The Railroad — What It Is, What It Does

Many readers will recognize the title of today’s blog post as the title of a book by renowned layout designer John Armstrong. This book, The Railroad — What It Is, What It Does, was first published in 1978 (Simmons-Boardman, Omaha), and though that date is long after the steam era, the book does contain considerable information about railroad practices well back into the steam era.

Here is the front cover of the original edition (soft-bound, like nearly every subsequent printing). It is 6 x 9 inches and contains 240 pages. Notice the sub-title: “The Introduction to Railroading.” That was the purpose of the book, and a purpose it has continued to fulfill.

In a number of ways, this is a remarkable book. Its breadth and depth continue to impress me, even after using it for quite a few years as a reference. I feel quite confident in stating that no matter how much you know about any one area of railroading, you will find information here that you didn’t know.

It is important to recognize that the book was a great success for Simmons-Boardman. It has been revised several times and reprinted many times. It remains in print today, and is still given to new employees on at least two of today’s railroads to give them background. 

 I also have the Second Edition, from its fourth printing of 1988. It is not enormously changed, having been revised in 1982 from the original book (written in 1977).

And of course each successive revision has removed the oldest information and terminology, and replaced it with new, along with adding new subjects as appropriate. I mention that because today’s book is significantly larger and quite different from the 1978 original. Obviously your chosen modeling era will determine whether you want the oldest edition, or one of the later ones.

John Armstrong passed away in 2004 and thus the most recent edition did not benefit from his hand. Today there is a Fifth Edition, issued in 2008, and now grown to 406 pages. If you would like to get this book, it is available directly from Simmons-Boardman for $49.95, though on-line booksellers are offering it for higher prices in some cases. I haven’t seen this edition myself.

John had been trained as a mechanical engineer (Purdue) and worked most of his career at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the Washington, DC area. After retirement, he was a consulting editor for Railway Age magazine for ten years. As many readers will know, he was renowned in model railroading for his layout designs and for his O-scale Canandaigua Southern layout (he was born and raised in Canandaigua, New York).

His layout design ideas have been very influential, best known probably through two of his Kalmbach books, Track Planning for Realistic Operation (Kalmbach, Milwaukee, 1963, 2nd Edition, 1976), and Creative Layout Design (Kalmbach Books, 1978). He published 76 articles in Model Railroader magazine in his lifetime, greatly extending the recognition of his ideas.

When I give talks about layout operation, or waybills, or rules of freight car handling and movement, I always show a slide of this book, and recommend it to the audience. It is the authority I rely on to make sure I am correct about any aspect of the prototype. It is clear and easily understood, even on arcane topics like switching districts or milling-in-transit waybills. If you want to understand any aspect of prototype railroading, I cannot recommend this book highly enough,

Tony Thompson