Trains and Railroads Books

I have just purchased my copy from Amazon. This is a wonderful book with more than adequate detail of all aspects of Santa Fe's fabulous and world famous era of streamlined train travel. Great photographs including colour with a shot of the first boxcab in its modified streamliner phase. Thank you Mr Dorin, a great buy at the price. Grab one before they all go!

David Jones, Kaiapoi, New Zealand

Everyone knows that Streamliners are known not for the exterior, but also for their elegant interior! A bit disappointed on the text of this book. Little reference as far as the interior of the coaches. There is only a brief description of the diesel engines of these Santa Fe Streamliners. Nothing much about the E-units or even the First Super Chiefs. If you really like to know more about these Santa Fe Streamliners, I would suggest the book Streamliners: The Pre-war years and Streamliners: Post-war years. Those book has more information than this book. The photo from this book was COPIED from the book Santa Fe Streamliners: The Chiefs and thier Tribesmen which in my opinion is a little better book but still lacks information as far the interior of these great Streamliners. The only useful I found useful is the schedule. Nothing more.

The problem with Brian Solomon is that he churns out so many books you have to worry about his research. This is a pretty superficial guide to US steam locomotives and gives a reasonable overview. But there are too many views of a limited number of engines and the whole thing has an air of being thrown together fairly quickly. This doesn't automatically make it a bad book, and it's a cheap way to acquire some decent quality steam photography. But expect more than that and you might be disappointed. Solomon is actually a good writer. I'd like fewer books from him, with more interesting subjects.

Having been a British & Australian steam fan for many years, this is my first book on American Steam. I found the book easy to read, with many great colour & monochrome images covering quite a few popular locomotives. For the Hardened American steam fan, more content will probably be appreciated.
It is sad, and unfortunately common for books on steam trains, to place the images of the locomotive in the crease of the book & the rest of the train or scenery on the centre of the page. There were nine images ruined in this book, that could have been easily been moved left or right, without reducing the size of the image. If you buy a book on Steam Locomotives, you expect the Focus to be on Steam Locomotives, not trees, platforms & coaches.A nine photo loss is not bad for a Rail book.
An otherwise pleasant book marred by poor attention to some photo content. This book is still very welcome on my bookshelf especially for its clear photographs & easy text.

This board book is fairly simplistic, and not the most interesting of all the Thomas books my children have. Using some of the engines at the station, basic color principles are shown. Bill and Ben are yellow, as are the rails of the bridge. James is red, as are the flowers in the flowerbox where he is stopped, etc. Unfortunately, there is little else to hold a child's interest once they've memorized that color and repeatedly pointed out the matching objects. There is no real text beyond the color written at the bottom of the page. All in all, not a very appealing Thomas book to budding and interested little minds.

My apraxic son (2 years old) loves this book! It is the only way that I can get him to say his color words. He needs the simplicity of the pages, plus the motivation of his love for Thomas. Only covers the colors blue, red, green, orange, and white.

This is a great little book. My one year old daughter was mesmerized by the pictures and true to life colors. We have other books in this collection but none of them have caught her eye quite like this one! I think I might order a few more as I can already tell that this book will get much wear!

A good pedagogical concept, to be sure: the explication of opposites. But almost every pairing is problematic. While James indisputably is IN the engine shed, it's not quite clear that Thomas is fully OUT.

And it gets worse. Next, the meanings of EMPTY and FULL are plumbed, but not in a satisfactory way. The carriage Clarabelle is said to be EMPTY, but what we see is merely a carriage with CLOSED doors. It cannot be said from the empirical evidence that the EMPTY assertion is true; it may well be false. On the opposite page, the carriage Annie is labeled as FULL, but what we see are the doors opening and passengers leaving the coach--truly an example of EMPTYING rather than that of the state of fullness.

Things improve somewhat with COMING and GOING, the title concept for the book. Sir Topham Hatt is presiding happily over the COMING of Thomas (but why is his back to Thomas? Is this disapproval?) and the GOING of Percy. But for the concept to be valid, we must presuppose that neither engine is going backwards, as tank engines can do very well.

A better illustration of opposites is UP and DOWN. Bertie the Bus clearly is ascending the hill--no doubt a therapeutic act after his defeat in the race against Thomas--and the yellow car driven by the fetching brunette is obviously coming downhill. But even here questions remain--why has the artist chosen to obscure the woman's face? Is she coming downhill from something of which she is ashamed?

The book concludes on a positive note, with Gordon and Henry demonstrating UNDER and OVER with the happy confidence you would expect from these big engines.

Overall, this book, after a stumbling start, ultimately redeems itself, possibly at the price of having to explain too much to someone still learning to talk. Recommended, but one would be SMART rather than DUMB to buy it USED rather than NEW.

these books are fun because you have to lift the flaps to find an item that is featured in each book. I have to do this with my son so he doesn't tear off the flaps but they are fun to do.

The flaps are flimsy and easy for a toddler's hand to bend out of shape. Lifting the flap doesn't add any action to the scene. The illustrations are bland and there's not a lot of action. The trains aren't particularly interesting. I'd recommend "Wave Hello to Thomas" instead.

The story still gives me chills after reading it a few times. After I explained to him what it was about, my 6 year old asked me to read it to him anyway, and he was so scared he couldn't go to sleep afterward. It is well written, with quality artwork, but I would recommend it for older kids who enjoy ghost stories, rather than young pre-readers. Even with a happy ending, the Banshee legend is a scary, creepy image. A full passenger train being chased to certain death by a reckless runaway passenger train behind it is terrifying beyond words, even if (or especially if) the pursuer turns out to be a spector.

While the book was a good read, it spent to much time dealing with his friends that he stayed with. He spent way to little time on how train travel works, what his experiences were aboard AMTRAK, and the beauty of traveling by rail. His stay in New Orleans, with a friend, was interesting, but not why I bought the book.

You have to wonder about a guidebook that says "most reliable" and "2005" on the cover but contains details from two years ago.

The "Crossing the English Channel" section is my favorite. The narrative on Page 41 mentions "only three hours to Paris and ... two hours, forty minutes to Brussels", and looks forward to the day when "[h]igh-speed tracks will ... be constructed within Britain". That day arrived in September, 2003, when the first section of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link opened. Paris is already down to 2 hours, 35 minutes and Brussels, to 2 hours, 20 minutes. Curiously, the schedules on Page 44 are recent and do reflect the new timings.

This makes me wonder whether the publisher takes updates seriously -- or just puts in new schedules and changes the cover.

On the plus side, I do think that the book's base city - day excursion approach is useful.

After school each day Billy and his best friend Finn, work on a cannon that they plan to shoot at their school. One day, when their cannon is nearly finished, Billy and Finn get detention for side talking. Sadly they don't get to put on the finishing touches because their two friends, Wes and his brother, get to it first. When Billy and Finn get out of detention they immediately rush to the cannon. When they get there Wes and his brother are already done and ready for action. First they shoot at the school, but it goes straight over the school and they hear a great crash. They go to check out where they think they heard the crash and see a box that states Danger: Explosives! Billy and Finn rush to tell their father, but when they get back the dynamite is gone. Billy's father thinks that they did it to cover up their mess of shooting the school with dirt, but can Billy and Finn prove the whole town wrong and find proof that someone is really trying to destroy Billy's home town with dynamite?

An excellent page-turner for young readers. If you like action, adventure, or mystery, you will probably like this book. I loved the details about the three main characters, but I thought the plot was only ok. The problem was it got boring when the story went on and on about Billy and Finn running around searching for explosives. At the beginning they talked about Alice Ann and Wes, but then the author seemed to forget about them. I wanted to know about what happened to Alice Ann, or Wes, or Finn's family. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the book, but the lack of information about the secondary characters was disappointing.

This attractive book is a collection of many well-illustrated short narratives about railway journeys throughout the world, some current and some historical. It's a cross between a travelogue and a technical book, with pieces by well-known railway authors such as George Behrend, Colin Garratt, Christopher Portway, Kenneth Westcott-Jones. It is much more railway-oriented than other books with similar titles, and is worth the money for the breadth of coverage. However, ultimately I found it falls between several stools. As a current guide, it is difficult to tell whether the description is current or out-of-date: some items are overtly historical, but others appear so only on close examination. Technically, it may well give too much detail for the uninterested, but not enough for the enthusiast. It's also not particularly well edited: there are too many inconsistencies and errors, and sometimes it displays a lack of familiarity with the subject. It has some odd quirks, too: some journeys are covered twice (by different authors), like Ulan Bator to Datong, and Christchurch to Wellington - and don't be fooled by the reference to locomotives in the title: the San Francisco Muni (not just the cable cars) is included, too!