All questions about trains and railroads can be answered in this thorough nonfiction book for older children. Author Milton Meltzer skillfully describes the powerful influence the invention of the railroad had on our country while he takes the reader from its birthplace in the Industrial Revolution to its less glorious modern times. There are two chapters which deal with California and the Transcontinental Railroad ("Building the Transcontinental" and "A Chinese Miracle") and clearly explain where the endeavor fit in with history. Throughout the book, Meltzer will sometimes leave his third person descriptive writing and ask the reader a question or make an offhand comment. For example, when describing what happened at the end of the Civil War, he wrote "This is not the place to go into what happened afterward". Meltzer included a lot of railroad poems and songs throughout the book that offered a window to what people have thought about trains throughout history. ( )