Customer Reviews

E Units: Electro-Motive's Classic Streamliners (Golden Years of Railroading)

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A pleasant enough pictorial round-up of the Electro-Motive Corporation's railroad workhorse, the E Units. There is a brief history about the development of these streamline trains including nine pages with excellent engineering illustrations. The rest of this landscape shaped paperback has one per page black and white photos of the trains in everyday use, mostly from the forties and fifties. The index is usefully divided into three parts, units by number, photographer and railroads.

The photo quality is good with the occasional standout professional shot, as on page sixty-four with a new E8 demonstrator unit fresh out of the Electro-Motive plant. As is usual with these railroad fan books the design could be better, all the photos really should have a very thin black line round them, making a crisp edge which would prevent those with light sky areas merging into the white of the page. The cropping of a lot of the photos is poor, many of them have just too much sky or foreground. Trains tend to be landscape in shape but frequently pages have the captions to either side of the photo preventing the full width of the page being used, there would still be plenty of white space above or below the photo for the captions. A few black pages would improved the overall look.

I really would have loved to see these trains in color and to quote from the text...''E units helped usher in an explosion of color that had never before been seen on railroads''. Quickly checking through a few railroad books I see plenty of Es in color and I also have an out-of-print seventy-four page paperback by Henry Maywald called (predictably) 'E Units' which has over two hundred photos, all in color but mostly taken a few years later than the ones in Jeff Wilson's book

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

The newest addition to Kalmbach's outstanding "Classic Trains" series E Units: Electro-Motive's Classic Streamliners by railroad buff Jeff Wilson is a superbly presented photographic showcase of vintage locomotives running from the end of WW II to the late 1950's. The E Units photographs are in black-and-white because they are true fragments of history, images taken in a time before the invention of color snapshots. The amazing display on glossy paper is highlighted by brief picture captions, but overall E Units is a marvelous compendium in which each picture is worth thousands of words. E Units is strongly recommended for railroading enthusiasts and yesteryear train buffs.

Extremely informative, very factual. It's not a pr show, it shows the real sides of railroading. It varies with each road, and shows the correct ecquipment on each road.