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Summary: The Best Railroad Atlas, Ever
Review: If you are interested in American railroads, geography, or cartography--and people who like any of these subjects tend to like them all--this beautifully produced, enlightening book could occupy a lot of your spare time from here on.It consists of hand-drawn maps, made with breathtaking detail and a wonderful imagination for the presentation of data. (Fans of Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information" will admire what the author has managed to fit onto his pages.) The maps follow standard USGS quadrangles for reference, but they show only railroad lines, neatly identified by color, and a wealth of associated railroad features. So there are stations (indicating passenger service or freight only); towers; yards; sidings; viaducts; mileposts; tunnels; track pans, you name it--all as they existed in the richly rewarding year of 1946. To enable you to situate the railroads there are map coordinates, rivers (when a river reaches the edge of a page, an arrow indicates the direction of flow!), and state and county boundaries. That's it. (Plus first-rate indexes.) Sit down with this book, an old copy of the "Official Guide," and a modern road atlas, and you have entertainment and instruction for hours. The maps in this volume cover just one region of the country--extending roughly from the southern tier of New York to the Virginia/NC border, and from West Virginia to the Hudson River and the Delmarva Peninsula. It is hard to imagine how a single author (who has apparently done a lot of other things with his life) could ever have found the time to cover even this much ground--the book is one of those rare products of obsessive genius from which the rest of us sometimes benefit--but his publisher implies that future volumes will cover the rest of the country. Long life to Richard C. Carpenter!
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