Locomotive:In 1869 America, not long after Nebraska became a state, the first transcontinental train journey began in Omaha with the Union Pacific locomotive.
With a change of engines every two hundred or less miles, the fictional family of Brian Floca’s Locomotive made it to San Francisco in a week after crossing the Great Plains, deserts, and the Sierra Nevada, chugging over narrow trestles, moving to the Central Pacific railroad, and creeping through a long, dark tunnel.
Locomotive was written with nonrhyming verse, lots of descriptive words and gorgeous artwork revealing the rustic America of late nineteenth-century.
I laughed when Floca confided that it was polite to not use the ‘convenience’ at depot stations because the toilet was just a hole dumping your stuff on the tracks. For history enthusiasts there are opening and concluding notes about the making of the over-sized, high-quality book.
Locomotive deserves the medal for its beauty, rich details, and reminding us of when America was young and full of dreams for all of its citizens and immigrants. I learned quite a bit from it and feel sad that I’ve never ridden such a train.
I do live within hearing of train whistles, but very rarely do I hear them anymore as the tracks were moved farther away for constructing buildings, and I miss their toots and blares. The romantic spirit of America is vanishing.
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