Railroad writer Frederick Westing: an appreciation

I suspect most writers like me live and die with Google. I’ve come to depend on its online search capabilities more than I should, but I have to say its reach — even for arcane railroad information — often seems like a miracle.

Until it isn’t.

Case in point: Last week my editor, Brian Schmidt, asked me to write a series of short biographical summaries for a bunch of authors being featured in an upcoming Classic Trains special issue. All of them were easy to do, until I got to Frederick Westing.

Many of you who love railroad books likely know the name. Westing was a prolific railroad author from the 1930s through the 1960s, especially when it came to the steam locomotive. The titles of his best-known books tell you something about his command of the subject: Apex of the Atlantics, The Locomotives That Baldwin Built, Erie Power, volumes considered standards of the genre. Ditto his numerous articles in Trains, Railroad, and other periodicals. His first byline appeared in Railroad in 1934.

But when I went to Google to look him up, there was a paucity of information. Only listings of his various books on Amazon, Thrift Books, and places like that. None of them told me much about the man, even in the author profiles.

As a longtime admirer of Westing and his work — I was a teenage Pennsylvania Railroad fan when I first encountered his Apex book in 1965 — it seemed to me an injustice that information about him was so hard to track down. I decided to try to fix the situation with this edition of Mileposts, with a headline designed for search-engine optimization.

Although long identified as a Philadelphian, Westing was actually born in 1903 in New York City, the son of an employee of the Interborough Rapid Transit’s subway division. The greater New York area turned out to be a good place to catch the railroad bug, as Westing told Trains Editor David P. Morgan in the early 1960s:

“I recall as a youngster the pleasant ending of train riders in the old Jersey City Terminal trainshed of the Pennsy. There you passed the engine on the way to the ferryboats that sailed one to New York. Sometimes, as a special treat, the kindly old engineer would say a few words to a little boy who gazed in awe and admiration at the giant 80-inch drivers of the new E2 or E3a Atlantics.”

The boy grew up to be a railroader, first with the Pennsylvania, where he worked in the office of the superintendent of the New York Division. Of his time on the PRR, he said, “I can say that I was once a New York Division man in those grand old days when E6 and K4 engines were the ‘big power’; for that I’m very grateful and proud.”

Next came a 14-year stint in the Philadelphia suburb of Eddystone with the Baldwin Locomotive Works, where he apparently worked in the plant, although I could not confirm his specific job. But his time there cemented his love of Baldwin, deepened his command of steam technology, and led to The Locomotives That Baldwin Built, published by Superior Publishing in 1966. He stayed with Baldwin until the company’s merger with Lima-Hamilton in 1951.

Next came his last job, as a librarian at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia’s world-famous museum of science and technology. I’m guessing here, but in addition to his administrative and research duties as librarian, he must have had an active interest in the Institute’s biggest exhibit, Baldwin 4-10-2 No. 60000, built in 1926, a massive experimental engine known for its three-cylinder design and water-tube firebox. As a business proposition the engine was a failure, and it was sold to the Institute in 1933; Westing retired from the museum in 1968.

My most vivid memories of Westing are his two monumental Trains cover stories of August 1956 and November 1957, covering, in succession, the story of PRR’s K4-class Pacifics and New York Central’s 4-6-4 Hudsons. I discovered them in the early 1970s, in a stack of old back issues, and I remember being impressed not only by the incredible research they exhibited — the K4 story contained 10,640 words! — but also by the fact that he wrote about the most celebrated engines of two bitter rivals.

As a writer, Westing had A-list admirers. Writing a review of the Apex book in Railroad, Editor Freeman Hubbard said, “Fred Westing is one of the dwindling number of technical writers who deal with steam power effectively.” And this from Morgan, in 1963: “(Westing) has a way of explaining the why and wherefore of each boiler tube on an engine without subtracting an iota from the inexplicable mystery of steam.”

Fred Westing died on Sept. 13, 1982, at home in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill. He was 79. In its obituary, the Philadelphia Inquirer called him “a railroad buff’s railroad buff.” Reason enough to write about him here and get him into Google, where he belongs.