The Milwaukee Road Olympian: A Ride to Remember.

A 1941 train trip from Chicago to Tacoma combines sights, sounds, historical asides, and behind the scenes operations of a railroad gone forever. Hundreds of photographs, charts, diagrams, floor plans, dining car menus, and reproduced timetables of the time augment the story. This book is capable of making the oldest train fan remember and the youngest truly envious of such memories, as it describes in detail what it was like to ride more than half way across the country from Chicago to Tacoma in 1941, the last year such trains ran.

Imagine a 13 year old boy, already sophisticated beyond his years in train travel through numerous long vacation trips with his parents and just pure fun working trips with his father who was a conductor on the Olympian, being given the opportunity to travel alone from Kansas City to Chicago. Beginning with a day of sight seeing on his own in the Windy City, spent mostly looking at trains, then boarding the Olympian in Chicago's Union Station for a train ride west through nine states to the Pacific Coast.

Experience this true adventure with him as he writes of it in detail, still remembered sixty years later. Recall with him the flash of passing streamliners, the view from bridges across the Mississippi, the waving tall grasses of the prairie and forbidding badlands of the American Desert, the ascent of the Rockies and the twisting rights of way through the magnificent fir and cedar of the Bitterroot and Cascade mountains. See the panorama of passing towns from Midwestern cities to prairie hamlets to mountain villages. Traverse tunnels, trestles and mountain passes with him as his ride is assured of becoming a treasured memory by the careful assistance of train crewmen, dining car personnel and a porter who was a personal friend of the lads conductor father. Nothing is forgotten. No detail is overlooked that might help satisfy the hunger of today's reader for such an experience.

The book is probably best described by a reader who said, I rode that train at almost that time and when I read these pages I recalled things long since forgotten. It has made forgotten things live again and cherished things still remembered even more treasured as I fit them once more into a past that I thought was gone forever.

Contents:
Introduction, pp. 1-8;
Ch. 1: Before You Hear All Aboard, pp. 9-28;
Ch. 2: Off on the Right Foot: Chicago's Union Station, pp. 29-50;
Ch. 3: The Land of Hiawatha, pp. 51-88;
Ch. 4: Where the Grass Whispers Secrets, pp. 89-120;
Ch. 5: Hoof beats, Drumbeats, and Prairie Ghosts, pp. 121-148;
Ch. 6: Electrified and Smooth as Glass, pp. 149-180;
Ch. 7: Challenging the Rockies, pp. 181-202;
Ch. 8: Train Races, Bearmouths, and Hell Gates, pp. 203-226;
Ch. 9: Trestles, Tunnels, and Trolley Wires, pp. 227-260;
Ch. 10: Steaming Through the Gap, pp. 261-292;
Ch. 11: Over the Mountains to the Sea, pp. 293-320;
Photo Credits, pp. 321-322;
Index, 323-333.

Museum of North Idaho, hard cover with dust jacket, 360 pages, 11 x 8.5 x .75 in., illustrated with b&w photographs, maps and ephemera.