Thomas A(lexander) Scott

Railroad executive, born at Fort Loudon, Pennsylvania, USA. He began working in the state toll collector's office at age 17 and continued until 1850, when he became station agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad at Duncansville. As the railroad grew, he was transferred and promoted, becoming first vice-president in 1859. (It was Scott who first hired young Andrew Carnegie in 1853 and helped him advance his career.) During the Civil War he was made assistant secretary of war in charge of government railways, troops, and munitions transportation. In 1870 the Pennsylvania Co was organized with Scott as president to direct rail growth W of Pittsburgh. He was elected president of the foundering Union Pacific Railroad (1871), a job he passed to Jay Gould when he became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co (1874–80). He was also president of the Texas & Pacific Railway Co (1872–80).

Thomas Alexander Scott (December 28, 1823–May 21, 1881) was an American railroad manager. He was vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1860, later president, and president of Union Pacific Railroad between 1871 and 1872. While Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott tricked the Pennsylvania legislature into allowing him to create the first holding company. This allowed him to purchase and hold corporations at a time in which such ownership was illegal.

Scott was born in Fort Loudoun, Pennsylvania. He joined the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1850 as a station agent, and by 1858 was general superintendent.

Scott was successful in standardizing the Pennsylvania Railroad system. No one knew more about railroad lines than Scott. Scott's influence in politics was huge, thereby breaking another containment law, that of corporate involvement in politics.

The first thing Scott did was to purchase newspapers so as to sway public perceptions of corporate behavior, specifically the railroad's desire to purchase and standardize the railroad lines across the state. Railroads were at that time a new player in the transportation industry. Towns were created or destroyed, depending on whether the railroad came that way.

The crime that caused the voters to never elect any of these legislators except one again was the allowing of a corporation to buy and sell another corporation. The crown had for centuries allowed the corporations free reign in the colonies.

After the war, Scott, along with his protégé Andrew Carnegie, convinced the United States Government to award the railroads with 10% of the land in the U.S. for building an intercontinental railroad. The railroads still own all this land. A very ugly low point in this man's life was when he blended the Ku Klux Klan into the railroad's board of directors as he moved through the South. He did this in order to stop the attacks by the Klan on the railroad's work crews of newly emancipated slaves.