This history of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Em-
ployes is the story of the pioneer railroad workers who built
our railroads' tracks and bridges, of the courageous men who
founded the Brotherhood, and of those who brought it to its
high place among labor organizations today. Inevitably, too,
it is the story of the men who have worked at all times and
in all places in the maintenance of way department of
America's railroads.

No history of a labor organization, however, can be com-
plete without at least a brief outline of the industry whose
workers it represents. For the industry itself is the warp and
woof of the fabric from which the organization has been cre-
ated. The development of a labor union, its organizational
set-up and its accomplishments depend in no small degree on
the structure of the industry of which it is a part and the rise
and fall of the fortunes of that industry. Thus, the story of
America's railroads forms an integral part of this history of
the Brotherhood.

The fabulous story of the railroad industry is more than
a narrative of the development of transportation. It is the
saga of man's restless urge to explore and develop new lands.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the restive colonial
pioneers along the Atlantic seaboard looked longingly toward
the vast tracts of virgin forests and the millions of acres of
fertile land to the south and west. Here were rich new terri-
tories to be conquered and settled.

But man's slow and painful advance to the corners of the
earth has been geared to his means of transportation. The
modes of travel and shipping in that day--the sailing ship,
the canal boat, the pony express, the pack horse, the stage
coach, and the covered wagon--were slow and cumbersome,
wholly unsuited to the needs of swift intercourse between
widely separated communities. The mass exodus to the new
lands had to await the development of faster and more ade-
quate means of transportation.

In 1830, the inauguration of the first freight-and-pas-
senger-train service in this country opened a new era of ex-
pansion and development. As the railroads began spinning
their steel web across the continent, a horde of settlers fol-

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