Travel all over the island, at all times of year in this wonderful first book of poems with the Thomas touch.

    Each maze in this collection travels through an amusement park and offers two ways for the reader to follow, an easy route and a more difficult one, and includes various objects to look for in each spread.

    Thirty drawings depict such famous trains as Europe's Orient Express, a Santa Fe Super Chief locomotive, the observation lounge on the Burlington Zephyr, and a sleeping compartment on New York Central's 20th Century Limited.

    Farmers used trains to transport produce into the city daily; businessmen rode the rails home to their commuter suburbs; and families took vacations mere miles outside the Loop. Historian and coeditor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Chicago, Ann Durkin Keating resurrects for us here the bustling network that defined greater Chicagoland. Taking a new approach to the history of the city, Keating shifts the focus to the landscapes and built environments of the metropolitan region. Organized by four categories of settlements-farm centers, industrial towns, commuter suburbs, and recreational and institutional centers-that framed the city, Chicagoland offers the collective history of 230 neighborhoods and communities, the people who built them, and the structures they left behind that still stand today. Keating reanimates nineteenth-century Chicagoland with more than a hundred photographs and maps; we find here the taverns, depots, and way stations that were the hubs of the region's vibrant, mobile life. Keating also includes an appendix of driving tours so readers can see this history for themselves. Chicagoland takes us into the buildings and sites that are still part of our landscape and repopulates them with the stories and characters behind their creation. The result is a wide-angle historical view of Chicago, an entirely new way to understand the region.

    These can be found in all corners of the country and represent, both historically and in modern terms, a delightful miscellany of the unusual and the quirky. Never seen before images of Britain’s unsung railways are accompanied by lively, informative text, exploring an institution once vital to the commercial and social life of Britain but now largely forgotten, abandoned by the changes in modern-day travel and transport habits.

    A lively text and scores of incomparable photographs take the reader coast to coast with most major American railroads and provide a sampling of interesting short lines and restored steam or main-line steam.There are spectacular photographs of aging roundhouses, country stations, busy interlocking towers and the great stations of Chicago; pre-Amtrak passenger trains, from the Twentieth Century Limited and the Midnight Special to lowly locals, mail trains and branch-line doodlebugs; N and W Geeps and SDs in the West Virginia coalfields, the California Zephyr threading through the Feather River canyon, and slant-nose, stainless-steel-paneled Burlington E5s racing across the Illinois prairie; Pennsylvania GG1 electrics, Milwaukee Road boxcabs and Little Joes; and the historic steam of Southern Pacific Daylight and Union Pacific Challenger 3985, the world's largest operating steam locomotive.Outbound Trains is an absolute must for every railfan's bookshelf.

    A blockbuster railroad merits a history book of the same scale, and this book will awe railfans with its rich content.

    

    In 2005, at a point when his contributions to the Railway Series were almost completely out of print during the 60th Anniversary of The Three Railway Engines, he wrote Sodor: Reading Between The Lines, which acts as a complimentary follow-up to The Island Of Sodor. As well as providing an overview of all 40 books (with the exception of The Twin Engines – a printing error), the book answers frequently asked questions and provides more recent exposition on the characters both human and machine.​Overview & Summary (Written by R Healy of sodor-island.com)Sodor: Reading Between The Lines follows a similar line to The Island Of Sodor. Christopher Awdry proceeds to bring us back up to date with events that have taken place on the Island of Sodor, how his stories contributed to the development of the Island the continuing timeline for the universe. Similar to The Island Of Sodor, we are given a fuller stocklist for the railways of Sodor in the first major chapter, The Island and its Railways, with some omissions that his father and uncle put in the preceding book. Christopher does not go into the same level of detail that his father did about the Island’s industry, geography and history, although does touch upon it lightly within the character profiles he gives.Characters In The Stories gives more relevant and interesting read, allowing fans of the books to find out how the lives of the people featured in the books have changed or developed throughout the course of the stories, and what has happened to them whilst the focus has been pulled away from the Railway Series.Christopher goes on to answer questions he’s dealt most regularly when meeting members of the public in ‘Your Frequently Asked Questions Answered’. Christopher gives insight into why (at the time) the Railway Series could not be obtained in its entirety, his father’s other character – Belinda The Beetle, and why the Rev. Awdry put faces on the engines in his stories.The real life inspirations behind the stories are discussed in The Stories, their Origins and Location section. This was one area that the Rev. Awdry did not delve into throughout The Island Of Sodor, and provides a definitive ‘Who, Why, What, Where and When’ for the entire Railway Series library, shedding light on where each story originated from and why. One glaring omission from the book was Book 15 – The Twin Engines which was missed entirely.Finally, in Thomas – A Crown Worth Fighting For, Christopher addresses personal issues with the Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends TV series, and the way the Railway Series is treated by the current publishers, Egmont Books, who seem to shunt it to the sidings.

    Divided into chapters by bridge type, each chapter shows several prototype examples and demonstrates techniques for modeling, painting, weathering, and installing the models on a layout.