Who said: “A railroad is like a lie–you have to keep building to it to make it stand. A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns, unless those towns are put at the end of it and a sea beyond, so that you can’t go further and find another terminus. And it is shaky trusting them, even then, for there is no telling what may be done with trestle-work.”?
Vanderbilt
I’ll take Cornelios Vanderbilt for a thousand James
I’ll guess Mark Twain.
Twain, for as much as you’ve got, plus your hat!
Google!
Matthew
I would say Cornelius Van der Bilt, since he made his original fortune in Hudson River steamboats.
Has to be Vanderbilt. The statement seems to lack the folksiness of Twain, Lincoln was much more lucid and down to earth when commenting upon business cases (although he would probably throw in a crack or two at the end), and Hoover was a civil engineer who probably loved all the players in the engineering field (not to mention most railroad construction had ceased by the time of his public emergence).
That being said, the statement is quite prophetic, in that today’s railroad operations seem to be most beneficial to terminal sites located seaside, service to online towns is sometimes non-existant these days no matter how many grain elevators and lumber mills are located thereon, and the DM&E and KCS sagas show that any ambitious rail company will want to keep expanding or risk getting swallowed up by the big boys.
Mark Twain. Totally in sync w/ the anti-business ethos of the “intelectuals” of the day (or this day for that matter)
[#dots] Vanderbilt??
Samuel Clemens, known to most by his pen name, Mark Twain.