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The Old Steam Train: A Cedar Grove Book
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 23 2026
Pages: 56
Weight: 0.19
Height: 0.12 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Every Cedar Grove kid of a certain age remembers the sign. It hung off the rust-brown steel of the deck girder bridge over Pompton Avenue through all of the 1970s, in big white letters on a faded green ground:
RIDE THE OLD STEAM TRAIN.
The sign was a billboard. The Morris County Central Railroad ran a working steam tourist line out at Whippany, and the sign was pointing Cedar Grove parents west on Route 46 for a Sunday family outing. The sign came down in 1979, around the time the rails themselves were pulled up and the right-of-way went quiet. That was almost fifty years ago.
In June of 2027, a twelve-year-old boy named Charlie Almeida walked out of his bedroom on Ridge Road at 3:14 in the morning in his pajamas. He walked six blocks through a sleeping town. He climbed the chain-link fence at the approach to the abandoned bridge. He stood alone on the deck girder in the middle of the night and faced east toward the old Cedar Grove station, and he was dead before dawn with a nineteenth-century rail spike through his jaw.
The last recorded spiking in Essex County was in 1897.
Now the new chief of the Cedar Grove Police Department, a thirty-one-year-old named Ray Koslowski, has to solve a murder whose weapon was last used before his grandmother was born. To do it he will have to go to his aunt Rachel Rinaldi, who ran this department before him. He will have to go to the quiet old cop at the Pilgrim Diner who has been keeping a filing cabinet in his garage for fifty years. He will have to go to a man named Elias Corwin with a cedar box in his kitchen that has been waiting a century and a third for someone to open it. And at the end of a long weekend, he will have to make a call to Virginia, to the retired Army colonel who thought he had already paid Cedar Grove everything he owed it.
They are going to ride the train. They are going to find out what it's been carrying. And someone is going to stay on board when the trip is done.
A supernatural thriller of small-town secrets, generational debts, and the hundred-and-thirty-year-old folklore every Cedar Grove mother used to tell her children before bed.
From the author: The sign on the bridge is real. The rail line is real. The deck girder bridge still stands. The trail is open to joggers and dog walkers now, and most of them don't know what the path they are walking used to be. The book is what I have been hearing, quietly, about the tracks, for almost forty years. The Old Steam Train is the second novel in THE STRANGE OF CEDAR GROVE. If you missed Book One, start with Devils Hole or jump in here. The town will still be there when you come back to it
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