| Summary: | "The Hoosac railroad tunnel in northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel on a par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. Its story, however, is far less well-known than these others. In large part this is because when it was finally completed after nearly twenty-five years of work, it was deemed a failure, costing over a hundred lives and tens of millions of dollars. Andrew Black's "Buried Dreams: The Hoosac Tunnel and the Demise of the Railroad Age" does more than refresh the public memory of the project - it explains how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place and what forces sustained it over more than two decades to completion. Black also describes the factors that diminished the tunnel's success, even though at the time it was the second-longest railroad tunnel in the world. To do this, Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced periodically to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state's efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation. However, it was certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry between the eastern seaboard states for the spoils of western development in the post-Erie Canal era. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and its arch-rival New York, the magic of the railroads, and the shifting ground of state and national politics to understand the complicated story of the tunnel. Finally, Black examines how the psychic make-up of Americans before and after the Civil War weighed heavily on the tunnel's story and public perceptions of its promise. By the time it was finished, he contends, the Hoosac Tunnel was no longer the symbol it had once been. The indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to it had faded, and the economic benefits it was meant to usher in never arrived. Indeed, in the years that followed, Massachusetts sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. "Buried Dreams" is thus also the story of failure on a colossal scale"--
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