Rock Island Line Bill Marvell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.A newspaper journalist and freelance writer for almost fifty years, Marvel has written the story of the legendary railroad, the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad Company, whose tracks spanned the Midwest, serving farms and small-town America for almost 140 years. Rock Island, which was one of the earliest railroads to build westward from Chicago, started in 1847 and was the first to span the Mississippi, advancing the frontier, bringing settlers to the West, and hauling their crops to market. By 1854, the line connected the Mississippi River to Chicago and then with the East Coast. By 1856, the line crossed the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi, connecting farms in Iowa and beyond to Chicago. When it finally succumbed in the early 1980s, the result was one of the biggest business bankruptcies ever, one of the longest and most complicated in US railroad history.Part of the Railroads Past and Present Series, Rock Island Line is a labor of love for the author and his enthusiasm for his subject shines through in the lavishness of the photographs he has selected. book will appeal to both the train enthusiast and to pop culture fans. It is quite readable, with six chapters and an epilogue. well-captioned photographs tell their own story although they also supplement the text.Chapter One, The Bridge, is one of the most interesting as it details the beginnings of the Rock Island Line, the problems of the early railroads as they replaced the much slower steamboats in transporting goods and passengers, and contains a sidebar about Abraham Lincoln (22). In May 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton, which usually plied the New OrleansLouisville run, rammed a bridge, then suddenly burst into flames. railroad's case was argued by Abraham Lincoln who stated that not only was the steamboat at fault in striking the bridge but that bridges across navigable rivers were to the advantage of the country. case went one way and then another in successive courts, but in 1866 the US Supreme Court held for the railroad.Another informative chapter, The Road to Ruin (Six), emphasizes the problems the Rock Island Line and other trains encountered in the late 1950s as the prosperity that had returned with World War Two largely dissipated. Jet airliners, which were replacing trains in popularity as a faster form of passenger travel, soon competed with a growing interstate highway system while freight moved in trucks and on barges. …