This week, I published a visual history of steam locomotives of the nineteenth century:

Steam Locomotives: Nineteenth Century Engineering, illustrated with more than 150 images of steam engines drawn by the top engineering illustrators of the 19th century.

Already, Amazon is calling it the #1 New Release in Railroading Pictorials. 

As one of my friends pointed out, in addition to being of interest to railroad and locomotive enthusiasts, it would make a great coloring book for those children and adults who love trains.

Why did I decide to write and fill this book with images of locomotives? I love trains, especially the locomotives. My family has a deep connection to railroads, since both of my grandfathers worked nearly all their lives for the B&O. My father hired on to the B&O before he went off to the Army during WWII, working as a fireman on large steam locomotives that hauled coal trains through West Virginia. My mother’s side of the family lived in Grafton, WV, one of the first major railroad towns west of the Allegheny mountains. It was an important nexus of rail transportation with a vital history during the American Civil War. When my family moved to Ohio, we lived in a town with rail lines through it with a bridge that had stood when Lincoln’s funeral train passed under it in 1865. Just up the road was Willard, one of the great rail nexus in the state. Many a time, we drove up there to pick up my grandparents who’d ridden the train from Baltimore to visit us. I can almost taste the smell of being next to a locomotive waiting to move onward as it dropped off passengers, and took on new riders going westward.

I also love illustration. I was a picture editor in my younger years, and later a professional photographer for magazines. In the later 1980s, I was an art researcher for seven years, on staff at National Geographic magazine, working with top artists. I fed them concepts, research reference, and served as the intermediary with experts in all kinds of fields, from showing the inside of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl after it melted down, to a cutaway of the USS Macon airship, to what it looked like on the deck of CSS Alabama during its fatal battle during the American Civil War. After that, I served as a researcher for the top editors of the magazine, working on advance concepts, sussing out possibilities for the magazine thorough coverage.

I hope my readers enjoy my new locomotive book as much as I enjoyed working on it. It was a labor of love, and as I say in my book, it acknowledges the importance of the illustrators who created most of the images that appear in the book. – David W. Wooddell, Baltimore, Maryland