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In February 1910, a massive blizzard trapped two trainloads of passengers high in the Cascade Mountains. Crews from the Great Northern Railway worked around the clock to rescue the trains stranded on the edge of a precipice near Wellington, Washington. Then an avalanche half a mile wide descended from the pinnacles, forcing the trains and their passengers down the mountainside. Bodies were scattered all over the area, some buried as deep as 40 feet. The last body was found in July, 21 weeks after the avalanche. The lost passengers included business leaders, women, and children, but nearly two-thirds of the 96 fatalities were trainmen, railway mail clerks, and track laborers. Many others were injured and a few were unharmed. Krist's research includes documents such as telegrams and diaries, newspaper articles of the time, court affidavits, and corporate archives. To his credit, Krist has avoided using any invented dialogue or other undocumented re-creations. The book is an astonishingly rich chronicle of this catastrophe. George Cohen





"A Memory of Trains is a book about trains like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a book about steamboats—which is to say, it is about trains, but it is about so much more. It is social history, memoir, and—as the author says at one point—a journey toward a vocation," writes Fred Hobson in the introduction.

"Railfans will find all the material they crave about the webs of passenger and freight routes that once plied those parts of the nation ... Rubin's work is also a literary elegy of trains and the culture they bore ... a handsome volume ... Trainspotters everywhere will love it," says Publishers Weekly.