This chapter discusses the traveling and communication through the means of railroads. Railroad firms harness technologies to create the big, capital intensive businesses. Straight, level rails require ditches to be filled, passages cut, rivers bridged, and mountains tunneled, each mile, using 2,250 ties and 9,000 spikes, crossed land often devoid of natural resources. Rail networks absorbed armies of surveyors, graders, and track layers. The Union Pacific supervised thousands of Civil War veterans using a paramilitary management model, and Directors of the Union Pacific formed a separate company called Credit Mobilier to oversee construction activity. Mobilier allowed directors to siphon money granted by the federal government. Financial scandal aside, the railway represented an engineering triumph where Railroads needed outside long‐term financing. Depreciation, the consumption of long‐term assets used in production, represents a financial reporting problem because it is never clear when the wear and tear takes place. Such growth sparked the need for accounting's best‐known dialect, financial accounting.
Railroads
More Than a Numbers Game ; 13-21
02.01.2012
9 pages
Aufsatz/Kapitel (Buch)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch