As railroad fever began to consume North America, railroad lines began to get longer. Soon, the necessity of night operation became apparent. But night operation required light to see with & signal with. The railroad lighting industry was born. As competition increased, the manufacturers increased the pace of innovation to produce better products. Here is the story of that industry, its entrepreneurs, their companies & their products. Among its 28 chapters are the histories of ninety manufacturers, catalog cuts, photographs &/or descriptions of more than 360 railroad lantern models, plus chapters on globes, burners, distributors & jobbers. Six appendices cover rumored manufacturers, lantern terminology, lantern patents, the disastrous Steam Gauge & Lantern Company fire, lantern collectors organizations & lantern rarity. The book also has a lantern model index, a biographical index & a business name index. Here, indeed, is the book lantern collectors & lighting historians have been waiting for! Author Richard Barrett has been a lantern collector for 37 years. He is the Managing Editor of "Key, Lock & Lantern," a quarterly magazine for collectors of railroad artifacts, & is the coauthor of "CANAL BOATS, INTERURBANS, & TROLLEYS," a history of the Rochester, NY Subway. PUBLISHERS OF THE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RAILROAD LIGHTING. To order, contact: Railroad Research Publications, 3400 Ridge Rd., Suite 5-266, Rochester, NY 14626-3495 or call 716-227-6903.

At some 770 pages, Barrett is only two-thirds finished (a third volume is due in 2004). This volume deals with lamps for bridges, yards, crossings, marker lamps, signals, and train order lamps. The markers became a vital tool and proliferated when trains began to run at night. Some fifteen companies' lamps are detailed here with some eight to nine hundred photos or drawings. A remarkable effort by a passionate collector.