Frederick Westing I suspect most writers like me live and die with Google. I’ve come to depend on its online search capabilities more than I should, but I have to say its reach — even for arcane railroad information — often seems like a miracle. Until it isn’t. Case in point: Last week my editor, Brian Schmidt, asked me to write a series of short biographical summaries for a bunch of authors being featured in an upcoming Classic Trains special issue. All of them were easy to do, until I got to Frederick Westing. Many of you who love railroad books likely know the name. Westing was a prolific railroad author from the 1930s through the 1960s, especially when it came to the steam locomotive. The titles of his best-known books tell you something about his command of the subject: Apex of the Atlantics , The Locomotives That Baldwin Built , Erie Power , volumes considered standards of the genre. Ditto his numerous articles in Trains , Railroad , and other periodicals. His first byline appeared in Railroad in 1934. But when I went to Google to look him up, there was a paucity of information. Only listings of his various books on Amazon, Thrift Books, and places like that. None of them told me much about the man, even in the author profiles. As a longtime admirer of Westing and his work — I was a teenage Pennsylvania Railroad fan when I first encountered his Apex book in 1965 — it seemed to me an injustice that information about him was so hard to track down. I decided to try to fix the situation with this edition of Mileposts, with a headline designed for search-engine optimization. Cover of Apex of the Atlantics, published by Kalmbach. Although long identified as a Philadelphian, Westing was actually born in 1903 in New York City, the son of an employee of the Interborough Rapid Transit’s subway division. The greater New York area turned out to be a good place to catch the railroad bug, as Westing told Trains Editor David P. Morgan […]
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