The Milwaukee Road Passenger Train Services: From the Hiawatha Era to Amtrak and Beyond

Rating:
Summary: Milwaukee Road Passenger Service: From the Hiawatha to Amtra
Review: I waited many months for this book and I am disappointed. The photos are grainy/blurry and better photos exist in other books. The text is mainly equipment lists and schedule times from timetables. And, the prooreader should be fired. There are spelling errors throughout and photo captions appear under wrong photos. My copy will probably be sold on eBay.

Rating:
Summary: "Incredible" overkill
Review: Noted railroad author Dr. Patrick C.Dorin writes another great book on the Milwaukee Road. The main focus is on Milwaukee passenger service from the 1940's to Amtrak and beyond. The book is a takeoff on his "Milwaukee Road East" published in 1978 by Superior Publications. It is basically an expansion of his chapter on Milwaukee passenger services. Much of the layout is like "The Hiawatha Story" published by Kalmbach in 1970. Many of the same pictures used in "Milwaukee Road East" have been recycled into this book for use, but are sharper and cleaner than the original book presented them.

However, there are huge problems with this book. Notably, there are numerous mispellings and historical misinformation on captions under photographs. The author's writing style has gone from flowing sentences with sharp detail to fragmented sentences as a 3rd grader would write. By the time I read the first chapter on the Hiawathas where Dorin uses the word "incredible" over 30 times, I was ready to throw the book across the room! The chapter header even uses the word "incredible" in it. Let's pick a different word to describe sensory detail please.

There is a color portion of the book which is great to read through, and consist examples of Milwaukee trains from Jim Scribbins. There is a list of all the passenger cars also indexed in the back. However, the beaver tails from before 1938 are not mentioned nor shown in their modified looks in the 1940's which would have been nice.

However, it is the spelling errors and misinformation on historical photographs that makes this book sink. Example is a picture of EMD E-6 # 15 on the head of Omaha section of the Midwest Hiawatha. The caption does not mention it is the Omaha section and lists the engine as #5. There is a picture of the same train with an E-7 in the lighting bolt scheme dating from - it says- 1956 when it should be 1946. There are pictures of the Columbian with heavyweight equipment and older streamlined cars, saying it is the forthcoming "Olympian Hiawatha" with Erie builts running the head. There is hardly mention of 1942 Hiawatha cars and what they offered. There is no mention of the 1937 baggage-tap cars that were rebuilt in 1942 into diner-lounges for the Midwest Hiawatha. The Midwest Hiawatha itself is mispelled as Mid-west. Numerous spelling and punctuation errors are all throughout the captions- like Spring etc.

The test train of E-7 #16 pulling the new 1948 Hi is used and it is captioned wrongly. There is a well known picture of EMD E-6 #15 A&B on the head of the Morning Hi in 1947, and it just says it is a EMD unit. Another picture shows an F-7 Hudson pulling the Afternoon Hi out of St. Paul in 1944, and it says it is Milwaukee. There is a picture of an EMD FP-7 63A which was converted to freight service in the 1950's, and it barely mentions the unit was the 93A in Hiawatha passenger service. The same locomotive is below as 93A, but it is confusing to see the difference. There is no pictures of the 1948 schemes on E-7's, and hardly any mention of DL-109 #14 with a nose job. There are pictures of the pre-1948 Chippewa and it is listed as the Chippewa-Hiawatha which it is not. There is no newer pictures of Amtrak in the 1990's or 2000 on the same route as the Hiawathas.

So, there are a lot of problems with misinformation, and I feel a great writer like Dorin would have better proofreaders for a great book like this. The editor should be shot for allowing simple errors like Kalmbach to be Kalmback to be in this book and other typos. It is an embarrassment to Mr. Dorin, compared to his other works.

This book is a must have in your library but I would wait until the 2nd edition with the corrections.


Rating:
Summary: You Will Want To Like This Book, But...
Review: Sadly, I must agree with the other reviewers who have taken the author and publisher and proofreader (apparently, though, there wasn't one) to task for the MANY mistakes in this effort.

If you desire information about The Milwaukee Road's passenger trains, any of Jim Scribbins' books would be a better choice.

I waited over a year for my copy of this publication, but realized the book was in trouble when I saw the heading for the section on train #s 9 & 10, the famous overnight run from Chicago to Michigan's upper peninsula. In this book it's called The Cooper Country Limited!

I have enjoyed Mr Dorin's writing in the past, but this is below his standards.