From Book News, Inc.
The 1997 edition was published by the New York Transit Museum Press. An assistant chief mechanical officer for the MTA New York City Transit, Sansone describes, illustrates, and provides technical data for all the passenger rolling stock that has ever operated in New York City's subway since the first demonstration in December 1867. There is no index.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Review
" Offers the reader a comprehensive, accurate, well-illustrated, highly documented catalog of the nearly 5800 current New York City subway cars, along with the many thousands of long-gone cars. Every subway student or enthusiast will return to it often to browse the pages or to research specific car series. It is an indispensable companion to prior or future general histories of one of the world's greatest people movers."--Richard L. Allman, Railroad History


Review
"This is the first comprehensive examination of the history and development of the system's rolling stock. Sansone has performed a real service by pulling it together, providing useful illustrations of the cars, and vetting it all for accuracy. Sansone knows his subject thoroughly and he's clearly done his homework."--Clifton Hood, Hobart and Smith College


Book Description
A collaborative labor of love by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York Transit Museum, Gene Sansone's Evolution of New York City Subways: An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars, 1867-1997 -- now available from the Johns Hopkins University Press with a new foreword by Clifton Hood -- offers an extensive array of photographs, line drawings, and stories about the city's most treasured railcars. Subway buffs, railfans, students of New York City history, and specialists in the history of technology will appreciate this authoritative account. MTA New York City Transit and Sansone provide a record of the rolling stock that helped make New York City one of the great cities of the world.


From the Publisher
"Offers an encyclopedic amount of information and is organized in a precise and thorough manner. The book contains a wealth of history and detail [for] tourists and transit buffs alike."—Amy Wanggaard, New York Transit Museum "This is the first comprehensive examination of the history and development of the system's rolling stock. Sansone has performed a real service by pulling it together, providing useful illustrations of the cars, and vetting it all for accuracy. Sansone knows his subject thoroughly and he's clearly done his homework."—Clifton Hood, Hobart and Smith College


About the Author
Gene Sansone serves as the Assistant Chief Mechanical Officer of Car Equipment Engineering and Technical Support of MTA New York City Transit. He is an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic University of New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A collaborative labor of love by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York Transit Museum, Gene Sansone's Evolution of New York City Subways: An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars, 1867-1997 - now available from the Johns Hopkins University Press with a new foreword by Clifton Hood - offers an extensive array of photographs, line drawings, and stories about the city's most treasured railcars. Subway buffs, railfans, students of New York City history, and specialists in the history of technology will appreciate this authoritative account. MTA New York City Transit and Sansone provide a record of the rolling stock that helped make New York City one of the great cities of the world.

SYNOPSIS

Photographs, line drawings, and narratives record the development of the New York City subway system's rolling stock.

A collaborative labor of love by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York Transit Museum, Gene Sansone's Evolution of New York City Subways: An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars, 1867-1997—now available from the Johns Hopkins University Press with a new foreword by Clifton Hood—offers an extensive array of photographs, line drawings, and stories about the city's most treasured railcars. Subway buffs, railfans, students of New York City history, and specialists in the history of technology will appreciate this authoritative account. MTA New York City Transit and Sansone provide a record of the rolling stock that helped make New York City one of the great cities of the world.

Author Biography:Gene Sansone serves as the Assistant Chief Mechanical Officer of Car Equipment Engineering and Technical Support of MTA New York City Transit. He is an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic University of New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

In Travel by Train, Michael E. Zega and John E. Gruber show how the spread of railroads across America coincided with the birth of modern advertising techniques to produce a blizzard of railway posters. Early, wordy efforts based on circus posters gave way to the big pictorial landscapes of the eighteen-nineties. As cars became dominant, graphic designers resorted to an increasingly stylized approach to glamorize the idea of travel itself, a trend that reached its apogee with the posters of streamliner trains of the thirties.

The romance of railways is almost exclusively connected to the steam era. Vanishing Steam is a record of Eric Langhammer's remarkable quest, begun in the seventies, to photograph "steam locomotives at work in a natural everyday environment" before they disappeared altogether. Langhammer relates with justifiable pride the extreme level of obsession one needs to feel to go and see a train at twenty below zero in Nancha, in northeastern China.

For the photographer Andrew Cross, plenty of romance remains in the big ugly freight trains of modern America. His book Some Trains in America uses a panorama format to accommodate images of vast trains snaking across open desert and prairie; the average freight train today is more than a mile long. Meanwhile, even the humble New York subway car has its fans, as Gene Sansone demonstrates in his exhaustive survey Evolution of New York City Subways. Featuring such curios as a private subway car built in 1904 for the director of the subway, his work also provides useful insights into such imponderables as why the cars on the F line are longer than those on, say, the 1 and 9 lines. ( Leo Carey)

Booknews

The 1997 edition was published by the New York Transit Museum Press. An assistant chief mechanical officer for the MTA New York City Transit, Sansone describes, illustrates, and provides technical data for all the passenger rolling stock that has ever operated in New York City's subway since the first demonstration in December 1867. There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This is the first comprehensive examination of the history and development of the system's rolling stock. Sansone has performed a real service by pulling it together, providing useful illustrations of the cars, and vetting it all for accuracy. Sansone knows his subject thoroughly and he's clearly done his homework. (Clifton Hood, Hobart and Smith College)  — Clifton Hood