Out in Paperback / Rails to the North Star

Rails to the North Star -- A Minnesota Railroad Atlas by Richard S. Prosser, Foreward by Don L. Hofsommer, UMinn. Press '07, $29.95, 283 pages, ISBN #0-8166-5267-8. Index, bibliography, list of statutes, voluminous maps.

Railroad history has been enhanced by the works of rail enthusiasts, usually trained outside the academy, whose enthusiasm more than makes up for any academic erudition. Such an independent scholar was Richard S. Prosser, who grew up near the Milwaukee Road in south Minneapolis. It's been more than four decades since his Rails to the North Star first appeared, tracing the historic routes of Minnesota's railways. This volume reprints that seminal work, adding a foreward by eminent rail historian Don L. Hofsommer.

The era of Congressional land grants to railroads began, for the most part, in the early 1860s. But as Prosser relates, the Minnesota Enabling Act gave the Territory of Minnesota authority to convey land within six miles on each side of a right-of-way to rail companies for construction. With that, the industry was off to the races, and Prosser charts the building of rails across the state, the street railway boom of the 1920s, and the decline of the industry and consolidation of companies in the 1960s in this coffee table-sized volume.

NOTE: Steve Goddard is the author of Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century (Basic Books, 1994).