Success Quote by John Moody

Moody’s line is a neat piece of business-minded demystification: the railroad didn’t spring into being because steam engines showed up, any more than ships were invented because someone later bolted on a steamship boiler. He’s stripping away the comforting myth of single-cause innovation - the “steam changed everything” story - and replacing it with a systems view where infrastructure, finance, and logistics come first, and propulsion is just the upgrade that makes the machine scale.

The specific intent is corrective. By stressing “completely dissociated,” Moody insists the railroad is, at its origin, an organizational and spatial idea: fixed tracks, rights-of-way, standardized gauges, scheduling discipline, and the capital structures to build and maintain them. Early railways moved freight with horses, gravity, and stationary winches; they were already railroads in the sense that mattered to commerce: predictable movement over a controlled corridor. Steam didn’t create the category; it intensified it.

The subtext is very Moody: don’t worship the gadget, follow the investment logic. For a businessman writing in an era when railroads were the backbone of American industrial power (and also a playground for speculation, consolidation, and regulation), the point lands as a warning against technological determinism. The real revolution isn’t the engine, it’s the network - and networks are governed by boring things: standards, coordination, and money. Steam is the headline; the railroad is the business model.