Books For The Penn Central And Conrail Fan

At some point in the late 1970s, I found a worthwhile book, A Sampling Of Penn Central, at a swap meet. It has long been one of my favorites. I got it then for some nominal amount, certainly no more than five or ten bucks. You can find an excerpt at the link on Google books. I recommend the excerpt, because in trying to find bibliographic info, I discovered on Amazon that even though it was reissued in 2000 by the University of Indiana Press, copies now go for about $350. I have some books like this in my library, and at some point I will need to set them aside so they're properly valued in my estate!

Anyhow, I always wanted to get the next book from this author, Jeremy Taylor, Conrail Commodities. I missed it when it first came out, and by the time Amazon came around and I could look it up, it was going for a premium price like the Penn Central book. My memory is in the $200 range. When I was visiting the Western Railway Museum a couple weeks ago, though, I found a copy for $30 in its used bookstore. I grabbed it in a hurry! I checked Amazon later that day to see how much of a bargain I'd come up with -- on that day, copies were going from $35 to over $600, so who knows. I checked again today, and it was going for $45.

From the Penn Central book, I got the impression that Taylor was some sort of railroad insider, possibly a PC employee. Conrail Commodities gives more biographical information. He graduated from Cornell in 1949, Cornell Law School in 1952. A search in Ancestry.com gives a birthdate of 1931. After leaving school, he worked for the New York Central throughout the 1950s and 60s, leaving Penn Central in 1969 as its New Haven reginal manager. This strongly suggests he was an Alfred Perlman protege, and he pulled the plug at PC around the time Perlman did. He then became Vice President -- Operations at the Long Island Rail Road, retiring in 1977 (at the age of 46!).

Interestingly, he's the same age as my uncle, Harry Bruce, who worked for Perlman as Vice President -- Marketing at Western Pacific. I don't know if he and Taylor knew each other at all; I'll have to check if I have a chance. My impression is that everyone at that level in the industry knew each other. My uncle, by the way, has always insisted that those who call Perlman "Al Perlman" never knew the man -- he was "Mr Perlman" to everyone. I heard an anecdote about Perlman once that my uncle refuses to believe, but it was from someone who also knew him. I'll tell it one day here, maybe.

After leaving PC, Taylor began writing a few railroad books, using the contacts he had in the industry to get permission to be on properties and find inside information. The books are mostly in big photo-with-extended-caption format, but the captions are extremely through and full of insider information. Searching the web, I see that after Conrail Commodities, he wrote books on Powder River Basin coal trains and the Clinchfield. Luckily, these are reasonably priced, and I've sent for the one on the Clinchfield, one of my favorites.

In you find either A Sampling of Penn Central or Conrail Commodities at a used book sale by someone who absent-mindedly marked it for a nominal price, grab it!