Trains and Railroads Books

My daugher (18 months) loves this book. She even refers to it as the "go" book. I like to read it by mimicking the speed of the text. I slow down when it says "slow slow slow" and I read it fast when the train is moving fast. From an adult's perspective, I would have preferred it to be written better, but it's fine for a child. However, I don't think it necessarily teaches bad grammar.

Now that I know this is the abridged version, I'll have to look for the full version. That probably explains why the story seems incomplete (especially at the end).

The board book is pretty sturdy, so it should withstand plenty of readings. The illustrations are surprisingly detailed for their style. The text flows nicely; it has a good rhythm. There are a lot of things to talk about here: a hat that flies off, a cow who moos at Thomas as Thomas peeps back, and a dog beside the tracks. The fact that the whole story is about Thomas taking a judge to a train show means that a great variety of engines appear at the end, and Harvey shows up on an earlier page.
If you are bothered by the use of "slow" (as opposed to "slowly") as an adverb, you might want to skip this one. Thomas "goes slow" repeatedly.
Additional note: I didn't realize that the board book was an abridged version of Go, Train, Go! until my son got the full version for Christmas. The two books have very different rhythms, and the full version has quite a few more pages. There's even a goat in the longer book, but there's no goat in the board book. Initially, I liked the rhythm of the board book better, but the other version is growing on me.

I thought this reference book was great. It gives you a ton of information that is helpful when buying used trains. I wish it had more pricing categories.

This book is great for realistic market prices. It has two price listings one for good condition and one for excellent for Postwar and Prewar and excellent and new for everything after 1969. Every listing is in numeric order with era it was made and even list special club cars but no prices

The saving grace of this book is its photo content, both the historical ones selected by the author and those he took himself. The text suffers from poor grammar and even worse editing. For example, the same person's name is spelled two different ways in the same paragraph and the verb tenses shift wildly throughout. There are also faults that appear related to poor proofreading. For example, text that appears to merge two sentences, with words left out. The frequency of these errors (typically two or three per page) significantly detract from the ability to read and enjoy the historical research Del Vecchio reports. Buy the book for its wonderful photographic record of steam in America and skip the narrative.

This book has some great photos and tons of useful information. The info on some of the currently operating lines is very helpful for those looking for a real live train experience. Unfortunately most of the text in the book is set in a font that is extremely difficult on the eyes. I know, I'm getting older and these bifocals aren't the greatest, but I have never come across a book where trying to read the body text is such a chore.

But then, thats my opinion. Other than that, the book is great.

It is a wonderful new way to remember an old favorite with a twist. The Little Engine is girl which is sure to delight litte girls. My niece loved the book.

This is a great picture book for reading with your child if your child loves The Little Blue Engine That Could.

Very few children's books venture beyond an image. Weitzman's presentation in "Locomotive: Building an Eight-Wheeler" goes beyond the typical superficial children's train book. Weitzman shows how a train is put together using machines just as grand as the engine. Several manufacturing processes are illustrated in a simplistic manner, which can be understood by a child. The line drawings are magnificent with exquisite detail. The text accompanying the drawings is clear and concise presented at the level of the intended reader. This is the type of book that creates interest in a child.

Unlike "Superpower", Weitzman's previous book on steam locomotives, this one is specifically written for children. The wealth of detail, and the story, in "Superpower" is totally absent in this book. I counted a total of 18 pages. That's the bad stuff.

The good stuff is that the exquisite line drawings are just as breathtaking as they are in "Superpower". Occaisonal bits of detail sneak into the text to tease you with the authors knowledge of 19th century industrial technology.

Even as a children's book, I think there could have been more.

My Freight Train is the story of a little boy who imagines he is the engineer of a modern day freight train. The story describes the various cars an engine might pull, what they are filled with, how they are connected and what a typical day is like for an engineer of such a train. My son, who is now four, has adored this book since he was two. The story ends with the boy falling asleep in the arms of his father and is a great bedtime book for a child who loves trains.

We read this at a bookstore. I thought it was o.k., but way overpriced at $16. My 4-year-old has been begging me to buy it ever since, though. It has a nice ending, and if it were closer to $7, I would buy it.

This hefty tome falls under the topic of 'historic geography of transportation,' in which Vance addresses the question of why railroads were built where they were. He examines the 'big picture' of why, for instance, the first transcontinental passed through Cheyenne and Ogden, instead of further north or further south. He also takes a `micro' perspective and explains how a specific railroad route was planned to reach a given mountain pass, while keeping gradients, overall length, and tunnels to an absolute minimum. The reader gains a new appreciation of how difficult it was to plan railroads before the era of aerial surveys, since even a tenth of a percentage point in gradient (an additional rise of a few yards over a mile) can make the difference between profit and financial disaster. The book focuses solely on the planning issues -- look elsewhere for descriptions of operating practices or rolling stock.

Three-fourths of the book cover the US, while one-fourth addresses Canada. Northern Alberta and northern British Columbia receive disproportionately heavy attention, undoubtedly because the author has a summer cabin there. There are over a hundred b&w photos and fifty maps. However, when the author engages in a mile-by-mile description of why a certain route was laid out as it was, the book cries out for even more detailed maps so that the reader can follow the author's description of topography.

James Vance's knowledge of his subject matter is staggeringly obvious. This thick, academic work proves it. I should recommend this as a useful library addition. However, for the average reader, Vance has made a grevious, common error. His book is simply tiresome to read; Filled with typical university verbage, making it nearly impossible to read more than a few pages at a sitting. Take this example on page 4 in the Introduction: "It is from looking at geographical aspects of railroading that we ultimately become aware of perhaps the most significant of all dichotomies associated with railroad history, that between the spatial aspects of the railway as it emerged in England and Wales in the first quarter of the ninteenth century and those of the railroad as it emerged less than a decade later in North America, particularly the United States." That was one sentence. There are an endless number of those in this book of over 300 pages. At the end of all that, the reader is left with essentially one point. The U. S. did not follow the British is developing its railroads, the U. S. did its own thing! Certainly this is simplistic. If one needs to know how and why this continent built its railroads the way it did, one need look no farther than this book. Just be prepared to take a while reading it

I found this book really useful traveling around in Europe with the train. I have tried it once before without it, but this time I realized that it was so much easier to plan the trip and I didn't run into all the unexpected stuff during the trip as before.

I found this book really useful traveling around in Europe with the train. I have tried it once before without it, but this time I realized that it was so much easier to plan the trip and I didn't run into all the unexpected stuff during the trip as before.

This book is great!!!! my 10 month old son loves when i read it to him, iv learned how to read spanish just by these kiddy books it's great!!

My son loves all the Thomas books and I was thrilled to have found some Thomas' books in spanish. The only thing is that in this particular item there is a word that it's misspelled... "trencito" should be "trenecito"!!!
Hopefully the publishing co. and others involved will review this problem and fix it before putting any more copies out for their customers.

There are many great books on railroad folklore; unfortunately, "Prairie Whistles" does not quite make the list of "greats." Its stories are all quite short, many being only a couple of pages long. Because the stories are all quite recent, most from the 60's and 70's, their narrators are, for the most part, still alive, and Boyer "protects" their identities by refusing to identify any of them; while I am not suggesting that Boyer simply made up any of his book's contents, he just as easily could have done so because all of his sources are anonymous! The stories also vary widely in both topic and interest with little consistency as to either. They range from the highly entertaining (one tells of a young war bride who got to travel with her husband only because a marine gunnery sergeant locked them in a compartment in an admiral's private car) to the very boring (one tells of a man's model railroad, and one is just a list of name trains once viewed by a self-styled "senile citizen"). The only photographs in the book are those on its cover. There are enough of the highly entertaining stories here to make the book worth reading, but they are interspersed with so many of the very boring variety that the book is in no way a "page turner." In fact, it took me from Christmas to the 4th day of February to finish its 128 pages of text, an unusually long while!

Prairie Whistles: Tales Of Midwest Railroads is an engaging collection of railroading tales and folklore from time gone by, filled from cover to cover with vivid anecdotes told by men and women who once labored to spread this historical mode of transportation. Prairie Whistles includes tales from conductors, porters, carmen, tower operators, telegraph operators, and more to give a picturesque, vibrant look into the past of the Midwest. Engagingly written by Dennis Boyer (a member of several railroad historical societies), Prairie Whistle is a fascinating, informative locomotive history and a "must" for all railroad buffs!