Page 22 - November December 2007
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Book Review by Tom Watson
The History of North American Rail
By Christopher Chant
Published by Chartwell Books Inc 2002, printed in China. 437 pages plus index. ISBN 0-7858-1455-8 NMRA British Region Library # 978 (12 inches by 9.5 inches; 3.2 kg)
Perhaps the subject is simply too vast and complex for any one volume to do it justice, but most American authors write about particular railroads or aspects of railroading, rather than the development of American railroading in general. It seems to be left to European authors to tackle the big picture. Thus we have had, for example, Derek Avery’s ‘The Complete History of North American Railways’ (1989), Bernard Fitzsimon’s ‘150 Years of North American Railroads’ (1982) and John Taylor’s ‘North American Railroads’ (1991). All of these large-format books follow a similar pattern, with over-familiar railroad publicity shots or well-known historical photographs (frequently poorly reproduced) being used to illustrate and pad out fairly minimal text. The British Region library has acquired the latest work in this tradition, and in some respects it is a big improvement on its predecessors. It has the merit of lots of new illustrations, for the most part excellently reproduced on superior paper and with a land- scape format which allows the pictures to be displayed to their full advantage.
The author, Christopher Chant, is best known as a technical writer and military historian, in which context he has been prolific in producing books about tanks, aircraft, warships and battles. However, he has also produced ‘The Golden Age of Steam’ (2000), ‘Famous Trains of the 20th Century’ (2001) and ‘The World’s Railways’. So what does such an eclectic author make of the subject in hand?
It would be tedious to review what is, for most people, essentially a ‘coffee table’ book, and critique it line by line. This is not a book one is going to read from cover to cover. The profuse illustrations make it particularly suitable for browsing, so we will offer some general comments and focus most attention on the illustrations. But in doing this one needs to acknowledge that the text seems to be generally soundly researched and well written. The written material in the chapters is, for the most part, concise, lucid and interesting, with only a few relatively minor errors. It is the editing of the captions to the illustrations that is the main weakness. In fact, as one scans more and more of the captions, one is left with the impression that the author has left the business of writing the captions to a sub-editor and then neglected to proofread the results!
The trouble starts at the very beginning, where there are three nice frontispieces totally lacking any indication of what they might be. The first is a full page b&w photograph of a Santa Fe 2-10-2 (ATSF 3937) bringing a freight down Cajon Pass, probably westbound. (If it was going up, eastbound, it would have helpers.) Next, on the title page, we have a colour photograph of an Espee SD50 (SP5516) leading a trio of D&RGW units, the first of which looks to be another SD50, exiting the east portal of Moffat Tunnel. Finally, overleaf there is a nearly full-page colour photo of two unidentified geeps with a short manifest crossing a causeway. All three photographs are reproduced again later in the book (on pages 126, 156 and 171; but the Moffat Tunnel locos are said to be part of the Southern Pacific network whereas at the
time they were technically on the D&RGW). These pictures graphically illustrate the major limitation of this book: all too often the captions fail to add any interesting information that is not self-evident from the illustrations themselves, especially for the more knowledgeable reader.
There is no introduction to provide an overview and a rationale for the structure of the book. There are ten chapters. The first three are strictly historical, dealing with the beginnings of railroading in the United States, the railroads during the Civil War and the westward expansion, and the activities of the railroad barons up to 1917. These are very well done, with potentially dry material presented in an engaging style (the doings of the rail barons would make for an exciting TV series), and several full-page photographs which, if not previously unpublished, are at least uncommon. For example, in addition to the usual ‘Wine Bottle’ picture of the Golden Spike ceremony when the rails of the CP and the UP finally met on 10 May 1869, there is another much less familiar photo taken a few minutes earlier which shows more of the crowd at the gathering. Unfortunately, some of the captions perpetuate errors which should have been laid to rest years ago. Thus the old chestnut about the Golden Spike meeting taking place at Promontory Point (sic) is reiterated in no fewer than three different captions, whereas the actual event occurred at Promontory, Utah – some 30 miles or more from the point, which juts out into the Great Salt Lake. Any well-researched modern text would avoid this mistake, and indeed Chant himself is careful to refer only to Promontory in his text. Whoever wrote the captions was less well informed. This emerges again on page 84, where the caption refers to the Northern Pacific (completed in 1883) as ‘the first transcontinental line’. In fact it was only the first of the north–west lines completed (NP, GN, MILW ), being some way behind the central and southern UP/CP and Espee routes. Then on page 100 there is a photo of the famous 4-4-0 locomotive NYC 999, ‘The Empire State Express’, with no ack- nowledgement at all as to its historical significance – now on display at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry as one-time (1893) holder of the absolute world speed record, at 112.5 mph. It would be easy to convey the wrong impression here. These early chapters do contain much worthy material, well worth a look. These accounts of early developments are followed by a chapter dealing with the ‘Heyday of Steam’ (Chapter 4), 1917–1945. The illustrations in this chapter are evenly divided between historical b&w pictures and more topical colour photographs of modern preserved steam. The kind of weaknesses we have mentioned persist: for example, the caption accompanying the splendid picture of Baldwin Mikado #487 on page 112 fails to mention it is a narrow-gauge engine shown operating on the Cumbres & Toltec tourist line. On page 117 and repeated on page 133, an ATSF 4-6-4 is referred to as a ‘Pacific-type’. Well, ATSF 3460 class, Hudson, or maybe
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