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Fine condition 1st Edition/1st Printing hardcover in Near-Fine condition dust jacket. Slight dust soiling and foxing to top outer page edges, else Fine condition inside and out. Dust jacket is not price-clipped and is spotless. It has some very slight chipping along top and bottom edges, none of which exceed about 1/8" and a single closed edge tear of about 1/2" from the top edge of the front cover. "The birth-to-merger tale of the unique coal-haul built from West Virginia to the sea: To the remote, unlikely mountain fastness of Deepwater, W. Va., came the man with the white mustache in 1902 on a visit that would change the Kanawha River sawmill hamlet forever. Fore there was bituminous coal, millions of tons of it, beneath the stony ridges and wooded valleys where this stranger from the East walked. A lot of folks suspected as much, but Henry Huttleson Rogers was different. Intimate of Rockefeller and Harriman, as well as a self-made millionaire himself, Rogers came and saw and then constructed a 30-million-dollar railroad out of his own pocket. His Virginian Railway was virtually a single-purpose property, designed and built to roll coal to tidewater in the heaviest trains over the shortest and most easily graded line money could buy. Rogers and his railway have now been re-created in the absorbing text of H. Reid, a writer who documents the Mallet-powered conveyor belt of coal with such fidelity that you can hear the soft drawl of cab conversation aboard a bouncing Mike, see the 'squarehead' electrics churning up the Clarks Gap, and feel the cinders of enormous 2-6-6-6 articulateds. For the Virginian Railway is everything but orthodox corporate biography. The tale of an incredibly efficient coal-hauler rises above statistics to reveal in its colloquial pages the men who built and ran and rejoiced in Roger's road -- and the engines they rode and sometimes went to glory aboard. Painstaking research supports the book with a photo-and-figure motive-power roster; a three-color fold-out map, an 1898-1959 corporate chronology; a 36-page pictorial supplement and a complete index of the text. Which is well, for if ever a railway deserved the permanence of a book, Virginian was it -- a blend of 15,000-ton coal trains and three-car passenger locals, slide-valve 0-8-0's and 6800 h.p. electrics, steel-trestled mountain valleys and swampy flatness. Yes, and a railway so worth while it could not escape merger. H. Reid has done the Virginian the justice it deserves." - dust jacket. We will pack this beautiful collector's copy in bubble-wrap and ship it in a sturdy box to ensure safe delivery. Seller Inventory # ABJ125
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