From Booklist
Rubin, a retired university English professor and founder of Algonquin Books, chronicles his fascination with steam locomotives that he rode and photographed in the days before diesel-powered trains. He focuses on the southeastern and Middle Atlantic states, where he lived and worked. Rubin reminisces not only about the trains but also recalls the Pullman porters and redcaps, conductors, brakemen, engineers, and travelers meeting families and friends. His photographs, 122 in number, are pure nostalgia: freight trains, passenger trains, trains rolling^B across trestles and heading into small-town stations, cabooses, water towers, and a carnival train with gaudily painted flatcars. Most of the engines are spewing plumes of bituminous coal smoke. For readers old enough to remember, the book is a joy; for readers too young to remember, here is a chance to share the joy. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
"A Memory of Trains is a book about trains like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a book about steamboats—which is to say, it is about trains, but it is about so much more. It is social history, memoir, and—as the author says at one point—a journey toward a vocation," writes Fred Hobson in the introduction. “As the son of a railroad conductor and product of a railroad town (Hamlet, N.C.) I’m a passionate railway buff. But in this wonderful reminiscence of old trains great and small, North and South, freight and passenger, smoke and whistle, illustrated by his own photographs, Louis Rubin shows himself King of the Buffs and Master of the Tracks. You can almost hear someone shouting "all aboard!" says Tom Wicker. "Railfans will find all the material they crave about the webs of passenger and freight routes that once plied those parts of the nation ... Rubin's work is also a literary elegy of trains and the culture they bore ... a handsome volume ... Trainspotters everywhere will love it," says Publishers Weekly. "It is his beautifully written narrative, humble and elegant, that makes the book such a gem," wrote Preservation magazine. And the photographs "convey the power, grace, movement, and beauty of the speeding train." "The author's photos accompany the well-written chapters, leave readers saddened by all that was lost when railroads lost their grandeur, but they will appreciate the memories this autobiography stirs," says Roger Carp in Trains magazine. "His photographs, 122 in number, are pure nostalgia; freight trains, passenger trains, trains rolling across trestles and heading into small-town stations, cabooses, water towers, and a carnival train with gaudily painted flatcars ... For readers old enough to remember the book is a joy; for readers too young to remember, here is a chance to share the joy," says George Cohen in Booklist magazine


From the Inside Flap
"All the machinery was on the outside, and when they came pounding along the rails, drive wheels turning, drive rods stroking, pistons exploding with sound and fury and sending a swirling cloud of bituminous coal smoke overhead, the earth shook." This is the way that Louis D. Rubin, Jr., remembers steam railroading during the days when trains were still the dominant mode of American intercity travel. In the years after the Second World War, as a young newspaperman he spent much of his time riding and photographing trains. Now, in a memoir featuring more than one hundred of his photographs, he tells of the role that railroading played in his life as a child and youth and as an adult in search of a vocation. It was a time when the coal-powered Iron Horse, which had settled and peopled a continent, was giving way to the diesel-electric locomotive. By the mid-1950s, when Rubin settled into what would prove to be a distinguished teaching career, the steam locomotives were gone from the American scene. A cub reporter who would later become a Southern literary critic and historian, Rubin began his lifelong engagement with trains in the Carolinas and Virginia, then journeyed westward to the Appalachians, northward to Maryland, New Jersey, and the Northeast, and then into the Deep South, the Midwest, and the Far West. The text and photographs of A Memory of Trains recount that journey. There was one train that Rubin had yet to travel aboard or photograph. Known as the Boll Weevil, it ran on a branch of the Seaboard Air Line Railrway between Hamlet, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, via his hometown of Charleston. His account of the day he finally arrived at the station in Hamlet to ride the Boll Weevil down to Charleston and his exploration of what the little train meant for him contitute a poignant episode in this memoir of railroads and railroading. Railrans and general readers alike will enjoy this account and photographs of a time when, in the author's words, "trains were everywhere to heard, going places."


About the Author
At 76, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., is hardly retired. A Memory of Trains is his 50th book, a memoir told through the trains and train rides that gave story to his life. Once a cub reporter (at the Bergen Record) who would later by many be credited for codifying “Southern Literature” and who taught (at Hollins and UNC) some of our favorite Southern Writers and who then first published many of them (as the founder of Algonquin Books), Rubin confesses that during the days when double-headed coal-burning steam locomotives still pulled long strings of cars, he spent much of his free time photographing and riding trains up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, inland across the South and sometimes to points West.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"All the machinery was on the outside, and when they came pounding along the rails, drive wheels turning, driverods stroking, pistons exploding with sound and fury and sending a swirling cloud of bituminous coal smoke overhead, the earth shook."

This is the way that Louis D. Rubin, Jr., remembers steam railroading during the days when trains were still the dominant mode of American intercity travel. In the years after the Second World War, as a young newspaperman he spent much of his time riding and photographing trains. It was a time when coal-powered Iron Horses were giving way to diesel-electric locomotives.

Railfans and general readers alike will enjoy this memoir featuring more than one hundred of Rubin￯﾿ﾽs photographs. This account tells of the role that railroads and railroading played in his life as a child and youth and as an adult in a search of vocation.

Rubin began his lifelong engagement with trains in the Carolinas and Virginia, then journeyed westward to the Appalachians, northward to Maryland, New Jersey, and the Northeast, and then into the Deep South, the Midwest, and the Far West. The text and photographs of A Memory of Trains recount that journey.

There was one train that Rubin had yet to travel aboard or photograph: the Boll Weevil, which made the Hamlet-to-Charleston run during his childhood. His account of the day he finally arrived at the station in Hamlet to ride it and his exploration of what the little train meant for him constitute a poignant episode in this memoir of railroads and railroading.

About the Author: Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., retired as University Distinguished Professor of English in 1989 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, he served as publisher and editorial director until 1991. Rubin has written and edited forty-eight books, the most recent being Seaports of the South: A Journey; Babe Ruth￯﾿ﾽs Ghost and Other Historical and Literary Speculations; The Heat of the Sun; and The Quotable Baseball Fanatic.

SYNOPSIS

Rubin is a beloved figure in the publishing world. As founder of Algonquin Books, he provided a launching pad for Southern writers such as Jill McCorkle, Clyde Edgerton, and Lee Smith at a time when fledgling authors from the hinterlands had little chance of breaking into the New York literary establishment. A prolific writer himself, Rubin has penned, edited, or otherwise compiled a vast body of fiction and nonfiction dealing with topics as varied as shipping and baseball. Now comes his fiftieth book, a short memoir of his lifelong love affair with trains.Dan Rather calls Larry Kane, the only lead anchor in America to work for all three major markets: ABC, NBC and CBS, "the dean of Philadelphia newsmen." During his thirty-four-year career he has covered almost every major event, earning the respect of local politicians, presidents, entertainers, and everyday citizens along the way. Larry Kane finds nothing more satisfying "than being the first [with a story], except being accurate." Dan Rather makes a good case. Kane's love affair with Philadelphia resonates throughout his book. All readers, regardless of where they call home, will relish the anecdotes about Philly's praised and notorious leaders and the events that made them legends. Good broadcast journalism is good broadcast journalism.

Philadelphia, unlike other major cities, is more a conglomeration of diverse neighborhoods with sometime edgy racial relations, where blacks and whites manage to live peacefully. This was much less so in Philadelphia as it was for America in 1966, when Kane came to this city from Miami. By 1968 he was covering many of the unforgettable events of that tumultuous year. Kane was present at the arrest of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King's assassin, at Heathrow Airport in England. On the same overseas assignment he was tear-gassed by riot troops in France for trying to prevent them from raping female protestors during the student revolt at the Sorbonne. Kane returned to Philadelphia in time to cover the police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

His memoir teems with stories about such politicos as former mayor James Tate, who reigned over a Democratic machine that arguably rivaled Daley's in Chicago, and events of national significance, including the fatal Move confrontation of 1985, where Mayor Wilson Goode became the first national leader to intentionally bomb one of his own neighborhoods; the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of 1979; and the sixties race riot in Wilmington, Delaware, that paralyzed the city for several months.

Not every event was so harrowing. Former Beatle John Lennon once stepped in to do the weather forecast on Kane's show. The "fab four" became friends with Kane when he accompanied them on their summer tours of 1964-66, before he came to Philadelphia. The most revealing stories are about former mayor Frank Rizzo, the onetime rough and tumble police commissioner who dominated Philadelphia politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Rizzo, to Kane, was the most authentic politician of his time. This colorful and controversial man was the first mayor to represent those city dwellers that couldn't or wouldn't move to the suburbs. Rizzo, according to Kane, had a soft spot for those down on their luck despite his menacing manner. Newscasts did not always run with seamless efficiency. Desi Arnaz, the popular former real life and television husband of Lucille Ball, died after a long illness while Kane was on the air. Producer Paul Gluck broke the news to Kane's co-anchor, Alan Frio, by whispering "Lucee, I'm dead!" Frio was so convulsed that he crawled off the set, leaving Kane to finish the show while struggling not to laugh.

Larry Kane, after so many years, shows no sign of slowing down or losing his enthusiasm for the news. The reader of these memoirs will be treated to a real taste good and bad of Philadelphia by a man who has become a local institution in his own right.

From his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, Rubin was fascinated with the mechanical leviathans with the sense of adventure and mystery they evoked, with their power, energy, and, yes, beauty. "One saw the train, one heard it and smelled it, and one felt it--not only in the sense of the earth trembling and the wind rushing by as it passed, but as an experience involving the assertion of singularity, the display of strength and a capacity for distances: the achievement of spectacle." While a young journalist in the forties and fifties, he studied trains as a hobby, rode them at every opportunity, and took untold numbers of photographs. More than a hundred are reproduced in this book, providing a visual stroll down Memory Lane for readers who recall when riding the rails was the primary means of traveling between states or cities.

This is simultaneously a book about trains and the writer's young adulthood. Hence, the railroad becomes something of a metaphor for Rubin's personal journey in search of love and a fulfilling career. Toward the end, he gives a richly detailed account of a six-hour trip from aptly named Hamlet, N.C., to Charleston a disappointing ride, for his heart had been set on finally taking a gas-electric coach nicknamed "Boll Weevil," only to discover it had been mothballed. It serves as a symbol of the decline of the passenger train era, and perhaps of the author's transition from youthfulness to maturity as he realizes that very little in life lasts forever.

As Rubin acknowledges, the book may contain a bit too much technical detail and jargon for casual readers and too little for train buffs. Together with the wealth of photographs, however, the text offers a pleasing pick-me-up for those suffering from what Arlo Guthrie labeled "the disappearing railroad blues."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Rubin has produced a handsome volume, a testament to one of his several obsessions. Trainspotters everywhere will love it.

Oxford American

Slowly leafing through [Rubin's photographs] is like spending time with an indulgent great-uncle who has taken his shoe box of yellowed pictures off the closet shelf and is sitting on the bed showing them to us one by one.

Library Journal

Rubin, a retired English professor at the University of North Carolina and the founder of Algonquin Books, recounts in words and pictures his experiences as a fledgling journalist riding and photographing trains at the end of the steam era, from 1946 through the mid 1950s. Most of the book concerns the author's travels in New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and the Carolinas, but he does include pictures and some commentary from trips to the Midwest and the Far West. The text, though well written, is more the author's affectionate reminiscences than a straightforward history of railroading during this period. Along the way, Rubin revisits the favorite train of his youth, the Hamlet-to-Charleston Boll Weevil. There are over 100 black-and-white photographs--mainly of late steam and early diesel locomotives, such as Mikados, Mallets, GG-1s, and gas-electrics--from this transitional time for the railroads and the towns they served. The photos would be useful to those seeking documentation of this era's locomotives. Recommended for libraries where the interest in railroads or postwar Southern history is strong.--Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Foreword