1901

This week in 1901, trains on Southern Pacific’s new Coast Line began carrying passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco along a route that for 100 miles traced cliffs above the ocean, inspiring the railroad to deem them “the most beautiful trains in the world.” Frank Norris’ muckraking novel “The Octopus” was published that same year, based on what he called the “fight of Ranch and Railroad” for control of California at the turn of the century. Southern Pacific--at the time the most powerful business in the state and one of the most influential political machines in the nation--is known as the Pacific and Southwestern in the book. Far from beautiful, the P. and S.W. is a greedy Goliath, and its trains are iron monsters barreling along tracks that shoot out like “diminutive little blood suckers” from the railroad’s heart.

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The noises came from a little distance. He ran down the track, crossing the culvert, over the irrigating ditch, and at the head of the long reach of track--between the culvert and the Long Trestle--paused abruptly, held immovable at the sight of the ground and rails all about him. . . .

Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.

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Source: “The Octopus,” By Frank Norris, Penguin Books, 1994