From 1880 through the 1950s, the New York, Ontario & Western Railway hauled coal from the rich anthracite deposits of eastern Pennsylvania to homes throughout the eastern United States and Canada. In Hard Coal and Coal Cars, Martin Robert Karig chronicles the rise and fall of the O & W's coal hauling operation in a richly illustrated work that interweaves economic, industrial, and technological history. Karig opens his history with the intense competition for the rights to eastern Pennsylvania's lucrative coal-hauling business. He then details the technological developments that transformed coal cars from wooden carts carrying just a few hundred pounds to steel hoppers hauling several tons. Bringing the story into the twentieth century, Karig explains how the O & W's ownership ultimately abandoned the coal-hauling business in the 1950s as coal was supplanted by more reliable and convenient home heating fuels. Rich with the romance of the railroad and crucial to any understanding of Pennsylvania history, Hard Coal and Coal Cars will be the definitive book on a fascinating chapter of American life.

Jeff Wilson offers you a brief history of each type of North American freight car and how designs have changed from World War I to the present helping you to model freight cars with truer accuracy.

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.

Because Norfolk & Western's existence was predicated on coal, its coal-hauling cars represented its most important rolling stock. In fact, with the exception of the Chesapeake & Ohio, no other railway concentrated its business on coal mining as heavily as N&W.This fully illustrated history of N&W's hoppers and high-side gondolas begins in 1881 and continues through the present Norfolk & Southern operations. Not only is this study a superb technological history, it's also an ideal data file for modellers. The drawings are taken from a number of trade publications and company archives. Photographs from all eras show the cars being both built and used.