Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad—the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The U.S. government pitted two companies—the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads—against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

• Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
• Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
• The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America
• The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45
• Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944
• Hell on Wheels: Wicked Towns Along the Union Pacific Railroad
• Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany
• Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
• D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
• Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America