Customer Reviews

Short Lines: A Collection of Classic American Railroad Stories

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For nearly a century the steam locomotive symbolized American progress and adventure. By about 1950 personal travel by automobiles and commercial planes had displaced the venerable locomotive. The romance and adventure of the railroad is now history. The once widely popular literary genre - the railroad story - is seldom encountered today.

Short Lines: A Collection of Classic American Railroad Stories (1897 - 1941) is a fascinating historical portrait of America. Rob Johnson's anthology introduces today's readers to the best writers of railroad fiction, authors like Bedwell, Welch, Cohen, Spearman, Warman, Packard, and Somerville. Others in this collection were penned by their more famous contemporaries, including O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Frank Norris, Jack London, Christopher Morley, Rudyard Kipling, and Owen Wister.

These enjoyable stories span a wide range of styles and topics. O. Henry details the methodology of holding up a train, based on his actual friendship with a former train bandit. Harry Bedwell's story Smart Boomer is based on his own youthful experience as a railroad telegraph operator (a boomer). The Far and the Near by Thomas Wolfe is a poignant story of a retired engineer.

I especially enjoyed Douglas Welch's hilarious story Mrs. Union Station. The excerpt from the Frank Norris novel The Octopus offers a sobering example of the excessive economic power exercised by some railroads. A Toot for a Toot (1928) by Octavus Cohen is a sympathetic look at a black railroad porter named Epic Peters.

Frank Spearman, the author of The Nerve of Foley, was perhaps the best writer of railroad stories. The background to this tale was a rough and tumble railroad strike. The Locomotive That Lost Herself by Cy Warman has supernatural overtones. Hoboes That Pass in the Night is a first person narrative by Jack London.

Christopher Morley's The Railway Guide uniquely describes the multitude of passenger rail routes crisscrossing America in the 1930s. The Night Operator (Frank Packard) and Wide Open Throttle (A. W. Somerville) are classic railroad adventure tales. Rudyard Kipling's unusual story, titled .007, describes the personal adventures of a new locomotive assigned to a switchyard. The last story in this collection, Stanwick's Business by Owen Wister, the famed author of The Virginian, pokes fun at journalists and writers of popular railroad fiction.

A series of short stories that will leave you hungering for more. Top name authors who you never knew could even understand a train, let alone wirte about them - but they all rode them. I only read one of these stories before. The superb surprise, an O. Henry without a surprise ending.

I bought this used...what a deal! I wished it had gone on and on...it was that good.