Some Classic Trains. de Dubin, Arthur D - 1964.

Waukesha, Wisconsin:: Kalmbach Publishing, 1964.. 1st Edition.. Hardbound . BINDING/CONDITION: green cloth with gilt title; owner's name/address stamp on the front endpaper, otherwise a Very Good book, with a Very Good dust jacket; publisher's price on the jacket flap is intact.. 4to (11.5 inches tall) . Index. Photo endpapers. Description: This first edition was limited to 5000 copies. Extra-long color fold-out at rear of the Oriental Limited of 1909; the top third of this shows an artists rendering of the train, the center shows the car floor plans; and the bottom portion is a route map. On the facing page is another, smaller fold-out, also in color, reproducing a Pullman advertising folder from the early 1920s. The jacket art which is also featured as the frontis is from a painting by Walter L Greene. The publisher's blurb reads: ''For a season in the history of the United States the only way to travel way by rail. But if railroading was a model monopoly, there was abundant completion within the industry, and the rolling symbol of a carrier's size and strength (or at least its ambitions) was its crack trains. This chronicles that era with thousand of words of informed comment and captions plus more than 1300 illustrations. It is a book about the sleeping and dining cars that suddenly changed overland travel from barbarous to opulent; about the compounds and Pacifics and 4-8-4s that sliced hours and days out of the timetables; about the amenities of going places; from mobile barbershops and libraries to gastronomic menus and wine cards and most of all, about the Cascades and Centurys and Crescents that resulted when railroad kingdom gave their car-builders blank checks and were proud of their dining-car deficits. Arthur D Dubin recounts its story in terms of both its mechanical implications and its human dimension. He is at once specific about car names, configurations, builders, and assignment and sweeping in geographic and historical content.''