Richard Warren Reinhardt

The subtitle of this book is “Reminiscences from the Age of Steam” is an excellent short summary of the book. Reinhardt has collected a series of excerpts from a large number of first person accounts of working on the railroad and assembled them in 17 chapters. The focus of the stories in each chapter is a single aspect of railroad work.

The chapter titles are:

Three Witnesses at the Birth of the Iron Horse – experiences with the Stoubridge Lion and the Tom Thumb
Whale Oil, Pitch Pine, and Ingenuity – railroad technology and engineering
Pathfinders and Rock Pushers – surveyors and their efforts
The Brakeman’s Glorious, Rowdy Life – accounts of the hazards and work of braking
Head End, Left Side – what it was like to be a fireman
Hogger at Work – descriptions of the life of an engineer
Roundhouse and Shop – stories from the mechanical force
Railroad Town – what it was like to live and work in one of these now vanished places
Bucking Snow – the hazards of snow removal
The Kingdom of the Keys – telegrapher/dispatcher accounts
Section Gang – the work of keeping the actual rails of the road in working order
Certainty, Security, and Celerity – railway mail service
A Cake and Coffee Stop – how to feed a passenger
Dance of Death in the Switchyards – the hazardous work of “shuffling the deck” in a rail yard
Tickets, Please – conductor stories
Lord of the Pullman Car – what the porter saw
The Brave Engineer – A single account of what can happen when thing go very wrong.

Many of Reinhardt's sources are familiar to the reader of first person railroad accounts – End of Track, No Royal Road, The General Manager’s Story, Railroadman, From Cab to Caboose: Fifty Years of Railroading, Clear the Tracks, Forty Years on the Rail, Mail by Rail, etc. However a number of the excerpts are from articles, biographies, and other writings which would not be classed as accounts of railroad life.

I think Reinhardt chose his selections well. This book is essentially a sampler of this kind of writing/history and it is an excellent introduction to this area of the literary landscape. (Text Length - 315 pages, Total Length - 318 pages.)… (more)