In the contemporary world of American business, where change is the only constant, it is exceedingly rare to encounter companies founded in the mid-nineteenth century that have maintained not only their corporate identity but also their basic business function. In Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration: America's Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present, historian Maury Klein presents a nuanced corporate history of the Union Pacific Railroad from its centennial year through the first decade of the twenty-first century. His study draws extensively from UP's corporate archives, as well as dozens of interviews with UP officials, both past and present. Klein is the foremost scholar of the 150-year-old UP system and The Reconfiguration is the third and final volume in his series that traces the evolution of the first transcontinental railroad from its incorporation in 1862 through its expansion into the largest single railroad network in North America by the 2000s.

In The Reconfiguration, Klein focusses on how the UP transformed itself from a staid but profitable “bridge railroad” in the late 1960s, the so-called “Fat Old Lady” that made its profits by shuttling cargo between West Coat and mid-western railroads, into a powerful and dynamic transportation system that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and handled a third of all American railroad traffic (426). Klein situates this transformation within the broader economic and political context of American deindustrialization, deregulation, and globalization and examines how a series of mergers with the Missouri Pacific, Chicago and Northwestern, and Southern Pacific Railroads brought fresh blood into the firm that enabled the conservative organization to become more responsive to the changing political and business landscape in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.

Unlike Klein's first two volumes, the third volume divides its focus between the railroad and the Union Pacific Corporation, created in 1969 as a holding company to oversee railroad operations, landholdings, and natural-resource development. Klein discusses the uneasy relationship between railroad and corporate officials and examines how corporate influence over railroad operations waxed and waned over the years as different executives sought to shape business strategies that variously emphasized and deemphasized the railroad's financial role within UPC. Given the prominent place of the railroad within the holding company, the UPC's eventual relocation to Omaha, Nebraska, the traditional headquarters of the railroad, in 1996 and its divestiture of its non-railroad assets in 2003 seems to have a certain air of inevitability about it, but Klein shows that these actions were contingent on the decisions of corporate executives faced with unexpected financial and political circumstances.

In his study of the modern Union Pacific Railroad, Klein succeeds in presenting a triumphalist corporate narrative without being overly celebratory of the UP, its executives, and its workforce. He does not shy away from less-pleasant aspects of the UP story. UPC CEO Andrew L. “Drew” Lewis Jr.'s alcoholism is a focus of Klein's narrative and Klein does not hesitate to assess in an empathetic but critical manner how Lewis's covert addiction affected corporate operations from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Similarly, Klein offers unflattering details about succession struggles within the organization and the UP's at times strained relationship with its unionized workforce. His depiction of the UP's merger with Southern Pacific in the mid-1990s, and the operational nightmare that unfolded over the course of 1996 and 1997 due to weather and system integration problems which nearly shut down the entire UP–SP system for months at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars of lost profits, offers a cautionary tale of the difficulties of merging two very different organizational and corporate cultures.

Scholars of American studies will appreciate Klein's wide-ranging focus in The Reconfiguration and his skill in presenting a corporate history of the UP that goes beyond balance sheets and boardroom decisions. Klein's study offers a fascinating account of how UP leadership responded to the nation's reorientation from an industrial to a service-based economy. He emphasizes the continuing relevance of railroads as a transportation technology in an era increasingly shaped by both environmental concerns and “just-in-time” approaches to product manufacturing and distribution. At times, Klein's familiarity with railroad technology and lingo may leave nonexperts scrambling for technical dictionaries, but on the whole he offers a very readable and intriguing account of the Union Pacific Railroad's corporate evolution and reorientation over the past four decades.