The Pennsylvania Turnpike turns fifty this year, and it has so transformed travel in this nation that it is difficult now to imagine the country before it was laid down. Our first superhighway was a superb piece of engineering from beginning to end—but that beginning goes back to the day of the railroad barons and a line that William Henry Vanderbilt eventually abandoned. Dan Cupper tells the whole story and shows how nineteenth-century railroad engineers put their impress on the automobile age.