac Tunnel; Colorado's rail and water Moffat Tunnel; Montana's Flathead Tunnel; and several major tunnels along the Canadian Pacific's main line. In addition to providing details on the tunnels, the author considers the reasons they were created, their engineers, and their use. The book includes more than 50 period and contemporary photos. A glossary explains concepts related to railroad construction and maintenance.