Gone 500 Miles When the Day Is Done: Trains Don't Sleep by Andria Warmflash Rosenbaum

Rumbling, grumbling, screech and squeal,
Rolling, trolling, wheels on steel.

Puffing, chuffing, never yawning,
Climbing hills as day is dawning.

In the blue dawn of day, a steam train pulls up to a small platform, where a little boy in a railroad cap clutches a ticket and eagerly pulls a parent toward the steps to be the first on board. At the next stop in the city, as a man with his briefcase detrains to greet his family, a pigtailed little girl in a starched yellow dress waves to the boy, already in his seat, as she boards the train, too.

The two share their adventure as the locomotive steams forward, past fields and farms, past forest trees and onto trestles over deep gorges where a single cowboy waves his hat from below.

Canyon sights.
Trains are not afraid of heights.

Through clanging crossing gates, they speed by cars that wait, past sheep who get a wave from brakeman in the caboose, over snowy mountain passes and through prairie grasses, where the two new friends spot a watching jackrabbit in the light of the setting sun. Then, under a full moon, they fly toward a darkened station where only a raccoon, standing staunchly at attention on his haunches, is there to watch the train pass by. And then, again in the dark, the train at last pulls in to another station, their station.

Give the brakes a gentle push.
SHUSH, SHUSH, SHUSH.

Goodnight, travelers.
Off to bed.
Dreams await you just ahead.

As the boy stumbles sleepily off the carriage, the girl turns to wave goodbye, but the train, its lighted windows still softly aglow, is already moving on, with promises to keep and miles to go, with miles to go....

Trains don't sleep--they roll away,
Racing toward a brand-new day.

The romance of the rails is the stuff of Andria Rosenbaum's gorgeous forthcoming book, Trains Don't Sleep (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). The rocking rhythm of the rails is deftly captured in Rosenbaum's taut and evocative, sometimes onomatopoeic rhymes, and the story, seemingly set in the 1940s, in the misty, nostalgic light of memory and times past, catches the magic of a cross-country train ride for the two travelers completely.

Author Rosenblum's rhythmic, rhyming text is perfectly matched by artist Deirdre Gill's exquisite and elegant oil paintings, with a skillful balance of the human and the mechanical, of closeups and wide-lens views from the passenger train's interior to widespread vistas. With perspective from front and back of the characters and from above the train as it moves through the changing landscape and from below it as it takes the trestle, each two-page spread is filled with details set in lovely vistas. A total tour de force, one set to become a classic of the art of the picture book.

Author and illustrator also give young readers a taste of other trains, a circus train, with its load of dancing bears and poodles in tutus, tigers, and, with a nod to Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could (Original Classic Edition), a giraffe riding with his head out above the circus car, and a freight train with its tender, boxcars, flat cars, and hoppers. For young trainspotters there is even a glossary, illustrated with thumbnail pictures, of railroad vocabulary.

Riding the Rails: Locomotive by Brian Floca

HERE IS A ROAD
made for crossing the country,
a new road of rails
made for people to ride.

It was built "with a grunt and a heave and a swing, the ring of hammers on spikes." The Transcontinental Railroad, linking the middle of the United States with its western coast, was begun under President Abraham Lincoln, a tremendous vote of confidence for the survival of a divided country and the hope for its geographical union.

When it was done, it was a shining road for people to reach the Pacific Coast lands, once a long slog by covered wagon or a perilous voyage around Cape Horn, now possible with what seemed wondrous speed, a trip of mere days.

Brian Floca's 2014 Caldecott Medal book, Locomotive (Caldecott Medal Book) (Atheneum Books, 2013) puts a family, mother, boy, and girl, into a frame story of the first passenger run on that train, from Omaha to San Francisco, where Papa awaits them. In his meticulous, award-winning artwork, Floca takes the reader along, riding those rails, across the wide high plains where at first telegraph lines zing by and later where antelopes race the train, where the tracks trace their way between mountain ranges on each side. Then they cross the desert where wagon wheels and oxen skulls tell the tale of those who failed the trip, until at last they begin the long climb--clickety clack, clickety clack, c-l-i-c-k-e-t-y c--l--a--c--k,--up the slopes of the Sierras, rickety rack rickety rack across scary wooden trestles over deeper and deeper gorges, burrowing into tunnels showing the hand-hewn marks of their hammers and drills, and at last roaring, twisting, down the mountains to their final stop.

Down, down, past orchards and towns,
down to stop at the depot--
Here, where you needed to go,
where where you need to be...

Brian Floca took two prizes for this book, the Caldecott Award for the best-illustrated book of the year, but also the Robert Sibert Honor Medal for excellence in non-fiction writing for young people. Into that story of a family united he includes, in remarkable blank verse, the story of the steel-driving builders, the railroad workers--engineer, firemen, brakemen, conductors aboard, and workers along the route at the water stations and fueling stations and the depot station cooks, where the dubious children contemplate a menu of buffalo steaks, antelope chops, and "chicken" which is likely prairie dog, even the newsboys who come aboard to keep the weary riders amused with the local papers. As he did in his epic book, Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, (Richard Jackson Books (Atheneum Hardcover)) Floca gives equal attention to the history and geography of the trip as well as its hardware, showing landmarks such as Castle Rock, the 1000 Mile Tree, and Pulpit Rock, and closeup looks at the tickets, the gauges and levers and firebox inside the engineer's cabin, as well as such touches as a view of the mobile toilet (don't flush unless the train is rolling) and the coal stove in the corner of each passenger car. Floca's opening and final endpapers are works of art themselves, especially the meticulous cutaway drawings of the engine itself at the back.

Floca's narrative is lively, rhythmic, and absorbing, mixing sibilant syllables--"Now the train travels trestles," and "through shodowy sheds, long and dark"--and not sparing the delicious onomatopoeia of train sounds--"HUFF HUFF," "BANG," "BOOM," "HISS," "CLICK AND CLACK" and "CHUG CHUGGA CHUG." The whole book is a masterpiece of fine storytelling, descriptive language and detailed illustration which tells the remarkable story of how the transcontinental railroad finally linked the whole land into one country. Floca's iconic final illustration shows the family walking away, hand in hand, while the boy salutes the engineer and his train with a wave of his hat. As The New York Times says "He's a brilliant, exacting draftsman; he also knows how to give his pictures a cinematic energy, especially in the way he "cuts" from page to page…"

Now the country's far corners
have been pulled together...
by the locomotive.

On the Pacific, by that new sea,
you have found a place to call home.