Mansions on Rails by KLucius Beebe The Folklore of the Private Railway Car w DJ
Mansions on Rails by Lucius Beebe The Folklore of the Private Railway Car. 6 full color reproductions, 350 rare photographs and illustrations.
Hard Cover w/Dust Jacket
382 pages
Copyright 1959
CONTENTS
Foreword 8
More Stately Mansions 17
Westward the Course of Empire 93
Such as a King Should Build 189
Last Resorts 269
Coachyards of Eternity 353
Appendix 372
DUST JACKET INTRODUCTION: MANSIONS ON RAILS THE FOLKLORE OF THE PRIVATE RAILWAY CAR By Lucius Beebe
Publication of "MANSIONS ON RAILS" will forever mark this a vintage year in the field of Railroadiana. Historians of transport will recognize that the material herein, never before researched and chronicled, isindeed a record of the era of bold acquisition and proud possession, a facet of America's growth which might have been lost to history.
Mr. Beebe, one of the two remaining private car owners, long ago projected this work, but despaired of finding accurate records or interesting pictorial material. Then came the discovery in a dusty factory loft at Pullman, Illinois, of the long lost, almost mythical picture archives of the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. These were made available to the author and so enriched the planned contents of the manuscript that "what started as a project became an epic." The enthusiasm for this cache was shared by the publishers when Mr. Beebe wrote, "The engraving should be done by skilled craftsmen at Shreve's and the composition by Paderewski seated on a red velvet throne before a solid gold linotype while Bach concertos are played by the Flonzaley Quartette secreted behind potted palms. Only banknote paper milled by Harvard graduates at Warren, Mass., is worthy of its picture matter, while 100 per cent rag stock manufactured from unworn Sulka shirts alone should be used for text portions."
"MANSIONS ON RAILS" is a professionally written, comprehensive study of a matter in which no bibliography of any sort now exists, an aspect of American social and economic history hitherto undocumented. It is the record of the costly and often beautiful artifact that must rank with the thoroughbraced Concord stagecoach and the palatial Mississippi river packet.
The felicitous phrases of Lucius Beebe accurately describe the "looped, fringed, frizzled and ferned" interiors and use them as settings for tales of some of the most colorful characters in our history. Lillie Langtry, Judge Roy Bean, Julian Street and "Bet-aMillion" Gates lend spice to the more restrained landfarings of the Goulds, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Fricks and Belmonts. These moguls of an age uninhibited by reticence rode in panoplied splendor and visible exclusiveness upon their personal or business occasions at a time when the dif- ference between a private car and a business car was largely academic.
Glorious illustrations in full color and in black and white are by Howard Fogg and E. S. Hammack, the ranking railroad artists of the generation. Superb photographs, builders' plans, train sheets and contemporary newspaper accounts are expertly reproduced and complement the ample text.
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