Modern Diesel Locomotives

Enthusiast Color

by Hans Halberstadt

Exceptional photography captures modern diesel locomotives hard at work moving trains on tracks everywhere from California to Boston. Major railroads are brought to life including the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, Conrail, Southern Pacific, and Burlington Northern. Modern Diesel Locomotives even gets under the skin of the locomotive and shows 12-foot-long diesel engines being rebuilt! Includes a short history of the rise of diesel technology.

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 1996

About the author

I trained to be a documentary filmmaker and worked in that industry for about fifteen years before getting involved with book projects. The basic techniques involved in designing a film project apply just as well to non-fiction books so the transition was easy. The books turned out to be more fun, more filled with adventure, and more profitable than the film work so I gradually took on books rather than films.

Although I hear a lot of people complain about the difficulty of getting a book contract, that has never been my experience right from the start. And I never have "writer's block" or any of the other typical complaints of our peculiar breed. Telling stories has always been fun for me and I will explain how and why in a blog on this site.

Reviews

[Iain]

There's a lot to like in this small package. Halberstadt discusses most all the aspects of diesel locomotive's design in a very readable way stressing key aspect in clear terms: you want a locomotives to be heavy, why are passenger locomotives different that freight ones. He even touches on the psychological toll that fatalities take on engineers.

If there's one thing that could have been done better it would be to have a few exploded illustrations mechanical systems discussed in the text.

[Bob]

I've been curious about modern diesel locomotives, ran across this bool, and I learned a great deal from this. Well written, factual, and quite interesting.