Michael Sussman Introduces Renowned Historian Maury Klein at SCORT Conference

In the Philadelphia office of OTA President Michael Sussman, one name appears over and over on the bookshelves: Maury Klein, professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island, and perhaps the nation’s foremost rail historian. A longtime fan of Dr. Klein’s work, Sussman was recently given the chance to introduce Klein as a speaker at AASHTO’s Standing Committee On Rail Transportation (SCORT) conference in Oklahoma City on September 21^st.

Over the course of a conversation with Leo Penne, Program Director for Intermodal and Industrial Activities at AASHTO, Michael had suggested inviting Klein to speak at the upcoming SCORT conference. Klein spoke for an hour in the Centennial Ballroom of Oklahoma City’s Skirvin Hilton Hotel on the first day of the conference’s proceedings.

In his introductory remarks, Sussman compared the experience of reading Klein’s work to watching a Steven Spielberg blockbuster: “They are informative, they are fascinating, and they are exciting. Because Maury connects railroads so vividly to the social, commercial, and political events of the day, railroads appear as the vital lifeline of the economy and the society they truly are.”

Sussman’s professional and intellectual relationship with Klein goes back a dozen years or more, to when Sussman first read Klein’s Unfinished Business: Railroads and American Life. “I was so impressed,” Michael says of the 1994 publication, “That I went on to read his studies of E.H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and the Richmond Terminal.”  At the time of his remarks, Sussman admitted to having just finished reading Klein’s 2007 work, The Genesis of Industrial America—for the third time.

Dr. Klein has written 15 books, and is currently working on two more: A Call to Arms: America Mobilizes for World War II, and the third volume of his history of the Union Pacific Railroad, subtitled The Refiguration, 1969-2004.