Customer Reviews

All Aboard!: A True Train Story

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3 star:		(1)
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My 3 1/2 year-old son loves this book. It has actual photos of a steam engine and the text is very brief and simple. Great for kids with short attention spans. For about a month now my son has asked us to read this every night before bed along with "Dinosaur Train." Highly recommend for preschool boys who love trains!

A wonderful picture book of this steam locomotive line, in the beautiful setting of the Rocky's. Our 3 year old loves to look at the pictures and point out things in the various scenes.

Young train fanatics much prefer the "real thing" : real live steam locomotives in the Colorado Rockies" to anything animated or fictionated. If you've got a little boy in the "TRAIN" stage, this is definately the book for him.

Young train fans who enjoy vivid, bright picturebook stories will find All Aboard! A True Train Story captures perfectly the sights, sounds, and travels of some of America's oldest steam engines. Kuklin's color photos provide plenty of close-up and action shots, while dialogue covers both train operations and scenic passages. A lovely 'you are there' train ride.

Kids constantly and without cease, amaze. For example, you enter into the profession of Children's Librarianship with a set of preconceived notions. At least, I did. I assumed that kids, little kids, would be interested in the following topics: Fairy tales, dinosaurs, trucks, firemen, and various animals of a pet-like nature. What didn't I count on? The lure of trains. Children adore trains. They like to learn about what makes a train run. They like to see where it goes and what kinds of sounds it makes. Why on earth is this? I would've thought that in this topsy-turvy world of high tech electronics and sleek modes of transportation the world of trains would have been abandoned and forgotten. Not so much. And as a result, various picture books have capitalized on this locomotive goldmine. Some of these are delicious inventive affairs, like Margaret Wise Brown's, "Two Little Trains" (be sure you get the version illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon). And then there are others like "All Aboard!". A perfectly harmless book that shows photographs of trains with some vague sound effects and, as a result, captures the hearts of youngsters everywhere. It's a fine book. Just not as great as some of the other train tales out there.

Photographing one of the five Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge steam engines still in working condition today, the book views the train as it navigates its way along the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the summertime. The book begins with, "All aboard! Turn the page and step back to a time when narrow gauge steam engines clickety-clacked along the historic San Juan wilderness". And clickety-clack they do. This isn't really a book that supposes that what you see in the pictures could have taken place decades ago, of course. The passenger holding the digital camera says as much. But with a loud whoo-whoo the machine is off and chugging. We get a lot of two word descriptive sentences after that point. Things like "Lights blinking" and "More steam". The text is fine and all, but it never gets a momentum going. You find yourself wishing that it would slowly increase like a train, hit its peak, then slow down at the end. It never does. Instead, it just comes to a normal close without much hooplah.

But what the book lacks in inventiveness it almost makes up for in its afterword. At the end of the tale the reader is given factual information about the classic Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge locomotives. There's a section on the tracks, and another on the whistles. There's even a webpage for the trains themselves (which, frankly, were a bit more enticing than the book). These facts at the end of the story may be a little old for some kids, but for others they'll be the perfect way to learn more about their favorite forms of transportation.

Now don't get me wrong. This is a fine n' dandy book and certainly will make its way onto the bookshelves of many an enthusiast for years and years to come. But there are better books about trains out there. Choose this one if you absolutely must have a book that includes real photographs of trains. Choose "Two Little Trains" if you want something particularly well-written as well. A nice book.