In this hardbound edition of the third book in the series, the President, desperate to leave some sort of legacy, has promised the nation that a great freight-hauling bullet train system will cross the country starting in just one year. The biggest problem? Nobody has started to design or build anything on a project that should take 10 years. When his advisors hatch a plan to split the work into dozens of manageable pieces, only a small handful of companies sign on. Tom Swift believes that he can figure a way to dig the massive tunnels under the various mountain ranges on the western half of the country, and may even be able to build the locomotive engines, but the other companies begin to abandon their work, making it necessary for Enterprises to take on more and more. A rival company owner has it in for Tom, and a mysterious source of governmental sabotage is somewhere in Washington DC. With time and so many other things against him, is it going to be a mission impossible for the young inventor?