Editor,
I was especially pleased to see the S Curves column. The S scale community was shocked to learn of John Craft’s recent untimely passing. I hope the column will be continued. S is an ideal scale to model in, but gets little coverage in the major model railroad press. I understand from the internet S list that a volunteer has come forward to continue with John’s column. I hope that will become a reality, for it improves your already excellent coverage of the model railroad hobby industry.
‘S’incerely,
Jay Mellon
New Orleans, LA
Dear Mr. Pratt:
I just wanted to thank you for your July 2000 [editorial] on The No Name and Pacific. A heart attack retired me and my doctor suggested that I get a hobby, so after 30 years I am getting back into model railroading. Thus, I enjoy your ideas and tips.
Can you give me an address for the Texas & Pacific Historical Society? This is the line I want to prototype. However, since they merged with MoPac in 1972, I’m having a hard time getting any information. Any help or advice would be most welcome.
Marv Weber
Morresboro, NC
I would like to say that we, in the Pocatello Model Railroad and Historical Society enjoy your magazine very much. Thanks.
H. A. Petersen, Vice President
Pocatello, ID
MRN:
Your review of The Historical Guide to North American Railroads: 160 lines abandoned or merged since 1930, second edition, is enthusiastic and certain to please the publisher. The book is a valuable reference, but it misses being as useful as it could be and should be. There are peculiarities in it that raise disturbing questions about its status as a legitimate railroad history, including some clear inaccuracies. Even its authorship is uncertain.
The first edition bore George H. Drury’s name on the title page and early announcements for the second edition listed Drury as author. Drury’s name on a railroad book carries more than a little weight, but it somehow disappeared from the present edition without explanation. Yet the first person singular pronoun is used often in the text, despite the missing identification of “I.” Your reviewer says the volume is “From the editors of Trains magazine” (“Publisher,” not “editors,” is used on the paper covers), but editors, like kings and popes, habitually use “we,” not “I.” So who is the “I” who is responsible for the book? Clarity is crucial, but it’s absent here.
Much more important, though, is the inquiring user’s inability to make full use of the prodigious amount of information made available by “the publisher,” “the editors,” or perhaps by “I,” because there is no index! While 160 railroads are covered in alphabetical order, nearly 1,700 railroads are mentioned in the text, and the alphabetically covered lines are frequently mentioned in the coverage of other roads. The history of the Southern Pacific, for example, is on pages 396-405, but its name appears on sixty-three other pages, sometimes only in passing but sometimes significantly. The specialist would expect the Iowa Central to be addressed under the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad, but without an index the user who might be interested in the Iowa road for other reasons is left without a hint that this important predecessor line is mentioned at all. CSX, because it still exists, has no principal entry but is mentioned thirty-four times under other headings. And the Union Pacific, which also still exists, does have a main entry as well as seventy-two additional mentions. Without an index the user can’t find those references except by reading every page. That might be a useful educational exercise, but it could as easily be an unnecessary waste of effort.
Indexes are increasingly and depressingly uncommon in railroad “histories” that are made up principally of pictures with minimal text thrown in, but indexes are essential for railroad books that purport to be histories (with pictures and maps thrown in). This book’s claim to be a history is badly flawed when it fails to make itself as useful as it could be by omitting that most useful of features, the means to locate what is in it — an index.
R. D. Armstrong
Sparks, NV
