Baldwin Locomotives
The title is unambiguous enough but what this book contains will almost certainly not be what you expect . . .
Mind you, this is a very pretty book, absolutely useful in its way, and if you know anything about printing and binding you’ll find it remarkable that a publisher can afford to offer this much book for so little money.
You think your vintage car is hard to start? Try a Compound Locomotive; it’s all about cylinder pressure. And in this example you have two locomotives to deal with!
It is peculiar that a seasoned publisher like Schiffer did not think to manage readers’ expectations better by giving them more information up front. A simple subtitle would have helped. Or not touting the book as “Now Available” in their current online catalog, which gives the impression that the book is either new or re-issued after having gone out of print. Nope.
The clue is in the name: Decapod, i.e. 10 driven wheels, or 0-10-0 in loco-speak.
So, why review a 2009 book in 2025? Mainly because we’re coming up on a big number—200 years. In 1825 one Matthias William Baldwin (1795–1866) went into partnership with machinist David H. Mason to manufacture in the US industrial equipment for printers and bookbinders that previously had to be imported from Europe. As the firm grew, so did its requirements for power and the pair turned their attention to the power source of the day, steam. Baldwin devised and constructed his own stationary steam engine; it was built well and worked well, so well that they used it for six decades (it’s now at the Smithsonian). More importantly, other companies wanted such engines built, one thing leads to another, Baldwin builds a miniature locomotive for exhibition at the request of a museum—where an actual railway company sees it and orders the full-size thing. Who would have thunk that this would give birth (1831) to the Baldwin Locomotive Works which would go on to become one of the world’s largest producer of steam locomotives, building as many as 1500 a year? (Do the math: what’s that per day?)
Who wouldn’t want to read about that??
If Baldwin locos are on your mind, and you discovered this book through a title search or saw the book cover, or maybe even read the publisher’s own catalog, you would naturally assume that this must be a book you ought to be interested in. Well, yes, but only if you have exceedingly specific and narrow interests, and only if you know the Baldwin story already. It’s not until you see the CIP page that you confirm that the book really has no author of record, and that the title page says “Record of Recent Construction / Nos. 21 to 30 Inclusive / Baldwin Locomotive Works / Burnham, Williams & Co.” Hardly self-explanatory, is it? There’s no Preface, no Table of Contents, no context of any kind. If this is not what you were expecting, you’ll be building up a head of . . . steam.
This book is basically a source book of company material from a 10-year-period when M. Baldwin was already long dead. The bulk of the book consists of catalog pages (see top and bottom photos) showing etchings or photos of a specific model and listing its specs. About a third of the pages consist of reproductions of papers read at meetings of various institutions, and one magazine article. All are from 1901 and each runs ca. 20–40 pages featuring lots of technical and other illustrations:
- Locomotive Boilers (Paper to AmSoc MechEng)
- Locomotives of the 19th and 20th Centuries (Paper to New England Railroad Club)
- Broad Firebox Locomotives (Paper to Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA)
- The Building of a Modern Locomotive (Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen’s magazine)
- Compound Locomotives (Address to Union Pacific Railroad personnel)
The curmudgeonly types will say that all this can be found on the interweb and for free. Sure. But that does not diminish the material’s historic relevance. And it certainly won’t look as good as here! Besides, someone at the publisher went to the trouble to create a really thorough Index for everything in the book, even sub-indices (above) for categories like types of loco, gauges, and classes. Even if you did nothing more than look at the fine illustrations—printed (landscape) gloriously sharp on good, glossy paper—you’d get plenty of mileage out of the measly $40 you laid out.
Baldwin supplied many overseas railroads, here is an example for France. Before ceding the field in 1951 and merging with the Lima-Hamilton Corp. Baldwin had produced a staggering 70,000+ locomotives.
Copyright 2025, Sabu Advani (Speedreaders.info
RSS Feed - Comments
Phone / Mail / Email
RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter