Stuart Leuthner

In 1972 Mr. Leuthner began his search for stories of the lives of railroad men and women whose careers had begun in the first decade of the 20th Century. As the author notes in his forward, he was searching for people who were in the twilight of their lives and many of the leads he tried to follow resulted in his arriving too late. However, he did persevere and the end result is a very interesting collection of first person accounts of railroad work from the standpoint of 34 men and women show more who worked almost every job that could be found on the railroad in the 20th Century.

The author’s approach to acquiring these accounts was to tape long interviews with each person and then re-assemble the taped words into smoothly flowing narratives which were then reviewed by the interviewee for corrections/additions/ etc. The end result is a series of very well written first person accounts whose writing style mimics what you, the reader, could expect to hear if you just happened to sit down with one of these people and get into a discussion about their life and work.

The general format of the 34 stories starts with a brief discussion of childhood, early (in general) non-railroad work, the incident/individual that turned the interviewee’s thoughts to working for the railroad and a brief listing/discussion of railroad jobs worked before the individual reached the occupation with which they are associated in the text. All along are side commentaries concerning interesting incidents/people/places that happened in the individuals journey through their railroad career.

In these pages you will meet, engineers, RPO mail sorters, dispatchers, station agents, Pullman porters, dining car chef’s, brakemen (male and female), callboys, roundhouse foremen, track gang foremen, Redcaps, conductors, office clerks, a railroad president, and a stationmaster. The railroads they worked for cover many of the Class I roads (AT&SF, Pennsylvania, NYC, B&O, Canadian Pacific,etc.) some regionals (D&H, Seaboard Air Line, L&N, etc.) and some of the very small and long forgotten railroads (Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes and East Broad Top).

The book was published in 1983 and all of these people are long gone, however, courtesy of Mr. Leuthner, they have left behind stories that will be of interest to anyone interested in what it was really like to work on the railroad in the first half of the 20th Century. I thought the book was a worthwhile read.

In order to give you some sense of the writing style I've included two short quotes in Common Knowledge.

(Text Length 152 pages, Total Length - 154 pages, includes foreword, introduction, and numerous photographs.)
(Book Dimensions inches HxWxT – 11 1/4” x 8 3/4” x 1/2”) show less

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