Author: Scott Slaughter

Hello

Author: Scott Slaughter

Financial scandals aren't just a recent thing in Washington, D.C. This book is about the Crédit Mobilier scandal that rocked the Congress and the railroad world in the 1860s and 1870s. The Crédit Mobilier scandal began from one simple reality in the 1860s: it wasn't the investors who wanted a transcontinental railroad built as much as it was the U.S. government.

Risk is something investors usually want to avoid but because a transcontinental railroad built across the country had never been done before, the project also carried an enormous amount of risk.

Therefore, when Congress chartered the two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific -- that would build the transcontinental railroad toward each other, it had to make the deal as attractive as possible.

The result was the creation of the Crédit Mobilier and the resulting stock payoffs, investments and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to the legislators.

Author: Scott Slaughter

You probably haven’t heard about the Ciurea rail disaster before, not only because it occurred more than 105 years ago (January 13, 1917) but also because of its location and the tight censorship of the Romanian and Russian authorities.

This is the story of the Ciurea rail disaster, which involved a very overloaded troop train that ran out of control, leading to a fire that killed many of its victims, was by far one of the worst, if not the worst, railroad accident ever to occur anywhere in Europe.

The final death toll possibly exceeded 1,000 although wartime secrecy, plus the remoteness of the area in which the accident occurred, meant that no precise figure has yet to be determined.