75 years in one book

A little more than a year from now, Trains Magazine will be 75 years old - a complete lifetime away from when Trains' founder A.C. Kalmbach printed the first official issue in November 1940.

Celebrating this anniversary means that we'll have a party sometime in 2015 (I'll save you some cake.) We'll also have a couple of trips and a memory book.

And right now, this memory book intrigues me the most. It's called "Great American Railroad Stories." My copy is a pre-distribution soft-cover version with heavy, gloss paper and perfect bound. It's all white, so I've jokingly called it "The Trains White Album."

But no joke, it contains the best of Trains writing through the decades.

Yes, writing.

Photos are included, but they accompany what editors in our building chose as some of the best articles ever written for Trains.

To get an understanding of how we chose what were the best, I asked "Great American's" prime editor, Randy Rehberg, to send me a list of must-know, behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Here's what he said:

RR: "Story suggestions mostly came from Kevin Keefe, Jim Wrinn, Rob McGonigal, and Jeff Wilson. They all had their favorites and some were suggested by more than one editor including: 'What’s the problem up there, Union?' by Paul D. Schneider, October 1981; 'Boilerwash Extra' by Lloyd Arkinstall, April 1979 and; 'Yes, I Did Want to Run a Railroad' by Ron Flanary, July 1978."

Interesting. But Randy says most of the in-house suggestions came from the 1960s to the present. Not to miss the first 25 years of the magazine, he said he went back to the beginning to see what Al Kalmbach's vision for the magazine was in 1940, and looked again.

RR: "I went through every issue from 1941 into the ‘60s looking for stories that were interesting, well-written, and also had historical insight or perspective, and sometimes a touch of humor. Because of the length of many stories, we weren’t sure how many we could include. Our first guess was around 30. I pulled 100 stories for possible selection and started whittling them down. Books Editor-in-Chief Dianne Wheeler and Publisher Diane Bacha helped in the selection process. Once we developed a look for the book with Art Director Tom Ford, which emphasized the text, we found that we could add more stories. We ended up with 50. (I still have the other 50, so who knows, maybe there will be a volume 2.)"

One of these earlier stories came from Cornelius Vanderbilt IV (yes that Vanderbilt family). Descendant of the "Commodore" who built the New York Central, this Vanderbilt preferred sleeping in an upper berth on long-distance trains instead of a private room when he wrote in 1948.

All too cool. But what about the photos? There must be an interesting story about how these were selected, right?

RR: "We knew that we wouldn’t be able to find all the original photos used with the stories. But I was surprised that the hardest ones to find were the more recent ones. Our library had the old black and white prints, and once we got into the 2000s, we had digital versions. There was sort of a photographic black hole from the 1970s to the 1990s, when the photographers were shooting slides that were returned to them. Luckily, I was able to contact [photographers] Ed King, John B. Corns, and John Lucas, who were able to dig through hundreds of slides to find the ones we were looking for."

There's more to this conversation which I will update in a couple of weeks, and lots more of Trains' best in "Great American Railroad Stories." If you'd like your own copy, check out the Books Department link here: http://www.kalmbachstore.com/01300.html

But now an informal poll:  "What do you think is the Trains' greatest story, ever?" I'd love to see what you think.