Appendix
You’d think I’d written a five-foot shelf of books instead of a small travel-guide pamphlet, if Forewords, Introductions, and Appendixes are any criteria. This is how it seems to stew out though, so it’s how you’ll have to take it. Keep cool!
Lots of you won’t be interested in this Appendix. It’s designed for the fellers who’re more or less railroad minded and thirst for technical details. It’s a brief critique about the gears and rods that made the wheels go round, during those hectic, vortical years. A cursory account of engines and cars and mileage that made up the Edaville’s immediate predecessors.
Here again we’ll have to condense the facts in favor of space. To include a really comprehensive expose of these historical lines—locomotive rosters and dimensions, car measurements and classifications, capitalizations, earnings and expenses, and blow-by-blow reports of the septuagenary rise and fall, as well as scale-drawings for model fans—would be a book in itself, and a family-Bible size at that. No one but the most serious students of railroad lore would read beyond the title page. Let’s try to jam a lot into a few pages here.