Two for the Railroad Enthusiast
Dover Publications used to keep three classics of the steam railroad era in print. The first was Matthias N. Forney's The Railroad Car Builder's Pictorial Dictionary, which literally defined and illustrated every single part of a standard railroad car, from the check-chain chafing plate to the wool-packed spiral spring, via the match striker frame and the melon-shaped lamp-globe. The other two were both by John H. White, Jr., who was once the Smithsonian's expert on steam locomotives and the trains they hauled: A History of the American Locomotive, It's Development: 1830-1880, and Early American Locomotives.
These are classics, and if you're a steam train buff, both are recommended. The second one is a collection of 151 engravings and lithographs of steam locomotives, most of them American. Each has a brief description, but there's no other descriptive text. It's a picture book. The A History... is a detailed history, and it discusses every major part and system of steam locomotives. Reading this book told me how much I didn't really know about how the old engines worked, and now I'll have to go back to a few railroad museums (won't that be a chore!) to study the systems I now somewhat understand.
[It should be mentioned that for several years I was the guy responsible for maintaining and using two Babcock & Wilcox railroad boilers that were the heating plant for a sizeable building, so it's not as though I knew nothing about locomotive equipment.]
The book begins with a history of the first dozen or so locomotives in the United States, which were mostly imported from Great Britain. Surprisingly, they saw very little use. American railroads were less well made, with tighter turns, weaker rails, softer beds, and in many cases, steeper grades. Some of the early engines failed their initial tests (being too heavy for their intended railroad was usually the problem), and were then used merely as stationary shop engines, or for scrap.
Then we get separate histories of the builders; the materials used in construction; the various locomotive types and wheel arrangements; the performance; the fuel; and then the chief components (boilers, fireboxes, trucks, drive wheels, rods and crossheads, cowcatchers, and, of course, bells and whistles). It then goes on to give special studies, with detailed drawings, of 25 representative locomotives, with an emphasis on the most popular types (rather than the oddballs) in use.
The book even contains a few contracts and order specifications, so you can see what they chose to mention.
One thing I learned, in addition to the details about parts, was that American designers were extremely conservative about adopting new technology, or experimenting with the basic structure. Indeed, most of the basics of steam locomotives had been invented in the first ten years of their use, and things got larger over time, but were rarely fundamentally changed. Oddly, the price for a locomotive stayed pretty much the same (averaging $8,000) during this 50 year period, despite the doubling and tripling of weight, and the change from iron and brass to mostly steel. A chart with about 20 engines listed shows that the first few cost $4,000 or so, but an 1836 4-2-0 Baldwin was $6,700, and weighed 10 tons; a 1855 4-4-0 Lawrence, 25 tons, was $8,825; and a 1905 51-ton Baldwin 4-4-0 was $9,410. Locomotives were far more decorative in America than elsewhere, too, at least until toward the end of the 1800s.
The History was my bathroom reading for several weeks, and had I tried to read it faster than that it would have given me a massive headache. Good, but also technical.
CBsIP: (Alpine mountains of student manuscripts)
Year's Best SF 14, David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, eds.
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell