She did. It was called The John Galt Line.

Remember - if you were alive back then - or imagine what it was like, never having the question of "shrugging" being raised, anywhere, anytime in history. Is it in Aristotle? Nicole Oresme? Locke? Schopenhauer? Louisa May Alcott? Mark Twain? It had to be discovered. Rand hit on it first in a moment of brilliant insight. Then she proved her thesis. Her novel showed the intellectual path hewed by those who discovered this truth. For Galt, it was her own insight. For the others - McNamara, Halley, William Hastings (who took years struggling with the truth), Ken Dannager, and more - the truth had to be learned and absorbed, integrated, before it could be acted on.

You have benefited from Ayn Rand's struggle, and their story.

As for Rand herself, the story is that she was on the telephone with Isabel Paterson. The world had been shocked into awareness by The Fountainhead. But the movie was then five years in the past, the book ten. Everyone was waiting for Rand's next book. Fortune magazine hinted at it in 1952. They knew that she was working on a novel "about business" in the tone of The Fountainhead. Paterson said that Rand had to write another novel because her fans expect it. (Maybe she said "demand". It is in one of the biographies.) Anyway, Rand saw through it, as no one ever did. "They do? What if I stopped writing? What if all of the authors stopped writing?" And there it was.

No one had ever asked that question before.

Why did Dagny not quit? Why did Dagny smoke cigarettes?

Don't forget that if she started up her own railroad she would have to deal with the Anti-Dog Eat Dog rule, designed specifically to give an advantage to Taggart.

Just a thought.

Dagny had to realise that she was allowing the looters and moochers to continue. She thought she was saving her way of life, but in reality she was shoring up the socialist policies of her enemies. So if she were to create another railroad, she wouldn't be any further ahead of the game, because that railroad would have become the Taggert Transcontinental Railroad in spirit, if not, in reality. They (looters and moochers) were constantly creating problems with their policies, and relying on Dagny (and others like her) to fix them. If she quit, she had to quit entirely and not try to build a better railroad in order to see her world rebuilt in its glory. She had to realise that they needed to live in the world they had created without the safety net of the Men of the Mind there to catch them.

It was a novel designed to show how fighting the system while staying in it was doomed to failure. Galt was a bit of a difficult character to identify with, but most of us are doing the Dagny/Rearden thing to keep our lives going inside of a crooked and bankrupt system. I do it- but I definitely am likiing it less

Dagny is a stubborn bitch -- in the best sense of the word. With her drive and understanding it would be uncharacteristic if she gave up, even to start a competition. There's a lot of Dagny in Ayn and vice-versa. Probably even more than Dominique.

If Dagny started a really new line, she would have had to procure new rights of way and immense amounts of rail and ties. After that, she would need thousands of coolie (or other) laborers. then she would have to start competing with established lines. It would be a fairy tale; not a realistic story.

there is a kinda tall entry barrier in the railroad business,
but she probably could have ... ahem ... had James removed
in some creative manner ... and taken over TT. -- j
.

Had Dagny quit the railroad after crash-landing in the valley, we would have had no story. One must wonder how artificial the decision might have been.

Then again: Dagny--and Henry Rearden, too--had to hit bottom, and realize they were hanging onto something, the meaning of which had ceased to exist. For Henry Rearden, that realization came to him on his long drive across New Jersey and back to Pennsylvania, after the abortive meeting with James Taggart, Floyd Ferris, Tinky Holloway, Wesley Mouch, and (as I think) Chick Morrison. The last tumbler of the steel safe fell when James Taggart, in that most Freudian of slips, said, "Oh, you'll do something!"

Dagny had a worse problem. She wanted to preserve the railroad as close to intact as possible--so that when the looters lost the battle, she'd have the railroad still in existence. The railroad also had tradition behind it. Rearden Steel was only as old as Henry Rearden's adult career, and not even as old as that. Taggart Transcontinental went all the way back to the American War Between the States. "From ocean to ocean forever." One does not give up a thing like that lightly.

That's what almost cracked Francisco d'Anconia. He had four hundred years of tradition, going clear back to the Spanish Empire and the Viceroyalty of Peru, to throw away.

Of course, John Galt's arrest brought Dagny around. Not so much the arrest itself, as her realization that the people who rode Taggart trains wouldn't lift a finger to help him. Francisco knew she would see that; hence his recruitment of her as a spy, with a cutout number to dial when the time came.

Eddie Willers, sadly, never realized it. He didn't want to surrender such achievement, either to the looters' government or to the inexorable inertia and potential energy of the great tumbling boulder, or snowslide, the American economy had by then become. "Don't let it go!" he cries.

Rand was a champion of justice above all. There was justice in what had to happen to Dagny, and how she had to suffer. To paraphrase Ray Collins as James W. Gettys in Citizen Kane, she needed more than one lesson. And she got more than one lesson. Happily for her and for John, she got the last lesson in time.

And there is justice in what we assume happens to Eddie. Never once able to consider independence, or to apply to himself to surviving a total social collapse, he falls victim to it. At least half the reviews and commentaries on AS I have ever read, assume Eddie dies on that track, lying prone in front of that crippled locomotive, and probably breathing his last even before the batteries give out on that loco's headlight.

Why did Dagny not quit until John Galt had to demonstrate the futility of waiting for the looters to come around, by placing himself into the looters' hands? Know that, and you'll also know why Eddie did not stick with Dagny when she offered to pull him out with her.

It's been a while, but my understanding she had enough authority as VP that she thought she could restore the company from that position. She may also have had a share of ownership that was illiquid, so she had a vested interest in seeing the company recover. This responsibility without authority is frustrating to her. It leads her to convining the board to spin off a skunkworks, freed from the politics of the parent company, where she can try something risky without endangering the parent company's brand or political connections. She doggedly keeps trying to work around the politics, until she finally gives up. She feels like the world is twisting her arm to make her produce without realizing twisting her arms makes it harder for her to produce. They make "desertion" from a job illegal. But they'll look the other way for her b/c none of this is real rule of law. It's just a cabal of people in power who need someone they can cajole or scare into doing the actual work so they can "manage" things.

To me that's the whole point. She was so a preternaturally driven to produce and to ignore political BS. The point is even the most dogged producer will eventually shrug because it's difficult to make someone innovate at gunpoint.

I thought she did quit but not right away. She built something against all odds only to have it destroyed in the end, right? Or did I forget and need to read AS again?

And if she had quit and started her own line would she had any more chance at all with the odds or would the outcome have been the same? Hmmm.

The Devil's Advocate by Taylor Caldwell, 1952- similar in many ways. Perhaps it inspired her?

The writer determines.

She only had two choices...quit or be destroyed by the very people she was working for.

It's as simple as that. I'm surprised that a "Gulcher" even asked the question.

There were probably too many laws and regulations
that would have prevented it. Anyway,"she was
armed with the knowledge that Jim was not smart
enough to harm the railroad too much and she
would always be there to correct whatever damage he caused." At least, that's what she
thought.

I fine it interesting that some people seem to want to rewrite the book versus just accepting it as it was written. I can only imagine Ayn Rand dismissing the conversation.

She did didn't she? It was called the John Galt line.

This question ignores the purpose of GG, Dagny's values and the state of government in the novel.