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Donald J. Heimburger (1947–2022)

Autor de The American Streamliner: Prewar Years

14 Obras 135 Miembros 1 Reseña

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Incluye los nombres: Heimburger DJ, Don Heimburger

Obras de Donald J. Heimburger

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1947-04-24
Fecha de fallecimiento
2022-06-10
Género
male
Lugar de nacimiento
Urbana, Illinois, USA
Educación
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BA, Journalism)
Ocupaciones
reporter
publisher
Biografía breve
[excerpted from Peterson-Bassi Chapels online obituary]
His interest in publications began when as a young boy he made short “magazines” weekly to give to his parents. At the age of 15 he started his own publication, a model railroad periodical called the S Gaugian. He continued to hone his skills through a job as a newspaper reporter for the News-Gazette while earning his Journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1969. After graduation, his job for seven years as Press Representative at the Illinois Central Railroad was put on hold when he was drafted for the U.S. Army in 1970. There he served as editor of the newspaper at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, for two years. In 1979, Don purchased his hometown newspaper in Tolono, Illinois, all the while continuing to nurture his initial publication, the S Gaugian. Eventually it grew so much he decided to start his own publishing company called Heimburger House Publishing Company as well as a model railroad product company called Scenery Unlimited, both of which he ran with his faithful wife, until retirement in 2019. He published more than 50 different model and prototype railroad books, a second magazine called Sn3 Modeler, and worked with 75 major book publishing companies that published prototype railroad and kids' railroad books, which his company sold to individuals, major hobby stores, and railroad museums in the US and foreign countries. Don himself authored more than 14 books. Always seeking new and exciting adventures, later in life Don created the EuropeanTraveler.net website, where he and his wife posted intriguing travel stories and photographs documenting their many trips abroad. They also wrote feature articles for German Life magazine.

Miembros

Reseñas

A little disappointing. The technology of railroads in wartime brings together two of my interests, but I have yet to find a good book on railroads in WWII. The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich was practically unreadable and had next to nothing about the actual wartime use of the DNR; the current book, Trains to Victory, has a lot of pictures of trains, various advertisements by railroads on how they were contributing to the war effort, and a few not-very-informative little side-bar type notes on the actual use of railroads in the war. What text there is is not very well organized; I suppose it was intended to allow the reader to pick up little details here and there while looking at the pretty pictures. Gleaned this way:

* the Office of Defense Transportation banned sleeping cars for routes under 450 miles.
* the ODT also ordered that all refrigerator cars be “made available” for ordinary freight (sounds like that strategy might have backfired since it would limit civilian nutrition; no comment by the authors).
* the War Production Board banned research, design and development of new steam locomotives during the war; the authors claim that contributed to the rapid takeover by Diesels. I find this a little dubious, since
* the WPB also banned development of new Diesels, which the authors say led to the post-war dominance of the General Motors FT class.
* the Army designed a few specialized freight cars, artillery ammunition cars for coast defense units, triple-deck bunk cars, troop kitchen cars, and military hospital cars.
* the Army took over the Alaska Railway and the White Pass and Yukon for the duration
* all “Mikado” class locomotives were renamed “MacArthur” class, to the extent of painting out the “MK” on engines and replacing it with “MAC”.
* 12.5% of freight traffic was military; I had expected it would be larger than this but it probably only counts direct military shipments.
* Military freight dropped dramatically in 1945 but military passenger increased tremendously as troops were redeployed.
* Baldwin manufactured a number of Lend-Lease locomotives for Russia; each of these took two flatcars (one for boiler, one for running gear) because Russian gauge was wider than US standard.
* The Army experimented with adjustable gauge Diesels; they were not a success.
* the Army operated a railroad training base at Ft. Eustis, Virginia, to allow troops to practice with foreign locomotives and rolling stock.

The pictures, while numerous, are strangely limited; most showing equipment and many showing troops are from very early periods in the war. Thus we see a lot of flatcar loads of M3 Grant and early M3 Stuart tanks, but no Shermans. I suspect censorship was rapidly imposed on freight train photographs. There are a great many photographs of locomotives, as is typical in railroad books. Not a bad coffee-table railroad book but not very useful for figuring out how the railroads were actually run in wartime.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
setnahkt | Dec 31, 2017 |

Estadísticas

Obras
14
Miembros
135
Popularidad
#150,831
Valoración
½ 3.7
Reseñas
1
ISBNs
13

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