Manufacturing nostalgia. Author David Weitzman writes and illustrates in the tradition of David Macaulay and Eric Sloane; accounts of activities from the past with line drawings. In this case the activity is the design and construction of a Berkshire class steam locomotive at the Lima Locomotive Works in 1925. This is probably best described as a “young adult book”; after starting with a prologue with an engineer and fireman taking a Berkshire out of the Selkirk, New York yards of the Boston and Albany, the focal point character is Ben (we never learn his last name), 18 years old when he starts work at the plant as a helper; as such he gets to see all the elements of locomotive construction: design, pattern making, foundry, forge, machine shop, boiler shop, erection hall. The meticulous drawings of the machinery are most impressive and the explanations of how they worked are well handled; and there’s a sense of the satisfaction and even joy that the workers get out contribution to the production of an impressive machine.
Still nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Ben never meets a company executive (although he does have brief encounters with the head mechanical engineer and the plant manager). There are no women in the plant – the only woman in the whole book is Ben’s mom, who isn’t even named, and no blacks (although plenty of Serbs and Italians and other ethnics). There’s no mention of a worker’s union at the plant, and no workers with missing fingers or patched eyes from industrial accidents (and OSHA would go ballistic at seeing the lack of safety equipment in the illustrations). To be fair, Weitzman is being historically accurate; that’s the way things were in 1925.
And alas, there’s the whole yearning for the “America that used to build things”. I did an environmental site assessment on a metal works in Englewood, Colorado; precision machine tools were rusting under the sky in a now unroofed building and the rotary furnaces had been left with their last batch of steel frozen solid inside. But the reality is that sort of work is going the way of flint knapping and harness making and gas manufacture and probably soon coal mining and truck driving. Sad, perhaps, but inevitable. ( )