Page 24 - NMRA Roundhouse March-April 2018
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 North American Railroad Books
 Rob Tinker
Established in 1992 by Kevin EuDaly, White River Produc- tions are based in Bucklin, Missouri. In the summer of
2014, White River acquired the rights to two smaller publishing companies, Carstens Publications and The Rail- road Press. As well as offering books from all three of these publishers, magazines such as Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette, Railroad Model Craftsman and Model Railroad News are available from them.
White River’s emphasis is on rail- road photography, concentrating
on the post-war era. Recent books have tended to be landscape format hardback books, with mainly colour photography. Good examples are
the Rio Grande books, or the more recent “Route of the Chiefs”, by Greg Stout, a 250 page photographic history of how the Santa Fe rose to being one of the foremost passenger carriers in America’s streamliner era. White River’s diverse selection can be seen as they also publish Russell Tedder’s “Forest Rails”, the story of railroads and the role they played
in the growth of Georgia-Pacific, a major forest products company. This 250+ page epic contains information on relatively well known routes such as the Feather River Railway to the more obscure Chattahoochee Indus- trial Railroad.
As for their other offerings, many railroad modellers will be familiar with the name of Hal Carstens, who died in 2009. In the 1950s and 1960s,
24 ROUNDHOUSE - April 2018
Carstens was the author of many articles on model railroading, rail- roads, photography, and the lumber industry and bought Penn Publica- tions, renaming it Carstens Publica- tions in 1969. Carstens published
a number of books on the subject
of railroad history and scale model railroading, characterised by in-depth detail. Today, White River still carries stocks of in-print Carstens books, for example “Rails Beyond the Rutland” and “Grand Trunk Heritage in New England”. These tend to be softback books of 40-80 pages, as do the Carstens modelling books such as the classic “Model Railroad Struc- tures From A to Z”
The Railroad Press catalogue is also available from White River. They pro- duced popular titles such as “ALCO’s To Allentown”, and “CF7 Locomo- tives: From Cleburne to Everywhere”, both now sadly out of print, but there is plenty of excellent reading still to be had, such as the highly regarded
“Bethlehem Steel Railroading” and “Hawaiian Railway Album WWII Pho- tographs”, a composite of four earlier volumes.
Shown are White River’s latest three offerings. “The Great Northern” by Richard Yaremko is a 250+ page all colour history of this famous line. With a similar format, “Denver & Rio Grande: The Early Years” is Mallory Hope Ferrell’s “22nd (and last) book.” It includes “almost every quality photograph available from 1873 to 1921” and will be of interest not just to RG fans, but enthusiasts of the days of early railroading. On the face of it “Freight Car Handbook” may seem a little prosaic compared to
the previous two offerings, but as the book includes hundreds of eleva- tions, details, and plans with all eras represented in black and white and colour, it will surely be popular with modellers. All of these books should be available in the UK “late Spring”, according to the Publishers.
  

















































































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