The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience
By H. Roger Grant
Before the widespread popularity of automobiles, buses, and trucks, freight and passenger trains bound the nation together. The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience explores the role of local frontline workers that kept the country's vast rail network running.
Virtually every community with a railroad connection had a depot and an agent. These men and occasionally women became the official representatives of their companies and were highly respected. They met the public when they sold tickets, planned travel itineraries, and reported freight and express shipments. Additionally, their first-hand knowledge of Morse code made them the most informed in town. But as times changed, so did the role of, and the need for, the station agent.
Beautifully illustrated with dozens of vintage photographs, The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience, brings back to life the day-to-day experience of the station agent and captures the evolution of railroad operations as technology advanced.
Hardbound 226 pages, Illustrated.
Review by Tom Dixon
This book is not one that would appeal to people modeling for purposes as are most of our books. Rather, it is by H. Roger Grant, who is well known as an academic who writes railroad history for that audience. He is a professor of history at Clemson University and has written numerous books about railroading and transportation.
This book is, however, particularly interesting to this reviewer and will be, I believe, to a number of other railfans, because it is really the first general history of the station agent/operator. The agent has been completely neglected in the history of railroading, yet was one of the its most visible, numerous, and important people.
Grant’s writing is very readable and interesting. He gives a complete background to the duties of station agents from the primordial days of the 1830s up to the 1970s. He covers not only their regular duties but how they were hired, where they lived (many times in a station building), their families, and their position in thousands of communities across the country. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
One interesting aspect includes floorplans for station buildings that provided living quarters for the agent and his family. Other illustrations show agents at their duties.
Chapters include one about telegraph operations and signaling and how the agent/operator was a key in this. It is one of the best descriptions we have read about this type of work.
Grant enlivens his work with many anecdotes about how station agents/operators worked at many locations. These concrete examples tell us much about the life, work, and times of these important railroad employees.
The paper is matte and the photos are fuzzy and not sharp, but give a good feel for the eras covered. They are as Lucius Beebe used to say “They looked like they had been photographed through an old Navaho blanket!”
This is probably the only book ever to be devoted to this subject and it, in my opinion, is a masterpiece of historical research and writing. I strongly recommend it for any interested in the life, times, and operations of railroading rather than just its equipment and facilities. The material about signaling and telegraphy alone is worth having the book.
