The long steel ribbon wound West over plain, desert and mountain into the timbered fastness of the Washington wilderness, the building of it was a saga of strong men battling sand, snow and the high mountain passes. Some were broken by heat and cold, some blown to eternity by primitive equipment, some buried under the wreckage of flimsy bridges. And all of it becomes a story of pioneers in a power struggle, driven to success by the indomitable spirit of the Empire Builder-James J. Hill. GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS DRAMATIZE the Great Northern story from the days when steam was king, hauling Jim Hill's trains west from Minnesota's lakes to become the country's most northern "empire building" railroad ... a line plagued by trouble until electrification came and the 8-mile Cascade Tunnel was completed in 1929. With the deftness of a writer who knows his subject, author Wood presents a vivid account of this historic struggle that gives full meaning to the action and detail pictures of Philip Hastings, Fred Jukes, Jim Frederickson, Lee Pickett, Walt Medenhall, Claude Witt, Walter Thayer, Stuart Hertz, W. R. McGee, Phil Kohl, Casey Adams, Howard Durfy and other famous railroad photographers. This is the book historians and friends of railroads knew would sometime come-the Great Northern classic, for every railroader, active or armchair.