H. Roger Grant (1943–2023)

Living in the Depot : the Two-Story Railroad Station is an overview of the one-time practice in the United States and Canada of construction of town railroad depots with living quarters for the station agent. The main focus is on this practice in the US by geographical region (east, south, midwest, and far west). The author discusses the economic issues with respect to this kind of structure – specifically the trade-offs between construction cost, workforce retention, and station profitability and provides pictures and blueprints of stations which illustrate each of these points. The last chapter “The Agent and the Depot” contains some brief first person accounts of this lifestyle from the perspective of the agent and his/her family as well as observations by the author concerning the agents place and standing in the community served by the railroad station.

The book length is 118 pages. The first 51 pages are a combination of text and photographs. Pages 52-118 provide illustrations, accompanied with brief descriptions, of the various architectural styles of these stations. The stations are grouped by railroad.

I wouldn’t consider this book a must read but if you are curious about railroad architecture and wish to gain some understanding of the reasons for this aspect of the railroad landscape then this book might be of interest.

(Text Length 51 pages, Photo album length 66 pages, Total Length - 131 pages, includes foreword, footnotes, bibliography, and index.) (Book Dimensions inches HxWxT – 11 3/8” x 8 3/4” x 3/4”)… (more)

Charles Brown (1879-19??) worked as a railroad boomer from 1900-1913. Boomers were the Kelly temps of the day. Every railroad of the period had its cadre of regular employees who could handle the work load for periods of time in the course of a year, however, most of those railroads had one or more periods of time during a year when demands for their services were above and beyond the norm -seasonal crops, rapid expansion/construction to meet sudden changes in traffic, etc. When these conditions arose the boomer was the individual who was hired to help meet the demand. Most boomers, like Brown, were ordinary people. The big difference between Brown and his co-workers is that he took the time to write about his experience.
His original book was self published on the eve of the Great Depression. As far as is known only 3 copies of the work survived. Roger Grant discovered the book while researching railroad history of the west. Using official records Grant was able to trace Brown's movements after his career as a boomer was cut short by a railroad accident, and he was also able to confirm much of what Brown wrote (locations, places, events, etc.) The level of detail in his book is such that it is evident Brown either possessed a fantastic memory or he kept a detailed journal of his experiences which he used as a reference when he wrote his book. As the editor for this release of Brown's work Grant has provided annotations and footnotes to highlight the facts Brown cites.
Brown's wrote probably the way he spoke. His style takes a little getting used to but once you have the "cadence" of his narrative the book gives you the sense that you are sitting in his living room listening to him tell his story.
For example Brown states: "When you read in a newspaper about an engineer dying at his post with his hand on the throttle in a train wreck, about nine times out of ten it is a lotta bunk, for most any railroad man will tell you that these so called brave engineers that sticks to his post and dies with his hand on the throttle when he had a chance to jump would sure be an awful sap, and the truth of the matter in most cases where a poor unfortunate engineer is caught in a wreck and gets killed, is because that things happened so quick and fast that the poor fellow did not have a ghost of a show to jump or get out, and save himself before the crash came. For dear readers I want to tell you that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred when train wrecks happen they always happen without warning to the train crew or anybody else, and they happen so quick and fast that nobody hardly knows what has happened until they have stopped piling up and it is all over but the cleaning up the wreckage..." (pp.158-159)
His story is ordinary only in the sense that what he did was once typical. Today his story is extraordinary and it provides a glimpse of the way things once were. I think it is an outstanding autobiography and I would recommend it to anyone who might be interested in reading about how things were back when. (Text Length - 230 pages, Total Length - 259 pages, includes index.)… (more)

We Took the Train is a collection of first person accounts of U.S. railroad travel from the very beginnings of passenger service on the B&O in the 1832 to Amtrak travel in the 1980's. The 175 page book is divided into six sections each containing between 2 and 5 accounts. The first section "The Iron Horse Arrives" opens with a narrative by an unknown author describing his impressions of his ride on the B&O in 1832 and ends with Charles Dickens description of his 1842 trip on the Boston & Lowell.
The second section "America's Railroads Mature" begins with A.O. Abbott's description of riding Confederate Prisoner of War trains in 1864 and ends with an excerpt from Nine Thousand Miles on a Pullman Train: An Account of a Tour of Railroad Conductors from Philadelphia to the Pacific Coast and Return which was published in 1898.
The next two sections of the book are essentially interludes - the first has two accounts of bumming a ride on the train (riding the rails) - one from the book Brownie the Boomer and the other, by Erling Kildahl describing his trip to Jamestown, North Dakota in 1936 in order to attend college. The second interlude describes intercity travel via electric interurban.
The accounts in "The Glory Years" cover the period from the 1880's to the late 1930's. Probably the most exuberant of these is Christopher Morley's account of riding in the cab of the head end power of the New York Central Twentieth Century Limited.
The final section provides descriptions of train travel from the 1940's to the 1980's. I found all of the accounts interesting reading and I think Roger Grant did an excellent job of editing. If you like travel and if you would like to have some idea of what it was like to take the train I think you would find this book of interest. (Text Length - 167 pages, Total Length - 175 pages.)… (more)