Customer Reviews

Horse-Drawn Commercial Vehicles

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A unique book covering vintage horse drawn vehicles of the 19th century. Besides the well written text, I found the illustrations, photos and diagrams amazing in their detail. There are over 250 illustrations. Truly a wonderful reference for anyone into antique transportation history.

the cover of this book is very appealing to me, so I might be disappointed by the contents. but, on the contrary, when looking inside, I was amazed by the quality. In Germany there are very few books on carriages and coaches and, as far as I know, none about commercial. those available are either on luxury coaches, actual sports vehicles and some few containing carriages for personal transport, either mail or private, museum descriptions and reprints of old books. I am positive that I own more than 80 % of all there is on the subject. so it was natural starting to look abroad, and I must be careful not to try to get everything all at once, since temptation is there with so many superb books on the market. to my opinion, this one belongs to the best there is, but I admit having been lucky this far since up to now all were exceedingly good containing exactly what I had been looking for. and at reasonable price, too.

Most of the wagons included in this book are drawings from The Hub, a coachbuilders' magazine from the mid 1800s through the early 1900s.

As a scale HD vehicle modeler, I would highly recommend this book as a reference source. It does have a few engineering drawings that could be used to build from (a nice set of plans for the Hansom Cab are included); most prints give the diameter of the wheels, which can then be used to scale the drawings. There are quite a few pictures as well of very interesting commercial and trade vehicles. Since these drawings came from The Hub, the designers recommendations for painting and trimming the vehicle is listed with almost all the wagons.

Very interesting from a historical perspective as well.

A fun and informative little book. Most insightful on pre motor transport technology. Most fascinating for those interested in history or in Horse drawn Transport.

Some of these little carriages, such as the double decker omnibus and the tree transport, blow the mind in regards to the genius of our forbears in how they applied the technology they had. Then there are the dump wagons.

A must for any library of anyone interested in pre-motor technology.