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• Cargo ships, American style : a primer
• The Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company : 1933-57
• From the Hudson River to Newark Bay : 1915-48
• Sea-Land : the first decade, 1956-66
• Sea-Land approaches maturity : 1966-85
• From RJR to CSX : 1985-99
• After 1999 : Horizon, Maersk-Sealand, and beyond
• Three other companies
• The present and the future.

Fifty years ago - on April 26, 1956 - the freighter Ideal X steamed from Berth 26 in Port Newark, New Jersey. Flying the flag of the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, she set out for Houston with an unusual cargo: 58 trailer trucks lashed to her top deck. But they weren't trucks - they were steel containers removed from their running gear, waiting to be lifted onto empty truck beds when Ideal X reached Texas. She docked safely, and a revolution was launched - not only in shipping, but in the way the world trades. Today, the more than 200 million containers shipped every year are the lifeblood of the new global economy. They sit stacked on thousands of "box boats" that grow more massive every year. In this fascinating book, transportation expert Brian Cudahy provides a vivid, fast-paced account of the container-ship revolution - from the maiden voyage of the Ideal X to the entrepreneurial vision and technological breakthroughs that make it possible to ship more goods more cheaply than every before. Cudahy tells this complex story easily, starting with Malcom McLean, Pan-Atlantic's owner who first thought about loading his trucks on board. His line grew into the container giant Sea-Land Services, and Cudahy charts its dramatic evolution into Maersk Sealand, the largest container line in the world. Along the way, he provides a concise, colourful history of world shipping - from freighter types to the fortunes of steamship lines - and explores the spectacular growth of global trade fuelled by the mammoth ships and new seaborne lifelines connecting Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Masterful maritime history, "Box Boats" shows how fleets of these ungainly ships make the modern world possible - with both positive and negative effects. Its also a tale of an historic home port, New York, where old piers lie silent while 40-foot steel boxes of toys and televisions come ashore by the thousands, across the bay in New Jersey.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
Brian Cudahy provides a vivid, fast-paced account of the container-ship revolution - from the maiden voyage in 1956 of Ideal X to the entrepreneurial vision and technological breakthroughs that make it possible to ship more goods more cheaply than ever before - the two hundred million containers shipped every year that are the lifeblood of the new global economy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"I declare the subway open", said Mayor George B. McClelland on 27th October, 1904. New York was moving uptown and everything was about to change. This book is a tribute to the world the subway created. Looking at one of the marvels of the 20th century, Cudahy creates a sense of this extraordinary achievement, showing how the city was transformed once New Yorkers started riding in a hole in the ground. The hero of the story is August Belmont Jr., the banker who risked a fortune to finance the building of the IRT. Cudahy also compares he experiences of Boston and London' subways and explores the impact of the new IRT on New York's commuter railroads, and later on rail transportation from Buffalo to Los Angeles.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Coney Island is the most famous seaside resort the world has ever known. This new book by transportation historian Brian Cudahy tells how a unique blend of enterprises emerged in the final years of the nineteenth century to connect Coney Island with the independent municipality of Brooklyn, with New York City, and, ultimately, with the rest of the world. The story of travel to Coney Island involves horse-drawn streetcars, steam-powered railways, and elevated trains running along viaducts over city streets, not to mention a cable-powered railway that once crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, sidewheel excursion boats steaming down the Narrows, and even such contemporary transport options as air-conditioned subway trains and private automobiles speeding along the Belt Parkway. How We Got to Coney Island is, in reality, the definitive history of mass transportation in Brooklyn. It tells how a famous general by the name of Henry Slocum, who fought with Meade at Gettysburg became the president of the first rail company to serve Coney Island. It also describes the origins of a company called Brooklyn Rapid Transit that eventually unified the street, excursion, and elevated railways of Brooklyn into a smoothly functioning system in the final years of the nineteenth century. Brooklyn Rapid Transit, though, would not survive. While it did participate in the construction of a massive citywide subway system in the early years of the twentieth century, the company entered receivership in 1918, was re-organized as the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation five years later, only to surrender its corporate status entirely in 1940 and become the BMT Division of the Board of Transportation of the City of New York. The era that is critical to these developments, though, is the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when entrepreneurs raised enormous sums of private capital, and constructed railways across the lightly settled flatlands of southern Kings County so people could travel to and from Coney Island. Cudahy's new book also tells how the city of Brooklyn became only the third city in all of America to deploy a system of horse-powered streetcars so its citizens could enjoy an enhanced level of urban mobility. How We Got to Coney Island includes tables, charts, photographs, and maps. The full story of transportation to and from the world's most famous seaside resort also provides an enticing glimpse into what people did once they reached Coney Island.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Rails Under the Mighty Hudson tells a story that begins in the final years of the nineteenth century and reaches fulfillment in the first decade of the twentieth: namely, the building of rail tunnels under the Hudson River linking New Jersey and New York. These tunnels remain in service today - although one is temporarily out of service since its Manhattan terminal was under the World Trade Center - and are the only rail crossings of the Hudson in the metropolitan area. Two of the tunnels were built by the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, a company headed by William Gibbs McAdoo, a man who later served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and even mounted a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination at one point. McAdoo's H&M remains in service today as the PATH System of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The other tunnel was opened in 1910 by the Pennsylvania Railroad, led to the magnificent Penn Station on Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, and remains in daily service today for both Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. The author has updated this new edition with additional photographs, a concluding chapter on recent developments, and a Preface that recounts the last trains of September to the World Trade Center Terminal.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is an account of the Malbone Street Wreck, recounting the events leading up to the disaster, describing the fateful train trip from its beginning to its terrible end, and reviewing the efforts conducted after the tragedy to fix blame and establish liability.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Ask the average American anywhere in the country to answer the word association question "Staten Island" and you get "Ferry" in immediate response. What is regularly billed as "America's favourite boatride" - not least because a round trip still costs an astonishing twenty-five cents - is the last public survivor of New York Harbour's once immense fleet of those doughty double-ended ferryboats. Dozens of ferryboats in a myriad of liveries crossed the harbour's waterways as recently as one generation ago. Most have vanished as though they never were, leaving in their ghostly wakes only fading memories and a few gorgeously restored ferry terminals. The handsomest of these terminals, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, is probably the one dubbed by Christopher Morley the Piazza San Lackawanna. "Over and Back" captures nearly two centuries of ferryboating in New York Harbour, by a master narrator of the history of transportation in America. In stories, charts, maps, photographs, diagrams, route lists, fleet rosters and in the histories of some 400 ferryboats, Brian J. Cudahy aims to capture the whole tale. The photographs capture a significant footnote in America's past and present; the illustrations preserve some of the stylish rigs in which the owners garbed their boats, despite coal soot, oil smudge and urban grime. A third of the book comprises a statistical compilation. The data show, among other things, that some of the former workhorses of New York Harbour are filling utilitarian social roles elsewhere in the United States and overseas, and that the newest boats in the harbour began life along the Gulf of Mexico and in New England.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)