Books on the Northeast Corridor & Trains in General

Hey Everyone.
As of late, I've become a bit of an avid reader, reading one new book front to back per week.
It was inevitable that I'd eventually get to another area of interest, trains.

However, when I search the web for books, the majority of train books are image / photo books. Which are great in their own right, but I'm looking for more text heavy / centered books.

I'm interested in the Northeast Corridor and trains in the northeast primarily, but I'm open to reading anything.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open. Even fiction books. There has to be at least one author on this forum .

I wasn't sure where to post this in the forum, so if the mods feel the need to move this topic, you got the all clear from me (not that you need it )

Thanks in advance. I hope this thread can also serve as a resource for others who may be interested in reading books on railroading in the Northeastern US & abroad.

Text, not pics (formerly ex libris, donated to a not for profit) - and worth your time:

The Men Who Loved Trains
ISBN 9780253220318

The Wreck of the Penn Central
ISBN 9781893122086

The New Haven Railroad; Its Rise & Fall
ISBN 9780803850170

Nothing Like It In The World:
ISBN 9780684846095

I'm currently reading The Metroliners by Bruce Goldberg and David Warner. It's an excellent book on the development of high speed trains for the NEC that is more text than photo-heavy.
https://shop.whiteriverproductions.com/products/tmet

Paul Holland's My Life as a Rear End is a great and humorous memoir of his career as an employee of Metro-North and the predecessor roads
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Rear-Memoir ... 1530851882

NortheastTrainMan wrote: ↑Sun Jun 18, 2023 5:42 pm I'm interested in the Northeast Corridor and trains in the northeast primarily, but I'm open to reading anything.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open. Even fiction books. There has to be at least one author on this forum .

Yes, I'm an author.

On the fiction front, there's two (outside my own) that I know of: The Deltic Disaster and Other Tales, and it's sequel That Which Was Lost. They're up on Amazon, but I don't have a link. I'll ask around other areas for some more suggestions.

Meanwhile, I do have a band-touring-by-train novel that's published: Throng: Going Station to Station. I did put the first chapter up for folks to peruse, and you can get more info at https://throng.band . On Amazon on dead tree editions or where fine eBooks are sold.
A sequel is in the works and playing out on my Patreon. If you subscribe you'll get new entries faster (I'm ahead of Patreon itself and need to finish out a few more cities).

Two of these sit in my "private stock"

Wreck of the Penn Central, his book was made more entertaining by knowing a conductor who in a previous life worked in the sales department at PC. We can ship those car loads of grain and to show our appreciation here is a new set of Ping golf clubs and a membership to XYZ Country Club

The Men who Loved Trains

May I also suggest. Derailed, What went wrong and what to do about America's passenger trains.
ISBN 0-312-17182-X
It gives some insight to Nixon's and the government's thoughts on passenger service.

I recommend the books "Merging Lines" and "Main Lines," both by Richard Saunders, Jr. They are pricey but some larger libraries might have them or can get them via inter-library loan. Together these books tell the story of North American Railroading from 1900 to 2002. All in just about 800 pages combined across the two books!

Which reminds me I need to reread these. It's been a while. Put that in the queue...

I wouldn't recommend Nothing Like It in the World; it has a lot of errors, many of them are things that are obviously wrong. I have a review of it on my website at http://www.stevedunham.50megs.com/BookR ... l#transcon, and after reviewing it I learned that somebody had a website detailing errors in the book, and there's a link to that at the end of my own review.

Wreck of the Penn Central is good, fascinating if dreary; I have read it several times and still have it on my bookshelf.

Men Who Loved Trains was pretty good, but I noticed Lyn Nofsiger's name spelled two ways in one paragraph, so I wondered how reliable the details in this book were.

Be careful about Nothing Like It In The World. An NRHS member, a university professor, found something like 23 factual errors about things that are well known generally and wrote to the author (who has published numerous books on a variety of subjects) about it. He received a reply saying essentially hey, the book's out -- what do you want me to do?

A better source on the UP is Maury Klein's Union Pacific, in two volumes.

Edit: I hadn't seen Literalman's post while I was typing the above.

Two books, interesting for their contrasting viewpoints, are

Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, by Dee Brown, and
Railroads Triumphant, by Albro Martin.

To give you an idea, whenever Brown mentions land grants it's always "the people's land."

A pretty good book is The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar. I reviewed it 11 years ago for the Fredericksburg, Va., Free Lance–Star newspaper, but I can't find the review online now. I'll have to add it to my own website, because I was given permission to cross-post my writing for the paper.

I added my review of The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar to my website at http://www.stevedunham.50megs.com/BookR ... html#RRrev

It all depends on where your interest lies--academic, popular, the companies, the trains, stations travel. In addition to what's been mentioned, I have some suggestions:

If you have an interest in stations, The Railroad Station: An Architectural History by Carroll L.V. Meeks remains foundational. An interesting pair of books bracket the era of the old Penn Station in NYC (and are very NEC centric). Jill Jonnes tells the story of the building of the station (and the North River tunnels) in Conquering Gotham and Lorraine Diehl chronicles its demise inThe Late Great Pennsylvania Station.

In re the NEC, it has not received the coverage in books that it should. There are a couple of books on the development of the Metroliners (I think one is mentioned upthread). Although it is very slim and photo-centric, I will mention Trains of the Northeast Corridor by the late Tom Nelligan (who posted here frequently) and Scott Hartley.

Books on rail travel could fill a library on their own. I especially recommend The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. I've heard great things about his The Great Railway Bazaar, but I haven't read it. Terry Pindell's Making Tracks isn't of the same caliber, but it was the book that ignited my adult interest in riding trains.

There are excellent books on rail history from both academic and popular authors. From the former, although it's nearly half a century old, I think Keith Bryant's History of the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe holds up. More contemporary are Amtrak in the Heartland and Limiteds, Locals and Expresses in Indiana, 1838-1971, both by Craig Sanders. A number of the top books from popular authors have already been mentioned. I'll add just one more: Twilight of the Great Trains by Fred Frailey. Get the revised edition, which is almost identical to the original, but includes the Illinois Central chapter that was inexplicably omitted from the first edition.

literalman mentioned a book by the Englishman, Christian Wolmar. He is a prolific writer. I especially like The Subterranean Railway, his history of the development of the London Tube.

If you read The Wreck of the Penn Central (and you should), a good chaser for that shot is Peter Lyons' To Hell in a Day Coach.

Finally, no discussion of railroad books is complete without a nod to Lucius Beebe. I think I got The Trains We Rode when I was around 10 or 12. You can't rely on the text as history, but it is fine literature and the pictures capture a lost world.

Concerning Ambrose's question of what did the reader want him to do:

When I worked in book publishing (1982-1991, I think it was), once a book was in print, we would start a file of things to be fixed in any future printings. That would have been something for Ambrose to do. Also, when I instructed writers and editors, I would tell them to read what they had written and what they had edited. Dormitory railroad cars eight feet long and flat cars eight feet tall? Ambrose wrote that. How could he read that and not see the problems?

Also, this forum does have a dedicated Book/Media section. Check it out!

Thanks, STrRedWolf. Yes, under General Railroad Discussion there is a forum called Books, Magazines, Music, TV, and Movies, and other Media, and it includes a two-page thread called Great Railway Reads.