Customer Reviews

Train Wrecks: A Pictorial History of Accidents on the Main Line

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I received this book (first edition) for Christmas as a boy, and although at the time I was looking for something more generic regarding railroading, I was pleasantly surprised with it, and over the years it has become one of my favorite train books.

Railroading was probably not the most dangerous of professions or means of transportation, but as the dust jacket attests, it certainly wasn't the safest. I was surprised to learn how often steam locomotives actually blew up, sending giant hulks of boiler and iron hundreds of feet into the air, or literally miles from the scene of the accident. Until new designs in car couplers and car construction were invented, many passenger cars would actually "telescope" into each other when wrecked, with the obvious results of death or maiming of passengers. Factor in things like split rails, bridge wash-outs, incorrectly aligned track, bad weather...there were many factors that could lead to severe accidents on the railroad.

This book provides interesting photos of just about every imaginable type of train accident, some of which are very old. While the text explains the different types of accidents that can befall the railroad, it also provides insight into how the railroads have progressed technologically and the impacts those advances have had on railroad safety.

Overall, the book is a light read for an adult, but it kept me captivated as a young person. The photos are what make the book, and like a moth to a flame, will make you come back again for another look.

Posting a review of Reed's TRAIN WRECKS: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ACCIDENTS ON THE MAIN LINE would never have occurred to me had I not recently been given a reprint of this rather old book (published in 1968). While I had thumbed through my original copy many years ago, I admit that reading the text had not been one of my accomplishments. Having now two different printings of the book, I decided that it was high time to read at least one of them properly.

Let us say up front that the narrative is not one of the book's strong points. The reader continually encounters misspelled words here and there, words that Reed surely knew how to spell but that fell victim to typographical error and lack of adequate proofreading. More annoying yet are what I believe to be Reed's own grammatical errors, particularly in his conjugation of the verb "to lead," the past tense of which is "led" and which is misused every time it appears in the text.

Beyond these grammatical weaknesses, the text also displays occasional inconsistencies in factual data. For one example, Reed's explanation of a runaway passenger train on Tehachapi Summit (page 143) clearly states that the seven cars "slipped away by themselves, [and that] the two locomotives had been detached temporarily." However, a photograph on page 145, captioned "Another View of the Tehachapi Runaway," shows the wreckage of a steam locomotive lying amongst the destroyed cars. The earlier text had also said that the cars rolled four miles before leaving the rails and crashing in a deep ditch; there is no mention of those hapless cars having met another locomotive. Either the text is inaccurate, or the photograph is actually of some other disaster and is mis-captioned. Either way, this is not the sort of error that is permissible in a book whose title proclaims it to be "A HISTORY."

One expects a history also to be consistent in the way in which it reports and categorizes events of the past. Here, too, the outline of Reed's book is poor, because it begins with a chronological scheme and then switches to one that classifies accidents by type or cause. In those later chapters, wrecks are not even reported in chronological order, more recent ones occasionally appearing before older ones.

Overall, the textual information appears to have been rather superficially researched, and I would be hard pressed to rate the book very high as a true historical study of its subject. Fortunately, the really strong point of Reed's book lies not in its narrative but rather in its photographs, of which there are many, all of good size and quality. Of course, bear in mind that these are reproductions of very old originals, monochrome of course, and sometimes showing blurs and fading resulting from limitations of early cameras and passage of time. Nonetheless, the book is an excellent compendium of photographs dating from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, and these photographs are quite effective in portraying the accident-strewn route of early railroads in the United States from their beginnings until well into the 20th century.

The three-star rating I have given the book is an average, for I would rate the text at a two-star level and the photographic content at four. Because of its pictorial record, if not its text, examining Reed's TRAIN WRECKS is a worthwhile application of the reader's time, and I recommend his book to students of American history, technology, or transportation, and to every general reader who finds the evolution of the "iron horse" as intriguing a topic as I do.