The Railroad Passenger Car: An Illustrated History of the First Hundred Years, with Accounts by Contemporary Passengers (review)

The Railroad Passenger Car: An Illustrated History of the First Hundred Years, with Accounts by Contemporary Passengers. By August Mencken. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii+207. $27.95.

When the first edition of August Mencken's The Railroad Passenger Car appeared in 1957, it was an important book for several reasons. Its publication by Johns Hopkins University Press helped to boost further the academic credentials of the field of railroad history, which at the time remained dominated by hobbyists and buffs, many of them dedicated researchers and skillful writers who produced an enormous and useful body of popular literature. Mencken himself was a civil engineer who specialized in projects involving railroad construction.

To be sure, economic and political treatises devoted to railroad-related topics, such as corporate finance and their land settlement activities, had already been published by university presses. However, passenger train equipment, especially when studied from the perspective of technology and society, remained largely virgin territory for academics. How that changed with the appearance in 1978 of The American Railroad Passenger Car by John H. White Jr., a massive work also published by Johns Hopkins, and in 1983 of Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene by John Stilgoe, published by Yale University Press! Numerous other recent works could be cited as well.

Not surprisingly, Mencken the civil engineer begins his study with an account of the historical development of the roadbed, the vital support structure that affects the quality of the ride aboard a railroad passenger car. In subsequent chapters he deals with assorted topics that range from the evolution of passenger accommodations from stagecoach bodies to ventilation and heating, the first sleeping cars, and the pioneer streamlined train. All chapters are well illustrated.

Because the topic is huge and this is a rather slender volume, Mencken had to decide carefully which topics to include. His choices give The Railroad Passenger Car a delightfully idiosyncratic quality. For example, there is a section on railroads and their role in the creation of standard time in North America. During the past decade standard time has been the subject of several excellent books, but Mencken, writing in the 1950s, believed it to be an almost forgotten topic, at least for most readers. Over the years the editorial pages of the Official Guide of the Railways had frequently discussed the history of standard time zones in America, its longtime editor having been present at their creation in the early 1880s, but that industry publication did not attract attention outside railroad circles.

Likewise, Mencken included thirty-five first-person narratives of travel by train between 1831 and 1891, perhaps his way of providing entrée for readers inclined to explore for themselves the social history of the railroad passenger car. What a reader derives from this section will depend on individual tastes and interests.

When The Railroad Passenger Car was published in 1957 an increasing number of Americans had never ridden in one, something unthinkable just a generation or two earlier. Trains magazine, a fan publication, devoted a large part of its April 1959 issue to answering the question, "Who Shot the Passenger Train?" In fact, by the time Mencken's book appeared, the American passenger train was poised to enter a long death spiral arrested only by the federal creation of Amtrak in May 1971, which managed to preserve a skeletal network. Outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other commuter corridors, the passenger train today remains little used and its rich history little appreciated by most Americans.

Mencken did not attempt to anticipate what was about to happen, although American, United, and Eastern airlines had passed the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads as the nation's largest passenger carriers in the mid-1950s, nor did he address the issue of why by that time so many...