The Lore Of The Train

by Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis

A history of the train as it developed from early steam engines to today's high-speed electric and diesel powered ones.

Genres: Trains

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 27, 1987

About the author

1909-1987

Reviews

[Dan Sendker · Rating 2 out of 5]

My grandparents have had this book since I was a very small boy, and I loved flipping through it to see the locomotive diagrams, schematics, and paintings. They gave me the book a few years ago, shortly before my grandfather passed away. Now, almost 3 decades later, I've finally finished reading it. And hoo boy, what a disaster. Ellis, God bless him, writes with the stuffiest, most pompous, most convoluted prose I've ever encountered in a book. He apparently assumes that everyone reading this is an engineer or a mechanic. Every backwards sentence is overflowing with technical jargon. Worst of all, there are sometimes upwards of a dozen pages between the reference to an illustration and the illustration itself, so I was flipping back and forth all over the place. In spite of everything, it was a very intimate accomplishment to finish reading this. For as terrible as it is, I will keep the book for the rest of my life.

[Stuart Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out great learning about the ancient history and humble beginnings of the railway and steam engines. Unfourtunatly it kinda turns into a slogfest of bad organization of the writing, basically throwing a new name or random engineering device at you every sentence without adhering to flow of the subject matter very well. The pictures and diagrams are great however are rarely placed on the same page as the material they depict, causing alot of this "choose your own adventure) style page-flipping. Though the book does end quite well with its look to the future and I enjoy its take on that when it was written in the 60s

[Carol]

Referred by Bailey White, Mama Makes Up Her Mind