It was decent, it is nice that it highlighted Frank Sprague's role in the transit revolution (though they don't mention multiple unit control, they allude to it). Had a lot of great old film and pictures from the construction and operation, which is always a lot of fun.They had one great shot of a Boston street scene where there is literally a line of trolley cars stretching blocks and it tells a lot as to why they wanted to build a subway. One fact I didn't know was that at the time, in Boston 400,000 people lived in a square mile of downtown Boston (NYC was pretty badly condensed in lower manhattan, but I don't know if it hit that level, as bad as the 5 points district was)
One thing I never really thought of was the opposition to travelling underground, how people associated that with being dead, and also some things never change (the panic over The Commons being destroyed, when the construction was on the fringes and they had clear plans to move trees and such affected). The other thing was how in an age when people were very angry and mindful of 'the trusts', they understood allowing Whitney to consolidate the street car lines was the way to go, that competition doesn't always work out to be the best thing.
Of course, being the subway/transit fan I am, I would have loved to see more, an hour didn't seem long enough.
The one thing the book seems to do is frame this as some sort of rivalry between NY and Boston in terms of building a subway, and from what I know it wasn't, there were plans to build subways in NY that stretched back (Beach's pneumatic subway was one of the first), I think that Boston building the subway allowed NYC to go ahead, since it proved it was possible. NY first proposed a subway in 1894, but was not formally approved until 1897 when Boston's subway opened, and construction started in 1900, so it wasn't like both were being constructed at the same time. Boston is interesting, when they opened the subway there was no real fanfare, they had a special train that people could buy tickets for, but then they simply opened it up, unlike the 1904 opening in NY with all the speeches and prayers and dignitaries on the first train (must be the Puritan thing versus those wicked, evil NYers *lol*).
