For nearly two centuries, through vast upheavals and enormous change, railroads have remained crucial to North American transportation. And always setting the pace have been the mighty American locomotives in all their ever-evolving forms. This collection traces the development of steam, electric, and diesel locomotives from the early nineteenth century right up to the present. More than 250 photographs are accompanied by detailed captions identifying the locomotives and explaining their roles in the history of American motive power. Together, the photographs depict well over 75 locomotive types and reflect the grand geographic and technological breadth of North American railroading.
St. Paul Union Depot was among the busiest and best-known places in the city--one of the largest depots in the nation and St. Paul's link to the world. It had nine platforms, twenty-one tracks, and well over 140 trains coming and going each day. At its peak in the 1920s, the Union Depot processed more than twenty million pieces of mail each year. Construction of the new depot began in 1917, among the burned remains of the previous depot, and was finally finished in 1926 as both a monument to St. Paul's urban growth and its gateway to the Northwest.
Practical rather than pretentious, the Union Depot served St. Paul for more than fifty years--complete with a restaurant, drugstore, infirmary, and playrooms for children. Millions of people bought tickets and walked through its lobby and concourse to board waiting trains. It sent children to summer camps and schools, and young men and women to wars. The depot hosted U.S. presidents and presidents-to-be, international royalty, famous authors, movie stars, and the rich and famous--but it also sheltered the homeless and the troubled seeking a warm place on a cold night. Though it closed in 1971 after years of declining passenger rail service, today the St. Paul Union Depot is once again being revived as a Twin Cities transit and commercial hub, just as rail travel throughout the United States experiences a renewal.
In St. Paul Union Depot, John W. Diers brings to life the sights and sounds and the behind-the-scenes inner workings of what was in its time the most important rail passenger station west of Chicago. He captures an era when competing railroad companies came together and agreed that one depot was better than nine. Of more interest, though, St. Paul Union Depot is about the people--the stationmasters, gatemen, switchmen, ticket clerks, mail handlers, train directors, locomotive engineers, and others who were employed there, as well as the millions of passengers who passed through its doors.
The photographic record of eight separate journeys in this book features lines where steam is still king. It includes the Lumberjack train of Romania, the Trans-Manchurian trains of China and the last working steam train in Europe.
A reference book identifying every railway station in the British Isles that has been open for passenger traffic, past and present. Station entries include dates of opening and closing, map reference and name of original railway company. More than 16,000 entries are contained within the directory.
Appealing to more than just railroad fans, this fascinating account of early Japanese efforts to build railways also paints a clear picture of the Meiji era and the historical, cultural and social ramifications of the railway in Japan.
In the summer of 2000, David Haward Bain and his family left their home in Vermont and headed west in search of Americaas past. From Omaha to San Francisco, Bain and his family retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad. Following abandoned railroad tracks and the traces of old wagon trails, cruising down back roads and main streets, they discovered the deep, restless, uniquely American spirit of adventure that connects our past to our present.
A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up the marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, train yards, museums, and diners that line the old emigrant routes of the railroad and the Lincoln Highway. As he cruises west to California, Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporaryafrom Willa Cather to Marlon Brando, from pathfinder John FreAmont to naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. Here, too, are memories of Bainas own grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage.
Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian Frazier, yet with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his own, Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.
