by David Weitzman; David R. Godine; 108 pages.

by William D. Middleton; Golden West Books; 238 pages.

by Charles Philip Fox; Reiman Associates, Greendale, Wis.; 255 pages.

Each of the triumvirate of forces that moved the world eighty years ago— steam engines, trolley cars, and equine muscle—has been the subject of a recent book. Of these, the most unusual is Superpower: The Making of a Steam Locomotive , by David Weitzman, which is just what the title says it is, and something more. For years every railroad man knew Lima, Ohio, as the home of the Loco, the sixty-five-acre, fifty-building complex where steam engines were built from the ground up. Weitzman, a California schoolteacher and industrial archeologist, has made it his business to know as much as anyone living about what went on there. In this handsome book he follows a young apprentice named Ben through his training, and shows us the myriad processes that resulted in a new locomotive.

It is the mid-192()s, and already the diesels that spell doom for the superb, deep-breathing steam engines are beginning to scuttle around the switchyards. But Lima is getting ready to produce the Berkshire, a steam locomotive of unparalleled efficiency. Ben is put to work on the prototype. He meets Will Woodward, the designer, who tells him what it will cost: “You can have a shiny new 2-8-4, painted in a nice shade of black with white wheel rims and handrails, the numbers on the cab and your road’s name on the tender in aluminum leaf, leather-upholstered cab seats, polished bronze bell and … oh yes, a complete set of tools, ready to run for $184,140 and a few cents. … Locomotives, you see, are like potatoes and beans—you price them by the pound.” He gets to know the pattern shop, where the engineers’ drawings are turned into 110 ; the lovely, full-sized wooden models around which sand is packed to make molds, and sees those molds filled with molten steel to form the twenty-thousand-pound side frames; he hammers rivets in the boiler shop and watches the drivers being turned on the wheel lathe. In the end the first Berkshire stands finished in the erecting shop, and Ben’s pay is raised from twenty-five to thirty cents an hour.

Weitzman writes with authority, eloquence, and a sense of the people who did the work, and he illustrates his text with crisp drawings. Weitzman’s evocation of life at the Loco offers a vivid example of what is really meant by the current truism about our nation’s shifting from an industrial to an information economy. And in teaching all those tasks that no American will ever have to know again, the author imparts a stirring sense of the greatness of the enterprise, and of what we have lost with the passing of this part of our industrial heritage.

Where the trains stopped, the