Get the fascinating story of how steel rails transformed an isolated ranching and agricultural center into the West's greatest city. An unforgettable walk through time recaptures the West's most powerful railroad.

The Southern Pacific Railroad is California's railroad. As the Central Pacific, it bored and blasted its way east from Sacramento, across the towering High Sierra, meeting with the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, completing the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, and profoundly changing the growing United States. By the early 20th century, the Southern Pacific was a rail colossus, stretching from San Francisco Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the Southern Pacific remained essentially Californian. Its rail lines gave muscle to the lovely California coast, the fertile San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys, and the timber industry of the north coast. Yet for all its might and majesty, for many Californians the Southern Pacific was a smaller, more intimate part of the fabric of their daily lives.

FOR THE FIRST TIME! A complete and true history of the Ray "Crash" Corrigan Movie Ranch, from its prehistory to its current status as a city park. Corrects all of the falsehoods and exaggerations concerning the ranch and its operation as both a movie location and as an amusement park. Includes many details of its day-to-day operation, especially the amusement park business (its highpoints and its shortcomings!). An extensive and expanded filmography of the movie ranch. Profusely illustrated with nearly a thousand illustrations, including almost 500 photographs from a 4,000 negative collection of Corriganville images, most of which have not been published before.

Presents a complete list of streamliner trains from 1933 to 1942. Includes early experiments in the evolution of semi-streamlining, the pioneers, the middle years, the zenith and decline, the conversions and more--the entire story.

Immensely popular and prolific, Harold Lloyd sold more movie tickets during the Golden Age of Comedy than any other comedian. From Coney Island to Catalina Island, and from Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, Lloyd’s movies captured visions of silent-era America unequaled on the silver screen. A stunning work of cinematic archeology, Silent Visions describes the historical settings found in such Lloyd classics as Safety Last!, Girl Shy, and Speedy, and matches them with archival photographs, vintage maps, and scores of then-and-now comparison photographs, illuminating both Lloyd’s comedic genius, and the burgeoning Los Angeles and Manhattan landscapes preserved in the background of his films. The book represents John Bengtson’s completion of his trilogy of works focusing on the three great geniuses of silent film comedy (Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd) in what Oscar-winning historian Kevin Brownlow calls “a new art form.”

This is an opulently illustrated catalogue of the entire remaining mammoth photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). The work will contribute not only to a fuller understanding of this pioneering photographer but also portray the barely explored frontier in its final moments of pristine beauty.