Each revolution of her ten-coupled 57-inch drivers shakes the seatbox and jars the cocks and gauges. The heat from over three score square feet of inflamed coal crust seeps through the Butterfly firedoors until sweat dampens your socks and trickles down the small of you back. In the tunnel blackness, her stack hammers hard against raw rock, and the thick, pungent, gassy smoke swirls back into the cab to slow your breathing and film your face; always the cinders are creeping past the red bandana around your neck. The noise is rhythmic, constant, deafening: the pound of a harness of main and side rods, crossheads and the valve motion; the monotone of the stocker screw; the asthmatic whine of the injector; the exhalation of brass valves; the rattle of deck plates. Yet for this a man would leave the security of a shoe store, the smell of fresh-plowed earth, the regularity of factory hours. Or he’d suffer the conscious frustration of having passed up the great adventure for cash or comfort or acclaim. For the reward of the smoke and the sweat is to hold in the palm of your gloved hand the throttle of a 189-ton Baldwin, to know that each notch on the curved ratchet overhead feeds more superheated steam into a pair of 28-inch diameter cylinders with a 32-inch stroke, to realize that this rocking, pounding boiler stuffed with tubes and charged with 200-pounds-per-square-inch energy is yours to urge and restrain.
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The section on Train-watching opens with Mr. Morgan’s description of his first encounters with trains as a boy and the anticipation, excitement, and letdown of experiencing the wait, the arrival, and the departure of the local train on its daily trip through his small town of Monticello, Georgia in the 1930’s and it ends with his 1957 essay which is source of the book title. In that essay he describes how he converted his hobby of train watching into a full time job by becoming the editor of Trains.
Reporting on the industry includes articles about technical developments (Super-Power, The diesel that did it), important people (Can Mr. B Save Miss Katy?, A conversation with A.E. Perlman), characters (The railfan, Why boys leave home), and various other aspects of the railroad scene.
Travel is just that – articles about Mr. Morgan’s rail travel experiences in the U.S. and other countries. Essays and reminiscence is a collection of Mr. Morgan’s thoughts and observations on topics as diverse as Cincinnati Union Terminal, his love affair with the L&N, the railroads on-again off-again interest in electrification, and a guest article by Wake Hoagland extolling the virtues of the railroad advertising agents (Tractive effort of the adjective).
The essays vary in length from 1 to 9 pages which, given the dimensions of the book and the font size, translates into normal book size page lengths of 1 to 18 pages. The essays are well written and range from the informative and technical to the philosophical and humorous. If you like reading about trains, I think you will enjoy this book. See Common Knowledge for some quotes from the book. (Text Length - 160 pages, Total Length - 160 pages.) (Book Dimensions inches LxWxH - 11.25 x.5 x 8.25) (