Thomas A. Scott ran the Pennsylvania Railroad when it was the largest corporation on earth. He gave Andrew Carnegie his start. He moved Lincoln's soldiers by rail in the Civil War and helped broker the compromise that ended Reconstruction. And near the end of his life, he burned his letters. In 1872, as president of the new Texas and Pacific Railway, Scott chartered a construction company in Pennsylvania to build his southern transcontinental. The company built the railway. It was never dissolved. It remains listed as Active on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's registry today, more than one hundred fifty years after its charter was filed. This is the first book to read Scott's Texas venture as architecture: the charters, the interlocking offices, and the paper trail running from Harrisburg to the Texas county courthouses, reconstructed deed by deed and filing by filing from the surviving record. What Scott built outlived him, and it sits outside every account of his life written since. Volume Two of One Machine, Three Lives. Together, the three volumes form the first history ever written of the California and Texas Railway Construction Company, the machine behind the Texas and Pacific Railway, a company that built an empire and eluded its historians for a century and a half.