Hailed since its publication as the definitive - and most opulent - book on the subject, The American Railroad Passenger Car is now made available in an unabridged two-part softcover edition.

Volume 2 of 'Trains and Technology' is devoted to railroad cars of nineteenth-century America. Since the variety of cars used during the nineteenth century was huge, the book is divided into three sections- passenger, freight, and non-revenue cars. The easily understood, jargon-free discussions and explanations throughout the book are accompanied by over 225 illustrations and accurate scale drawings of the various equipment.

Railroad travel in the nineteenth century was often dangerous, dirty, uncomfortable, and uncertain. Yet at the same time, most of the inventions associated with the luxury of a later era--from sleeping cars and dining cars to streamlining and even an early form of air conditioning--had already made their appearance by the time of the Civil War. In The Railroad Passenger Car August Mencken offers a fascinating look at the achievements and contradictions of this key period in railroad history.

"A fascinating account that takes the reader into the real world of 19th-century railroad operations." -- Railroad History

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

This nostalgic, authoritative history of the railroad industry in the United States is richly illustrated with more than 200 images covering everything from the road's beginning to its heyday in the 1940s and '50s and its current state. Features include: black-and-white and period color photographs; maps, timetables, promotional materials, and other memorabilia; and details about railroading's five most fascinating components--its locomotives, freight trains, passenger trains, depots, and workforce.