Steam, Smoke, and Steel

Back in Time with Trains

Author  Patrick O'Brien Illustrated by  Patrick O'Brien
Steam, Smoke, and Steel

All aboard! This train travels through history making stops in time to learn about the progress of travel by rail.

Hop up into the cab of a speeding modern-day locomotive and look down the tracks into the past. Perhaps these are the same tracks that the diesel-electric locomotives of thirty years ago thundered down, pulling their loads. Perhaps you can see the steam engines of thirty years before that. Watch time unravel and the landscape change as the history of trains barrels through the pages of STEAM, SMOKE AND STEEL: BACK IN TIME WITH TRAINS.

The first trains puffed great billowing clouds of smoke and showered passengers with burning embers as they sped down the rails at a pulse-pounding twenty miles an…