Ebook The First Quarter-Century of Steam Locomotives in North America

In that comparatively short time the steam locomotive had changed the United States from a small country with a few seaports, and with towns and settlements little farther inland than river navigation permitted, to a great nation covered with cities and spanning a continent. It had made possible the confederation of the isolated provinces of Canada into a great Dominion. Now, by the 1950's, owing to the emer gence Of another type of motive power, it had become Obsolete and its days could be numbered. N 0 future generation would experience the thrill enjoyed by its predecessors. NO future American could stand awed beside the track and behold the majestic onrush of the iron horse, be deafened by the blast of the exhaust, the crash and clatter Of steel on steel, and the hiss of escaping steam, or be momentarily shaken as the locomotive thundered past in a blurred ?ash Of connecting rods, valve mechanism, and pounding wheels. NO child at night would ever again awaken to the eerie echo Of a far-off steam whistle crying at a lonely crossing, or by day look out from a hillside at the long white plume of steam that marked a distant train charging down the valley below. The present generation Of Americans can gaze back upon these things with nostalgia. The next will never know them. Here and there a steam engine will be saved, but the people Of a different era will note them and quickly pass on, wondering. Only a few will pause to marvel and ponder over the development Of the steam locomotive. It is to the everlasting credit Of our forebears that some few examples and relics Of the early engines have been pre served; and the appearance Of this study Of them, coming in the final hour of the steam locomotive, is most appropriate. The author has gone to painstaking lengths to find and sift and bring together the most complete record ever compiled Of these examples and relics remaining of the earliest Of North American railway engines and of working replicas Of them. Students Of locomotive and railroad history are familiar with the almost impossible task confronting the researcher who undertakes to trace the history of early engines. The contemporary account is Often a will-o'-the-wisp pursued endlessly through the yellowed pages Of century-old news papers and books; the seemingly authentic fragment Of fact is found to be faulty just when it seems ?awlessly correct; the colorful description of some ephemeral engine Of the past just cannot be reconciled with contemporary accounts and finally proves to have been prepared long afterward, replete with the inaccuracies which most unfortunately result from the inroads made by time upon the recollections Of the most careful Observer.