Re: New Book - "Hollywood's Railroads" ...

Hi Johnson! And thanks for your comments! Are you any relation to Roseanne Barr?
To answer your question about the cover photo selection, I would have loved to have the perfect movie photo on the cover. I never found it. The standard in Hollywood for still publicity photos until recent times was always black & white, as the shots were intended for newspaper and magazine reproduction, as well as to document the production. While limited color was shot on some of the really big films beginning in the late 1940s, 99% of the work was done in black and white until the 1990s. I was hoping to find a shot at the Colorado Railroad Museum, but none of the photos filed by locomotive number had the "Wow!" I wanted. I even went through the 20,000 uncatalogued slides they have in binders (lots of neat stuff), but no "Wow!"
Other volumes in the series will have variations of fat Hollywood movie stacks on the covers, ranging from tasteful to atrocious. Wait until you see the shot on the cover of Volume Five! Since the K-36 class has been used in many films on both the D&S and C&TS, often with straight stacks, and guests on both railroads ride behind them on a regular basis, one of them became the logical choice. John West's photo of #489 is the perfect cover shot. I saw it, said "Wow!" and have been in love with it ever since. Oh yes, #489 was the star of "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," a 1982 PBS-TV movie.
See my reply to dougvv for comments on "Night Passage."