One Man’s Locomotives: 50 Years Experience with Railway Motive Power by Vernon L. Smith

Abstract

1058 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY ANI) CULTURE the need for new equipment, and a changing traffic mix. The Great Depression almost broke the transcontinental, but some adroit fi­ nancing through the RFC and a superb physical plant enabled it to survive and handle huge wartime tonnages. Post—World War II inflation, labor regulations, and constantly rising wages forced the Great Northern to cut its labor force through mechanization and to adopt the more economical diesel locomotives. All the technological advances, however, could not protect the road against trucks, buses, and automobiles. Ralph Budd and his contemporaries on the North­ ern Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy understood the need for a merger. They worked out its details in 1960, but road­ blocks at levels from the ICC to the Supreme Court delayed the merger’s consummation until March 3, 1970. The book ends with that date. This excellent corporate history chronicles how rails and their associated technologies created new societies on the American fron­ tier where the company’s policies literally determined the shape of the on-line communities. This is technological history at its most basic level. And no reviewer in good conscience could omit mention of the volume’s superb photographs and maps; they are worth the book’s price. James A. Ward Dr. Ward is professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and has written That Man Haupt: A Biography ofHerman Haupt;J. Edgar Thomson: Master ofthe Pennsylvania; and Railroads and the Character of America. He is currently working on a book, The Decline and Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company. One Mans Locomotives: 50 Years Experience with Railway Motive Power. By Vernon L. Smith. Glendale, Calif.: Trans-Anglo Books (Interurban Press, P.O. Box 6444 91205), 1987. Pp. 181; illustrations, bibliog­ raphy, index. $33.95 + $1.50 handling. As the title suggests, this book is Vernon Smith’s recollections of more than fifty years of operating, designing, building, and maintain­ ing locomotives. Smith grew up in the iron mines of Minnesota, learning to operate the engines in the great pits of the 1920s and 1930s. Interested more in mechanical engineering than operation, he studied at night through correspondence courses, and finally became an apprentice mechanical engineer for design firms in Ohio. He helped design ore cars, then locomotives, at the Lima works. He next moved to Baltimore, where he helped perfect the poppet valve, one of the many innovations attempted by firms trying to improve steam locomotive efficiency. He introduced the valves into a number of Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives before hiring on with the Santa Fe, where he worked from 1944 to 1955. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1059 At the SF’s Topeka shops he participated in the transformation from steam to diesel, did rebuild designs, and conducted road tests on a fleet of approximately 1,550 locomotives. From the Santa Fe he became superintendent of motive power on the Belt Railway of Chicago, a 27-mile line connecting the main lines entering the city. At the Belt Railway he varied his tasks, running locomotives during strikes, pounding iron, and managing men. In 1976 he retired, but he ventured to Egypt to study its railroads. Although the book details Smith’s work on specific railroads at specific times, it is universal in its review of steam and diesel locomotive technology as well as the day-to-day activities of an engineman, mechanical engineer, and engineer-turned-manager. Smith writes in a chatty style, turning from one topic to another, from mines to towns, fellow workers to offices, but always returning to his main focus and passion, locomotives. He worked on locomotives from design to drawings, steam tests, paint shop, operation, rebuild, and scrapyard. His interest in photography is well displayed in the numerous pictures of equipment reproduced in the book, one of its strengths. In the text he bemoans missed opportunities for taking photographs or the pain of hearing of the loss of the Santa Fe archive of glass plate negatives in a flood. One Man’s Locomotives is a unique contribution, the firsthand account of a self-taught mechanical engineer. He recalls fellow engineers and railroaders, giving us his candid opinions...