Trains and Railroads Books

Railroads were a fundamental foundation for the growth and prosperity of virtually all major American Midwestern cities. Wisconsin's Milwaukee was no exception. Compiled, captioned, and informatively introduced by railroad enthusiast P. A. Letourneau, "Milwauke Road: 1850-1960 Photo Archive" is an impressive, 150-page compilation of historic black-and-white photographs drawn from the collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Originally conceived in 1847 as a twenty-mile route, the Milwaukee Road began as the Milwaukee and Waukesha Rail Road, which in 1849 was extended further to service Madison -- the Wisconsin State capital, then beyond to the Mississippi River. The historic photographs of the steam, electric, and diesel engines, railway workers, line construction, depots and shops spanning 110 years of operation is inherently fascinating and will prove to be of immense interest for railroad buffs and students of 19th and 20th century Wisconsin history. Railroad enthusiasts, as well as librarians seeking to expand their railroading history collections in general, and Wisconsin railroading history sections in particular would be well advised to contact Iconografix for a complete list of their many unique and specialized railroading titles.

interesting and worthwhile photo history (partial) of rolling stock and buildings mostly of steam era. Certainly NOT a definitive historical record of CMStP&P RR. and its predecessors or the personalities who built the railroad.

In my thesis research on railway architecture, this book has been a delightful read. My opinion is that the "meat" of the book is in the essay written by Thorne, "Renaissance of the Train Station."

She covers pertinent points about the historical experience of railway travel and its development as an infrastructure. Her comments are well developed and informed of timely events. Wessner and Phillips expand on the development of the infrastucture in Europe, Asia and the United States respectively.

I was very pleased with the coverage of the projects as well, and have made this volume a keystone of my architectural library.

Compiled and edited by Martha Thorne (Associate Curator of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago), Modern Trains And Splendid Stations is a wonderfully descriptive and impressive collection of photographs showcasing inner-city railroad travel stations in North America, Europe, and Japan. Gorgeous color pictures, railway station histories, and an informed and informative wealth of background information on each spotlighted railway make Modern Trains And Splendid Stations an enthusiastically recommended title for personal and academic Architectural Studies, as well as a welcome contribution the reading list of any railroad buff.

Peter Lynch's new "Penn Central Railroad" is a nice follow-on to his excellent "New Haven Railroad" of last year. The Penn Central book is formatted and laid out in a similar manner to Peter's previous work, combining well-written historical narrative with a good selection of photographs of trains and locations.

A good summary history of the Penn Central is provided. Among other things this covers the circumstances leading up to the merger of the New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads (and the inclusion of the New Haven), the merged railroad's financial and other problems, a review of its operating regions (Eastern, Central, New Haven, etc.), and the circumstances that led to the formation of Conrail.

Although I enjoyed the narrative, I most appreciated the numerous photographs of Penn Central equipment in various "interim" color schemes. By this I mean shots of equipment in New York Central, Pennsylvania, and New Haven color schemes with Penn Central stencilling and numbers. I have not seen most of the photographs in this book published elsewhere.

I'm a long-time member of the New Haven Railroad Historical & Technical Association (http://www.nhrhta.org) and the New Haven is my favorite railroad. By rights I guess I ought to hate the Penn Central, but I don't. For better or for worse, it's the railroad that I grew up with during my childhood and there is substantial nostalgic appeal to me. I highly recommend "Penn Central Railroad".

An informative and well illustrated general history of the Penn Central Railroad focusing on PC operations and merger plans, and what actually happened on and to the railroad, and further breaks the story down by operating region. Excellent text, good region maps (surprisingly, no system map), and well chosen photographs by a serious author who apparently comes from railroad management ranks. Peter E Lynch has produced a balanced work that both railfan (anti-PC foamers will have to look elsewhere for solace) and historian will appreciate.

A slight distraction is that Thomas McNamara photo captions appear to need closer scrutiny. Of the locations I am familiar with, most of the "Horseshoe Curve" photos aren't Horseshoe Curve or otherwise aren't correct. For the record: Page 66 appears to be the curve east of ETT Benny where the Red Arrow derailed decades earlier. Page 156 is ETT Benny interlocking with westbound TV at right while at left an eastbound tonnage train is coming down the slide from Portage Tunnel. Page 16, if Horseshoe, train is eastbound downgrade (note the heavy brakeshoe smoke, and heavy sand accumulation on roadbed of foreground tracks).

The only real historical weakness in the book seems to be the lack of any real discussion of Hurricane Agnes (June 1972) and it's heavy impact on PC, giving it only a paragraph of text and mentioning it only as a "violent storm". Only an undated photo on page 132 gives readers any real hint as to the devastation this storm caused but the caption makes no mention of it (See the Aug-Sept 1972 issue of Penn Central Post, "Special Issue - The Flood").

All in all, Penn Central Railroad is an excellent and needed contribution to the historical record.

I have never had so much fun reading a story to my toddler. My son was so enthralled by the story and the illustrations, and the last page sealed the deal with the little boy playing in the attic. My son ran straight to his room and started playing with all his toys as if he was that little boy. One year later we are still reading this book on a regular basis. It's the best children's book I've ever read, who cares about the crazy plot, and it's nonexistent explanations. I let my 3 year old tell me his version of the story, it all makes sense to him.

I once worked in a library where one of my small patrons, a boy of three or four years, had an incurable railroad obsession. Any book you handed him that involved trains was devoured by his greedy little peepers within seconds. At that time I started keeping a keen eye out for train literature in the event that I might possibly find some kind of a book involving locomotives that he hasn't already seen. Nowandays I no longer work at that particular library, but since that time my trained eye (ha ha) has been continually on notice. You can understand then my excitement when I first saw, "Railroad John and the Red Rock Run". Trains in place? Check. Fun story? Check. Wacked out illustrations that make you sit up and take notice? Check. And, most important of all, does it have some good old-fashioned westernized English full of sentences like, "so peppery hot it made the crows' eyes water thirty-two miles away"? Honey, this might just be your lucky day.

Oh the outlook wasn't pretty for the Sagebrush Flyer that day. Sure, Railroad John assured passengers Lonesome Bob and Granny Apple Fritter that he'd never been late to a stop in the last forty years he'd driven his train, but sometimes fate works against a person. You see, Lonesome Bob is to be married at exactly 2:00 and if he doesn't show up then Wildcat Annie, the love of his life, may never be his bride. At first all is well, but wouldn't you know it but that nasty varmint of an outlaw, Bad Bill, immediately robs the train of all its coal. That dilemma is solved when it's discovered that Granny's Hard-Shell Chili-Pepper Corn-Pone Muffins make for an adequate super-hot substitute. But then a bridge gets washed away (remedied by some guitar strings, believe it or not), Granny runs out of muffins, and just when all seems to be for naught a tornado comes along, picks up the train, and plops them right smack down in front of their destined station on the dot. But wait! Where's Wildcat Annie? The answer leads to one heckuva hoedown wedding and the book ends with the thoughtful vision of a single boy playing with his model train in an attic. Make of that what you will.

I'm a sucker for smart use of colloquial English, by the way. Crunk never disintegrates into an overabundance of "consarn it"s and Yosemite Sam speak, but at the same time he knows how to keep his language colorful and fun. So sentences like "She's wild as a panther, but sweet as a honeybee's gold tooth", strike a chord with me. Any book in which characters let loose with phrases like "Well, this is a vexation" while they are "squeezing out tears the size of elephant's eggs", may well have my ever and abiding love. The plot itself is a good rootin' tootin' adventure tale, but with enough train imagery and mentions that children with one track minds (hee hee) will be able to relate to it entirely on that level as well. I admit that I also liked that the book pokes mild fun at picture books that include recipes in their pages by including one for Granny's Hard-Shell Chili-Pepper Corn-Pone Muffins. Lest you start heating up the stove, please bear in mind that the instructions call for porcupine eggs, cactus flour, lightning-roasted hot chili peppers, and an oven that's roundabout 1250 degrees (give or take).

A person may be intrigued by a picture book's premise, but they'll set that puppy down in a minute if the images in the story don't grab them. Credit one Mr. Michael Austin then with knowing how to successfully wrangle a viewer's attention. Painted in sepia-toned acrylic, Austin's smooth old-timey feel captures the book's era, to say nothing of its tone. I loved that the endpapers would ripple and wave like the faded corduroy on Bad Bill's pants. Each image is mounted and framed like an old photographic image, their edges nipped and rounded with age. At the same time, the sepia doesn't appear to be limiting in the least. I found myself staring for long periods of time at the individual hairs visible on a horse's mane or the way in which light would play through the train's thick glass windows. Austin isn't afraid to pop in a humorous detail for those with quick eyes too. When Granny (whose face is never seen) first proposes feeding her muffins to the engine, the accompanying image shows her balancing a plate with one hand, the muffins carefully concealed under a hazmat warning symbol (under glass, no less). Maybe I enjoyed the last picture in the book most of all, though. When you look at the pile of old faded photographs sitting on the floor of the attic, you've a sense of what they might contain. And isn't that Granny's apple-laden hat sitting on the back of that chair? Or Lonesome's guitar nearby? Best of all, this last picture at first appears to be sepia-toned, but a second glance reveals that there is color. It's just been a little washed out by the bright light of the day.

I did have some slight quarrels with the book, mind you. Plot gaps are the nature of tall tales such as this, but that shouldn't mean that solutions to problems are so vague as to remain unmentioned. Take, for example, the moment when the bridge over Cripplesome Creek (love the name) is washed out. Lonesome John solves the matter by lashing his guitar strings together. Here's how the solution is reached as the book puts it. "Lonesome Bob lassoed the forked end and whipped it down over the creek - just in time! The Sagebrush flyer sailed right across!" Come again? How did the train sail across? I suppose the solution could have been found in the picture, but the image that Mr. Austin chose to pair with that exact moment was just of the throwing of the rope. Not so much the how-did-the-train-get-across-the-river part. Did the train run over the makeshift rope as it would railroad tracks? Did they swing across? It cries out for a better explanation.

I've been waiting a long time for a book that would pair nicely with Anne Isaacs', "Swamp Angel". Now I think I've found one. Should you wish to dust off your Western drawl and crack open this book alongside the aformention Isaacs and maybe even Susan Lowell's "Dusty Locks and the Three Bears", I daresay you'd have the hottest storytime your kids ever did see. Consider this one of those wonderful unexpected finds, hidden within your picture book shelves.

This fine book is, as Herbert Hovenkamp has called it, "a monumental achievement." If Ely has missed a connection between railroad law and any other important topic in American legal history, I am unaware of it--everything from the use of slaves to build railroads to insolvency, receiverships, and train robberies.

Ely is not intimidated by the reigning thesis that railroads were "smoking devils" run by ruthless capitalists who bent legislatures to their greed or the notion that judges fell over themselves to protect railroads from tort liability in the name of economic progress. Ely argues instead that far from "allowing carriers a free hand, lawmakers enacted a host of preventive measures and insisted that railroads must bear the cost of regulations to protect the public." (134) Refreshing and right on target is his description of the Mann-Elkins Act (1910) as a "regulatory straitjacket" that helped destroy the railroads.

The potential reader of this book should be warned that though clearly written, it is encyclopedic. Teachers of economic history, legal history, and transportation history will here discover a wealth of illustrations for their classes; a general reader with no absorbing interest in railroads will probably find the presentation overly academic.

James Ely's Railroads and American Law investigates then relationship between the courts and America's first "big business" and the impact railroads had on the American legal landscape. Ely states in the introduction how he wants to avoid stating a thesis (which seems to be a typical lawyer's ploy to avoid committment) but then establishes themes to support his case.

Ely challenges popular myth that railroads literally carried the courts and the lawmakers in their back pockets. The image of 19th century railroads taking land from people and getting all the laws and court decisions in their favor is simply not true. Ely demonstrates how some railroads won court cases while others lost. At times labor or the travelling public won cases while in others railroad interests prevailed. There is no set pattern of cases where one side prevailed over the other. Rates for freight are but one of Ely's examples. Another was railroad mergers and the application of antitrust laws.

This book is not for the casual reader. It is in-depth and at times kind of boring. But legal historians will enjoy the large number of Supreme Court cases referenced and how the author analyses each. I chose this book because I enjoy reading about both topics, railroads and law. Others in this same boat will likely find much offered here.

Very complete for a one volume history. If Indiana railroads are an interest, this is the starting book.

This book is good for someone that is wanting to learn alot about Indiana Railroads, and their historical value. If your into railroads, this is a must have coffee table book. Some small errors in it, but for a book of this scale, it is great, and very profesionally done.

The third volume of the series that all train lovers will adore is now available in "Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California: Volume III: More of the Northern Roads". Made by railroad fanatics for railroad fanatics, this nearly 400 page coffee table book serves its fan base remarkably well. Over 300 photographs, an index and other appendixes make "Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California: Volume III: More of the Northern Roads" highly recommended for railroad lovers everywhere and for any community library railroading collection.

Ignore the rating on this book! It's a five-ster "must have" if you are interested in the subject, of proportionally less value the less interested you are.

About 15% of the subject matter is additional information about RRs covered in Volume I (the Central Pacific, Carson & Colorado, N-C-O, etc.). The CPRR in particular has new photos and track diagrams of early division points. This material is interesting but of limited modeling value unless you model the 19th century.

The other 85% is about the small logging and lumber railroads in the northern Sierra Nevada; mostly in Plumas and Lassen counties. The histories genrally include the full story of the lumber companies that built the RRs, including mill operations and the shifting pattern of track into new logging areas. Coverage of the individual RRs varies depending on how successful Myrick was at finding eyewitness accounts so if you are interested in only one specific RR, you should browse a copy before buying if at all possible.

RAILROADS: A HISTORY IN PHOTOGRAPHS is roughly eight inches wide, six tall and one deep (ca. 400 pages, 500 photos). With its format and soft cover, it is highly "flippable" and fans of all kinds will enjoy seeing some "rare birds" among train photos like an overhead shot of the 1955-56 Aerotrain in Rock Island livery.

It is not this book's duty to set up a chronological flow of history; there is some history to be gleaned on the fly but it is not particularly systematic. RAILROADS: A HISTORY does, however, use broad chapters as eras that highlight the trains' locomotives and what they're pulling, as well as contemporary infrastructure: "Steam Freight Trains," "Steam Passenger Trains," "Stations," "Diesel Freight Trains" and "Diesel Passenger Trains" are at the core of the volume.

RAILROADS almost never uses black-and-white photographs but there were a few times I wish it had -- this is especially evident in the chapter "Diesel Passenger Trains," in which many of the diesel-electric locomotives of the 1940s and 1950s are shown re-painted in their "heritage" colors but relieved of their mainline duties and passenger loads, operating as today's business specials or on tourist runs.

But this volume treats the dining-car and employee collectable "railroadiana" in a useful and interesting way, not as piecemeal equipment but as two-page spreads displaying, for example, such themes as old timetables, a steam locomotive engineer's tools and clothes, and from the more recent past, a specific passenger train's dining-car paraphernalia. Yet another fun feature are the two-page spreads for particularly heralded and influential locomotives: a color painting portrait of the loco (such as Union Pacific's "Centennial" diesel or Amtrak's "AEM-7" high-speeed electrics) and a few bare specs such as builder, tractive effort in foot-pounds, years manufactured and wheel arrangement.

There are better books of history and more solid collections of photos out there. I for one particularly like the hardbound books of history and photos that deal with one railroad company such as PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD or CSX at a time (and by the same publisher as this one,"MBI"). But if you treat RAILROADS: A HISTORY IN PHOTOGRAPHS for what it is, you'll enjoy it. Bargains are out there in the used market for those who don't require pristine copies. - al smalling, train buff

This easy to read and view book is part of the 500 Photograph series and is worth it's value.

Although the book delves into the classes of locomotives that ran in North America, we are also treated to the Passenger trains they hauled and the stations they once patronised.

Set out with Pioneer Steam first, we move through the eras that were importaint in the history of railways ending with the most up to date trains we have today.

A great book for all

This is not a book of track plans nor is it a book that spends much time on how to lay track. Instead, it attempts to teach broad design considerations to make a model railroad operate better and seem more realistic. It considers such matters as modeling an imaginary line as opposed to one from the real world. It talks about making scenes plausible in their context; this is not always the same as real. It considers how to pick rolling stock and how to choose graphic and model elements to make the miniature model world more like the real one. Most important, though, it tries to teach how to make a layout reliable.

None of these objectives is specifically accomplished but the book goes a long way in teaching things to consider. It is a book about design philosophy as opposed to design criteria. It is worth the time.

Realistic Model Railroad Design by Tony Koester is a methodical, step-by-step guide to crafting a captivating, original layout for an impressively presented model railroad. Full color photography and meticulous attention to the little tweaks that make great environments stand out make this practical, in-depth guide for dedicated hobbyists a top of the line resource. Special attention to drawing inspiration and atmosphere from real-life railroad locations, complete with sample images, distinguishes this above par dedicated model railroading hobbyist instructional accessory.

Many people find themselves fascinated by railroads and get caught up in the hobby of building model railroads but are hampered by one big problem. They don't know how the real thing operates. If the act of building is the fascination, then this poses no problem but if you actually want to do anything with the trains besides watch them go around and around, you need to learn something about the real thing. That's where this book comes in handy.

It explains various aspects of how railroads operate in the real world and then explains how enthusiasts have modeled those operations. The book is readable and clearly written. Even so, so material may take a few readings to properly understand. It is a worthwhile investment.

Realistic Model Railroad Operation: How To Run Your Trains Like The Real Thing by Tony Koester is a complete and "user friendly" guide to realistic model railroad operation. Readers will be provided with a quick-start guide to realistic operating sessions complete in a single evening; diverse schemes for forwarding cars and moving trains across a model railroading layout; explanations of sign systems as they apply to model railroads; and an appendix of precise railroading terminology. Superbly enhanced with previously unpublished color photography of tony Koester's HO scale Allegheny Midland Railroad (along with other great model railroads), Realistic Model Railroad Operation is a seminal and core addition to any dedicated model railroaders reference shelf. Model railorading enthusiasts are encouraged to send for the free Kalmbach Publishing catalog for a complete listing of their titles.