The book is weighted down with so much detail about payoffs and swindles that the reader longs for passages detailing the Central Pacific construction work across the Sierra Nevadas and into Utah, where Chinese rail gangs carried nitroglycerin up rocky slopes to blast their way, sometimes inches at a time, through mountains. Bain is a good writer, and his prose moves swiftly when he gets going on the construction challenges, the dangerous surveying expeditions into hostile Indian country, the wild life in the tent cities that sprung up overnight along the railroad's path to milk paychecks from the work crews, or evocative passages about the Plains Indians, who are being shoved into ever smaller and more desolate patches of land by the inexorable march of progress. Empire Express is full of cameo appearances by most of the major figures of the period, from Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant ,and Brigham Young to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. But it bogs down repeatedly and heavily on the intricacies of Washington and Wall Street deal making, as investors like Durant and the Central Pacific's Collis P. Huntington scrambled to secure public funds, grease pockets, and build their own fortunes, while speculators traded in land, iron, and every other material vital to the project. One of the arts of storytelling is knowing when enough is enough.
Some details cry out for endnoting.
In these chapters it is easy to lose sight of the project's real grandeur. Out there in the wilderness those Chinese and Irish work crews were literally building a road to the future. There is something both exhilarating and sad about an event that so clearly closes one age and opens another. One of the virtues of this impressive book is that it captures both. There is appropriate awe for the sheer will of men who blasted and dug and hammered their way across mountains and deserts, but Bain also captures glimpses of the world that was rapidly being lost, of surveyors braving hostile Indians to map out proposed routes through magnificent landscapes of unspoiled wildness, of Pawnee Indians racing their ponies alongside locomotives as the rail begins to stretch across the plains.