Descripción
60pp. Dbd. Original printed front wrapper (rear wrapper lacking). Front wrapper nearly detached, chipped. Text lightly tanned, some dampstaining to top edge. Good. Argument written and compiled by Artemas H. Holmes, legal counsel for the Kansas Pacific Railway, and addressed to the Secretary of the Interior and the Attorney General of the United States, outlining the company's argument in a legal dispute with the Union Pacific Railroad. In the 1870s, the two railways were in competition for transcontinental traffic to and from the Pacific, with the Union Pacific operating a line between Omaha and Cheyenne and the Kansas Pacific operating a competing line between Kansas City and Denver. To get to and from the West Coast, however, customers of the Kansas Pacific had to use the Union Pacific's Cheyenne-Ogden line, which was connected to the Kansas Pacific via the Denver Pacific Railway running between Cheyenne and Denver. As the present document explains, the dispute between the companies arose over the Union Pacific's rate structure and, more specifically, over its practice of charging as much, if not more, to transport passengers and freight over the 516 miles between Cheyenne and Ogden as it did to transport them over the entire 1,032-mile route between Omaha and Ogden, thereby effectively forcing transcontinental customers to choose the Union Pacific's own line over its rival's. Such discrimination, the Kansas Pacific and its lawyers claimed, was a violation of the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864, which, they insisted, required the Union Pacific to charge the Kansas Pacific and its customers travelling between Cheyenne and Ogden "a rate of freight and fare not exceeding one-half of its rate for business and traffic of a similar description and character for the entire length of its line," between Omaha and Ogden. The debt-ridden and beleaguered Kansas Pacific stood little chance either in court or in Congress against the Union Pacific, however, and by 1880 had been consolidated with its rival. Appendix includes a table comparing the relative rates of fare and various categories of freight (to include agricultural implements, canned goods, candles, and hardware) between Omaha and Ogden and between Cheyenne and Ogden. Scarce in the trade and institutionally. OCLC locates copies at fifteen institutions at the time of cataloguing. "Only a few copies printed for the interested parties" - Eberstadt. An interesting pamphlet, documenting the fierce competition among the railways in the decade after the completion of the transcontinental railroad. LITERATURE RELATING TO THE UNION PACIFIC, p.236. RAILWAY ECONOMICS, p.217. EBERSTADT 137:289. OCLC 4836641. Richard White, RAILROADED: THE TRANSCONTINENTALS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA (New York, 2011), pp.192-7. Julius Grodinsky, TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAY STRATEGY, 1869-1893: A STUDY OF BUSINESSMEN (Philadelphia, 1962), pp.88-100. N° de ref. del artículo WRCAM59031
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