Night Trains

I bought this book in a 'remainder' book store in Albuquerque the night before flying back to the UK some time in the mid-1990's so I don't know if it is even still in print. But's it's a favourite to take off the shelf to admire the night photographs.

There's inevitably a touch of romance about passenger trains that run through the night. In Britain there are very few (if any?) left and I guess in North America now it's limited to the Amtrak long distance runs. In Japan we've also lost a lot in the last few years. Here the spread of fast daytime shinkansen services makes night travel a convenience rather than a necessity and on some routes if they can't replace and repair track during the night there's never any other chance.

In the first half of the twentieth century there was an amazing network of overnight Pullman sleeper services to every part of the United States before it evaporated with the spread of air travel in the 1950's. This book details those trains state by state. So if you are a sad person like me who loves details and tables of numbers and has to know were each train was at midnight (35 miles west of Cheyenne!) it's the book for you.

But there's also a wonderful nostalgia here too. All those long vanished trains like the 'Dixie Flagler' and 'Olympian Hiawatha' and 'Paul Revere' that rode off into the night sometime durng the 1950's never to return are described and illustrated with fine black and white photographs. Yes, a book worth exploring ...