To sum it up in one word a disappointment. Not even the photo feature on Canadian Pacific 5137 could uplift a mediocre issue. If a better effort than this cannot be made I vote for discontinuance of the annual all-steam issue.

In over 10 years of readership this is the first time I've felt that your magazine wasn't worth 50 cents.

Harvey Dust. 1660 Hansuld St., London, Ont., Canada.

Since your 1960 steam issue was in December, couldn't you have waited at least that long before sending out another one of those "Oh, Steam Is Dead, Oh, Boo-Hoo" issues?

How about an all-diesel issue for your diesel fan readers?

5647 L St., Lincoln, Nebr.

H. Martin Swan.

"Well, how about an all-diesel issue, readers? Ed.

Alarm system guards General

You might be interested to know that Western & Atlantic's General [page 10, October TRAINS] while it is at South Louisville is being protected from the ivory hunters by a burglar alarm system. This is connected to such goodies as headlight, bell, whistle, and so forth.

James Herron.

117 Sunset Dr., Cocoa Beach, Fla.

The man for the job

Dick Kindig's Mikado article - "Mudhens and Sport Models" - in September TRAINS does the soul good and is undoubtedly one of the finest locomotive documentaries you've had in years.

Here truly is a dedicated man who knows his subject as intimately as though he created it, who has something to say about it, and tops it off with a fine, warm presentation.

Yes, he was and is "the man for the job"!

Jack Whitmeyer. 837 Calle Miramar, Redondo Beach, Calif.

... Dick Kindig's article caused me to paw through my files, and I have unearthed a couple of interesting photos.

One shows No. 473 masquerading temporarily as No. 7 for a movie. The conversion was the epitome of simplicity, involving only the painting-over of the 4 and the 3 plus the removal of the two engine-number indicator housings. The scene is Silverton.

The other, showing the rear of the 496, illustrates how the standard-gauge tender was converted to narrow gauge. The truck frames were left intact while the wheels were moved inward the proper distance, leaving an awesome gap between wheel and frame. As shown in this photo, the rear coupler pocket presents a sort of enigma. To look at it one would think that narrow-gauge locomotives could be used with narrowgauge cars having automatic couplers, or with standard-gauge cars having linkand-pin couplers. I suspect, however, that the casting is inverted and that its previous use had been to permit standardgauge locomotives to haul either standard-gauge cars with automatic couplers or narrow-gauge cars with link-and-pin couplers.

The outside counterbalances on these engines used to cause derailments in winter, I have been told. They would pack the snow outside of the rail against the ends of the ties. Thawing by the sun, plus water dripping from the engines, would build up bumps of solid ice in time. Then when a new snow fell, there was no place for it to be squeezed, and the engine would be lifted off the rails by the counterbalances, and when it came back down, it sometimes came to rest in places other than the running surface of the rail.

Robert A. LeMassena. 1795 S. Sheridan Blvd., Denver 26, Colo.

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I SUSPECT that the editor of TRAINS, who usually reviews books on his own, entrusted this volume to me because he was afraid he'd find himself in the position of heaping praise on a publication of his own firm. His fears were well founded; if he was an honest man and a sincere railfan (as we know him to be), he could only lay praise on Middleton's The Interurban Era as one pours maple syrup on a stack of pancakes.

The book is mainly concerned with presentation of 560 photographs of the interurbans, which amount to about all one could ask as a pictorial sample of interurban history. Many of the later ones are from the author's own camera, which he wields effectively, and from those of other men whose names have become familiar in credit lines in recent years. For his older pictures, Middleton has drawn on the marvelous collections of George Krambles, Steve Maguire, and other prominent juice fans, plus a wide variety of other sources, including some very obscure archives. I was much impressed by a credit line to the Historical Collections of the Security First National Bank of Los Angeles. About two-thirds of the photographs, I would estimate, are pre

viously unpublished, and many of the rest have appeared only in old trade journals or in modern railfan bulletins that have not achieved wide circulation. The quality of reproduction is top-notch, on a level with recent Howell-North publications or with the previous Kalmbach effort Steam's Finest Hour. I'd put the blue ribbon on a breath-taking twopage spread of a 1917 wreck on the Ogden, Logan & Idaho on pages 368-369, and I'd give a special award for obscurity of subject matter to an interior shot of a Holland Palace car on page 58. The distribution of photographs between lines seems equitable. The lines that lasted longest are best represented. Thus, the Ohio and Michigan interurbans, which largely went out before there was widespread railfan photography, get somewhat less coverage than their mileage in the industry might have earned them, but the Pacific Electric and the Iowa lines are beautifully covered. I immediately checked on my own pets - the West Penn 700 series, Ohio Public Service car 21, and the Sacramento Northern's carferry Ramon - and found them all well represented. I am sure there is someone who just lives for the Cleveland, Painesville & Eastern, and who will be outraged at not finding it included, but I predict that nearly all readers will be satisfied with the coverage.

The advertised 55,000 words are about equally divided between captions and text. The captions are a mine of information on individual lines, and the text gives a good but necessarily brief history of the industry. There are no maps. Middleton combines an engineer's professional training with a good feel for history. I'd praise his writing on four grounds. First, he is accurate. Second, he doesn't waste time worrying about the precise limits of the term "interurban." Like certain other objects of importance, notably time, life, and electricity, interurbans are difficult to define rigorously. If we'd wait for somebody to develop a definition ironclad enough to separate all electric lines as interurbans and noninterurbans, we'd never be able to write about them. Third, Middleton makes no artificial efforts to create nostalgia. I presume we all have some degree of nostalgia for the interurbans, or we wouldn't read about them, write about them, and

collect material on them; but the photographs and the straight story should be enough to kindle the pleasant feelings without delving into the chirp of the crickets in the weedy roadbed on the summer's evening, and the yellow glow of the headlight in the distance. Fourth, Middleton's over-all interpretation of interurban history is generally correct. Love interurbans though we may, we have to face the fact that they were an awful economic flop. Basically, the public just preferred to ride in automobiles, and there was nothing the interurbans could do about it. I have never been able to stomach interpretations that the decline of the industry was the work of unscrupulous bus salesmen. Middleton seems to be all square with reality on this point.

I feel obligated to find something to carp about in this volume, merely to keep up the cherished traditions of reviewing; but I can't find anything more offensive than that the Bonner Railwagon came out Banner, and that somebody mislabeled a Miller trolley shoe as an overrunning third-rail shoe in an otherwise useful glossary. I'd like to think that this is merely testimony that interurbans are a subject too sublime for mere mortals to deal with perfectly.

GEORGE W. HILTON.

The Virginian Railway, by H. Reid. 1961, 84" x 11", 208 pages. $10. Kalmbach Publishing Co., 1027 N. 7th St., Milwaukee 3, Wis.

IN the opening years of a century fraught with technological promise, American railroads were ready to move mountains-literally. But for overregulation and restrained competition they might have moved quite a few. Diesels and dome cars, radio and roller bearings serve as evidence that railroads have come many miles since 1900; yet immeasurable advantage was forfeited when business conditions barred construction of what John W. Barriger would later call "Super Railroads." Hints of the loss and monuments to the idea exist in a cutoff here, a low-grade line there - and the railroad which Henry Huttleston Rogers built as Virginian Railway.

Owen Wister wrote The Virginian; H. Reid has written The Virginian Railway, a book of generous proportions with such extras east as a pictorial section, roster, historical chronology, foldout map and profile, photographic end papers, and a dust-jacket painting by Richard Ward. Withal Reid's crisp style of writing, the measured work and worth of a Southside Virginia newspaperman and long-time Virginian fan, is the thing - even to a reviewer with an irresistible urge to rewrite. Reid has shunned the straight historical narrative to gather a collection of more than 130 historical vignettes, deftly montaged to form a word picture stretching from 1898 to 1959 - Virginian's life span.

It was the last hour of the railroad barons. One of their number was about to outdo them all by building a 444-mile railroad with his own resources and doing it to 20th century standards. Henry

Huttleston Rogers had got his start in oil; creating Virginian to haul whole hills of West Virginia coal to tidewater the best way possible was a project of Rogers' later life and, sadly, he died only a few weeks before the line was finished.

Author Reid has taken up the subject of motive power with particular verve. The completed Virginian had the makings of a super railroad, with a favorable route and a high volume of coal traffic, but there were no super locomotives in 1909. At its beginnings as Deepwater Railway in West Virginia and, later, the corresponding Tidewater Railway in Virginia, the Virginian relied on 4-4-0's and 2-8-0's with wildcat whistles - not to forget "Fido," the Altoona-built exPennsylvania 0-6-0 which was Deepwater Railway's first engine. When Virginian received four 4-6-0's in 1907 they had to be loaned to Norfolk & Western until curvature troubles in the mountain country could be straightened out.

In 1909 came the first of 42 plain-faced class MB 2-8-2's. Reid has elevated them to a place in history, and they deserve it. Quiet-spoken George Halstead, who helped design them, was probably right when he called the MB "the best engine for its weight ever built." In 1909 the Mikado type was not yet generally accepted, although even greater motive power developments than the 2-8-2 were only a few years away. Most roundhouse talk was still of Mallets and Pacifics, and Virginian's MB's were the largest Mikes built up to that time. A mixture of old and new concepts, they were highly efficient drag engines of extraordinary power. Really big 24 x 32-inch cylinders (with distinctive "milk can" extensions on their spool valves), 56-inch drivers, and 200 pounds boiler pressure gave the 1302-ton MB a tractive effort of 56,000 pounds. The boiler, not a large one, nevertheless liberated plenty of steamwhile consuming plenty of water. Partly because of near-perfect design and partly because most later Mikados were built for higher speeds, the MB's power-toIweight ratio (a factor more looked for abroad than it is here) has seldom been approached.

Later Virginian itself tried bigger Mikados, bought some Pacifics, toyed with a Triplex Mallet (which, suggests Reid, "ran better by calendar than pocket watch"), commissioned engines in four less radical Mallet wheel types, licked its Big Hill with three kinds of electrics, and at length- under a management of Chessie graduates - bought Berkshires and Allegheny articulateds of the C&O school and some secondhand C&O 0-8-0's. Through it all steamed those cottonpicking, cabbage-cutting MB's. When it finally came to diesels, the mountainclimbing, tonnage-hauling, MB-wise

Virginian once more went for packaged power on a short frame and chose FM Train Masters. The achievements of such neighbors as C&O and N&W undoubtedly obscured Virginian's motive power accomplishments. Virginian designs just quietly moved coal, echoing Rogers' tongue-in-cheek remark that his Mallets "would not puff, snort and spit fire, but

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Blame our pride for the tall type; but credit the acclaim to Colorado's State Historian Agnes Wright Spring, reviewing "Where Steam Still Serves" in the State Historical Society's July issue of The Colorado Magazine.

WHERE STEAM STILL SERVES The Picture Story of The Great Western Railway

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merely smile, pull, or push as may seem necessary to get them where they're going."

There is much more in The Virginian Railway about routine performance: how costs went down while profits went up; how a certain N&W president had good reason for preferring to hitch his business car to a Virginian overnight train; how the tidewater coal pier at Sewalls Point outdid itself at car dumping; how the road fell in love with 12-wheel, 120-ton "battleship" coal gons; how employees like B. Moore, Jean Gray, and Gernie Corning got themselves into and out of anecdotal scrapes. Virginian brushed with fame, too. There was Rogers' friend Mark Twain, who twice visited Norfolk during construction days. There was a company detective named Hatfield with an active remembrance of the HatfieldMcCoy feud. And a trip over Virginian had an unhappy ending for William F. Cody.

Such errors as could be detected in The Virginian Railway are minor and mostly typographical - which may even explain why the ruling eastbound Clarks Gap grade is described (on page 40) as having a fearsome rise of 101⁄2 feet per mile. It becomes apparent as one reads on that the ascent is about 10 times that. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Virginian is that it was built. Even though Rogers' name was not openly associated with the enterprise in its early stages, one suspects that C&O (which had once actually operated the

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original 3.8-mile Deepwater Railway) and N&W knew what was going on - and allowed it to happen. Perhaps N&W had a covetous eye on Virginian even then. If so, it had to wait 57 years. An operating merger under U.S.R.A. during World War I only whetted Roanoke's appetite, and in 1925 the larger carrier tried to lease Virginian. But until December 1, 1959, Rogers' railroad had a history of its own, and it was a great one.

H. Reid has proved that he knows all about it.- WILLIAM S. YOUNG.

STOP, LOOK & LISTEN

edited/DAVID A. STRASSMAN

WHAT, precisely, is the purpose of a record review? To give a frank, critical opinion which will describe a record for the benefit of those who cannot always listen before they buy. Preferably the review should be unbiased.

In theory all records can be compared on some points - accuracy of presentation and technical fidelity. This is a rather simple matter with music. Published scores and previous recordings of the same work furnish a basis for compariProfessional recording equipment and quality control usually assure a high standard of technical fidelity from the large companies.

son.

Not so with railroad sound effects. They are not rehearsed and rerecorded to perfection. There is certainly no score or script. Many of them are recorded by amateurs with less than full-fidelity equipment and the resulting sound quality varies from "excellent" to "horrifying!" And who can dispute, unless he was actually there, that Rio Grande Southern 20 sounded thus echoing across the big trestle at Ophir?

This reviewer is constantly faced with the problem of comparing professionally recorded railroad sounds with nonprofessional recordings offered to the public at the same price. In each case the question arises whether technical quality of reproduction or the documentation of never-to-be repeated sounds is the more important value. Is A a poor recording because the chime whistle of a passing Northern is so distorted that it threatens damage to the speakers? Or is B a fine record because (even though the microphone is positioned next to an operating sawmill) the sound of the Wreck of Old 97 can be heard dimly in the background?

Bear with us, then, as this column attempts to chart a middle course between the camps of those who want high fidelity at all costs and those who accept surface hissing and cramped frequencies in order to hear the actual voice of Caruso singing into a horn back in Camden, N. J. I freely admit that I tend toward