A Memory of Trains : The Boll Weevil and Others - Hardcover

Louis D. Rubin Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 157003382X ISBN 13: 9781570033827

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Pr, 2000

Synopsis

A pictorial memoir of railroading during the days when trains were still the dominant mode of American intercity travel. This account tells of the role railroads played in Rubin's life as a child and as an adult in search of vocation.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 157003382X
• ISBN 13: 9781570033827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182