Lot of 4 books Beebe & Clegg Highliners Highball High Iron Hear the Train Blow

$28.50

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Table of Contents:

Cars along the canals

Spokes of the hub

The panter from his lair

Away you rolling river

War rides the cars

Plains without rails

Longhorns

Toward promontory

Zulu no jug

The railroad west

Folklore

Narrow gage

Sounds of strife

Rails of gold and silver

Car bobbers and bindle stiffs

The open switch

The fast mail

By the seashore, in the mountains

Amenities of the cars

Private varnish

Fin de si

860 illustrations, 10 drawings.

This magnificent book is a picture story, amplified with text, of the railroads as they have played their part in the history, economic, geography, legend, folklore and consciousness of America.

Table of Contents:

O Pioneers

Speed

Power

De Luxe

Car heralds, devices and insignia of the principal railroads of North America

A glossary of railroad terms, slang and usage

Bibliography

LOTS OF photos!

It is the hope of the author of this book that whatever readers it may encounter will not seek in its editorial economy a definitive volume on American railroading, still less a comprehensive survey of the practices and mystery of the high iron. As a matter of factual record, Highball has been written and photographed in the expectation that it may form an integral part of a somewhat larger picture of railroading when viewed as complementary to its antecedent volumes, High Iron, Highliners, and Trains in Transition, and that, considered together, the four books may constitute a reasonable coverage of some aspects of a highly specialized and at the same time widely diffused subject.

Any single subdivision of the subject of railroading-its history, motive power, operations technique, finance, and legend, even its literature, music, and ballad lore-is in itself suitable material for many books. Even so monumental and impressive a work as Dollfus and Geoffroys Histoire de la locomotion terrestre, perhaps the most authoritative railroad history et evolved strains to contain its subject in a sin le and beautiful volume.

Highball, like its companion pieces, has been brought into being in the full knowledge that profound change is at hand in the shops and roundhouses and dispatchers offices of the countryside and that, indeed, many of the most fascinating chapters of the legend must already be written in the past tense. The Taunton-built locomotives of the sixties and seventies, many of the narrow-gage and short lines, with happy and ambitious beginnings and the wonderful variety and gaudy pattern of passenger travel of only yesterday, are already with les neiges dantan of the Villon poem, and the would-be historian must be pat and avid to seize upon all the glamour that is left to the rails if he is to preserve any part of it for the dreary and Diesel-shrouded future. He may weep that no single railroad photographer of the eighties possessed a modern speed camera, but he must also be quick to realize that even the color and charm still left to railroading may not be available to the historian of tomorrow or the day after.

There is still, as this is written, gaily varnished rolling stock in the uplands of Colorado and Nevada, and sleek, high-wheeled Atlantic type locomotives yet power the short hauls on many a Pennsys dispatch sheet which in a decade may have disappeared, from active service at least, as completely as the Sharps rifle, the Saratoga trunk, and the Amoskeag steam fire engine. No Hamlet ever demanded of Horatio his tablets-My tables,-meet it is 1 set it down.. .-more urgently than the chronicler of American railroading should call for his Speed Graphic and film of fastest emulsion speed.

The world is obviously the poorer that the fine flowering of the overstage coach, the Mississippi River steamer, and the packets and clipper ships of an even earlier period were not known to the recording devices of photography. Even the fascinating machine mentioned above, the Amoskeag fire pumper, drawn by three splendid horses and an almost daily familiar in the lives of Americans up to thirty-odd years ago, is represented by an almost unbelievable poverty of material in the files of the great photographic agencies. Many of the most casual properties of only the last generation, Stoughton Bitters, congress gaiters, the Remington derringer, Florida water, the Pinsch gaslight, still linger in the language but evoke no imagined or tangible quality.

For the recording of the Concord coach and the Allaire walking beam of the sidewheeler, lithography, painting, and the written word are admired and admirable mediums, but they are not factual, documentary, and explicit in the sense that the arrested photographic image is these things. Railroading is the first great evolutionary manifestation of mans imagining to be born coeval with the photographic camera, and whose technical developments have been nicely paced to the perfecting of the instrument of its record. There was no Folmer patent Graflex with a -potential speed of 1/1,000 second when, in 1848, the worlds first mile-a-minute speed was achieved by the Boston and Maines immortal Antelope on the Boston-Lawrence haul, but, forty-five years later, when the Empire State Express made history with its 112.5 miles an hour, the practice of action photography was sufficiently advanced to record the Centrals 999 at speed over the track pans at Poughkeepsie and to preserve its style and the pride of its going for all time.

The function and office of the railroad historian are difficult of definition, since his subject matter requires exposition rather than interpretation and, unlike so many aspects of history, demands little orientation to other parallel aspects of the record. The saga of steam and overland steel is largely self-contained, self-evident, and self-sufficient. Its operations are almost wholly devoid of figures and personalities. The most vivid and colorful characters to emerge from the American railroading saga of the nineteenth century were not so much Jack Casement, William Mason, or Theodore Judah as they were the scoundrelly capitalists of Wall Street and Nob Hill in black broadcloth tailcoats and General Grant whiskers. It was the Commodore Vanderbilts, Leland Stanfords, and Daniel Drews who have proved such fearsome fellows in the biographies written by men who, in their own proper lifetimes, never quite paid off the mortgage on the house.

The closest approximation to honesty in any writer of consequence remarking on the great princes of the rails was achieved by Ambrose Bierce who, one San Francisco morning in the nineties, was observed by a friend to be speculatively, even longingly, eyeing the fine swinging doors of Flood and OBriens Saloon in Sutter Street.

There, sighed the noisiest crusader against vested corruption of his generation, there, lapped in luxury and upholstered in Babylonish devisings, sipping rare vintages of great cost and plotting further brigandage against a toiling people, are those arch-thieves and conscienceless pillagers, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington. Even now, no doubt, they scheme to loot more outrageously than ever the people and commonwealth of California! I wish I might be one of them!

The fascinations and romance of railroading are almost altogether implicit in specialized mechanical function, the complex integrated agencies which find their fulfillment in steel wheels rolling over vast, meticulously channeled distances. Tracks, motive power, and rolling stock, and to a somewhat less degree their coordination and control through human agencies supply the enchantments of rail transport. The railroad aficionado is prone to supply his own element of personality to the art and mystery he cultivates when he endows a locomotive with attributes of animation, speaking of it fondly, as with ships, in the feminine gender rather than the more strictly justified neuter.

The borrowed time on which a vast number of little railroads have been living is, as this is being written, coming to a close. The end of the wars and the restoration of competition in the field of transport, both of passengers and of merchandise, must inevitably spell the end of many short lines in the Deep South and Middle West. There is, however, an amazing and heartening vitality to the business of railroading and business is being and will in some cases probably continue indefinitely to be done over some of the most improbable-appearing properties. The author and his associate lay in wait one recent summer evening beside the twin, but scarcely ever parallel, streaks of rust they knew to be the main and only line of the Virginia and Carolina Southern, a feeder of the Seaboard Air Line, near Lumberton, North Carolina. The adjustment of his camera to 1/200 second seemed approximately as optimistic as the loading of an elephant rifle in Times Square. Surely no motive power or consist more ponderous than a 00 scale model could maintain itself on these travesty rails which stretched casually through the southern woodlands, overgrown with grass and shrubs, innocent of fish plates and in many places of ties themselves where the original wood had again merged with the elemental earth! But sure enough, just before dusk a gentle sighing sound came across the distant meadow, and a train swam slowly toward us through the tall grass. It was a beautiful and wonderful train advancing with an elaboration of caution under a cloud of undulant soot, like some aged beldame in a wreath of widows weeds. Its capped-stack locomotive comextreme elegance with imponderable age. Its half a dozen high cars swayed and dipped over the almost nonexistent iron in an ecstasy of improbability. The rolling shanty that was its caboose was peopled with happy Negroes, one of them possessed, as though he had been secured from some celestial casting agency, with an indignant sort of fiddle. The Negroes sang, very low and no two the same song. The rear shack beat time with his brakemans club and on the final platform was a crate of red-combed fowl whose life prospect, as they rattled toward some dark-town dinner table, seemed very poor indeed.

It was a train out of heaven, a train such as a little boy might draw with uncertain crayons in his sketch book, and yet the Virginia and Carolina Southern is a valuable property. It owns three locomotives, each more elaborately obsolete than the next. It has no dispatchers and, indeed, not even a telephone between its stations. Passengers may ride among the darkies in the caboose and the freight agent knows when the daily train is coming by its smoke against the sky. But every year it provides many hundreds of carloads of tobacco, cotton, and lumber for the A.C.L. and is strictly a going concern. The management is muttering about Diesels.

More, however, even than locomotives, individual railroads themselves incline to recommend their personalities to human sentimentality and to assume characteristics quite divorced from the tangible resources assigned them in their corporate articles. To the considered judgment the Missouri-Kansas-Texas or, say, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois cannot in any way bear comparison with the vast and glittering transcontinental systems, the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, the Burlington. And yet, to many and many an imagining, it is a railroad of secondary economic importance, a narrow-gage or short line that has a close hold on the heart, is freighted with wonder and delight because of some sentimental association, a circumstance of motive power, or an accident of geography in the terrain it serves.

It so happens that, to the author, there are some all but obsolete high-wheel Atlantic type passenger engines on the Cotton Belt, some right-of-way vistas along the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio, the ageless elms arching above the meadow sidings of the Bellefonte Central, the hours of departure between ten and noon at the old Dearborn Station in Chicago, and a now doubtless decommissioned dining car of ancient splendors on the Fort Worth and Denver City which have no equal in their counterparts elsewhere. The cult of antiquity and obsolescence for their own sake is not an entirely vital one, but there are sensibilities which recoil from the meretricious fraudulences of airflow design and the sullen secrecies of Diesel-electric power.

And there are still evidences of the storied and immemorial legend of railroading in the years of its flowery magnificence: the highball arms of the crossover signals of the St. Louis Southwestern in the rice lands of Arkansas; the brave canary yellow coaches of the Virginia & Truckee, peopled with the ghosts of Flood and Fair and Mackay; the covered bridges of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain. The past beats against them as the night wind against a storm lantern; the urgency of their preservation in some form is as compulsive as a 31 order over a single circuit in the snow-bound High Sierras. Their import and symbolism is that of Stephen Bens riders shaking the heart with the hooves that will not cease, and they stand as reminders still of heroic times in the land. And they are one with placer diggings and the Jingle Bob, the hallmarks of California and the Chisum steer, the C.C. on the minted gold of Carson City, the Wells Fargo scales, the Conestoga wagon and the Starrs Navy pistol, all the identifications and styles, the devices and coat armor of a way of living as vanished as the longhorn and as distinctive as Medford rum.

I have hoped to preserve a little of them for the record.

Highliners A Railroad Album by Lucius BeebeCopyright 1940. 103 photos with the description on the facing page. Some of the photos include: C&O, Reading, Frisco, IC, Alton, L&N, Chief, KCS, Missouri Pacific, B&O, SP, NKP, C&EI, many others. A great book for the railfan.

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