Metropolitan Railways: Rapid Transit in America (Railroads Past and Present)

Rating:
Summary: Good general North American overview
Review: Being disappointed by many other North American books about rapid transit, this one has lots of illustrations (unfortunately it is entirely in black and white). It also covers smaller systems like the Newark City Subway or the Cleveland rapid transit. I can recommend it to anybody who is interested in metros beyond the well-documented NYC Subway.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: From a design point of view, this book is poorly organized and typeset. For example, the photo captions are of the same typeface (and point size) as the body of the text, making it hard to identify which is which. The indenting is strange (as well as inconsistent and wasteful) and the photos are too small. Also, typical of recent IU Press titles, the dust jacket design is pretty lame. At least the book is decently bound and printed (in Canada), justifying the steep price.

As for content, I found the information new and up-to-date. Many of the photos have been published elsewhere, but others have not. I found the maps mediocre--the legend is elsewhere in the book and not having memorized it the maps were not very beneficial.

This is not one of Middleton's better works (but it is not entirely his fault).