Customer Reviews

Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern Railway (IL) (Images of Rail)

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As with all of these Arcadia published books, it's like one giant yearbook for the subject they are covering. Which is great if they are willing to fork over the cash to get the publishing rights to some good photos.

While they make a note that this is not a documentary of the company, or a roster of each locomotive and so on, its kind of insulting when they pretty much skipped over the entire train yard in Joliet and the book starts off with the early years, then 5 pages later has jumps to images from the 1950's.

Most of the photo captions are informative, but many leave you hanging with questions, or wanting just a bit more. The book has shown me a few things I wasn't aware of, but as a new fan of the EJ&E, that isn't saying to much.

I know Arcadia doesn't seem to like anything but black & white images in their books, but with the bright green & orange color scheme of "The J", I think they should have added at least a 4-8 page section of color images.

If you're a big fan of The J, you can't really go that wrong for $20, but you will most likely feel it could have been done better. If you're just a casual follow of railroads, I fear this book won't help bring the J's glory to full light.

I'm sure the authors put their all into this book, so I don't want to disparage them, but this book just doesn't feel complete and I can't help thinking it was on account of a lack of cheap or free pictures.