Locomotive

Streaming video - 2014

It is the summer of 1869, and trains, crews, and families are traveling together, riding America's brand new transcontinental railroad. The pages come alive with the details of the trip and the sounds, speed, and strength of the mighty locomotives; the work that keeps them moving; and the thrill of travel from plains to mountain to ocean. Come hear the hiss of the steam, feel the heat of the engine, watch the landscape race by. Come ride the rails, come cross the young country!

Saved in:
Subjects
Genres
Animated films
Video recordings for the hearing impaired
Published
[United States] : Dreamscape Media, LLC 2014.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Other Authors
Brian Floca (author), Eric G. Dove (voice actor)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 video file (approximately 24 min.)) : sd., col
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Audience
Not rated.
ISBN
9781629236216
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

TRAINS ARE BIG, strong, fast, loud. Just like America. Trains typically get in trouble when they're not moving forward. Just like America. They're romantic, too - again, just like America, or at least the idea of America. So it's no wonder that trains, whether as symbols of might or restlessness, have played such an iconic role in our popular culture, from the folk tale "John Henry" to such songs as "Mystery Train" and "500 Miles," to films as varied as "The General," "North by Northwest" and "Before Sunrise." But who loves trains more than kids? You'd think there would be a surfeit of whistleblowing, wheels-aturning classics in the picture-book section, shelves and shelves of them, right up there with bunny books and princesses. Trains are so wonderfully graphic, too, slashing across landscapes and barreling full speed ahead to force dramatic perspectives - after all, what is a train but a line on steroids? Funny, though, I can think of only a couple of genuine picture-book classics starring locomotives: "The Little Engine That Could" and "The Polar Express" - and maybe I should also include "Green Eggs and Ham," because as a rule, one should always include "Green Eggs and Ham." ("I will not eat them in the rain. I will not eat them on a train.") Oh, right, I'm forgetting "Thomas the Tank Engine," the multimedia phenomenon. Or rather, as the father of a son who once had 40 miles of Thomas track, I'm blocking his dutiful memory. Leave it to the English to neuter trains and turn them into civil servants with wheels. Happily, we have three new American train books to consider here. I'm not sure any are future classics, but all are first-rate; and one, "Locomotive," by Brian Floca, is the very deserving winner of a 2013 New York Times Best Illustrated Books Award. "Locomotive" tells the story of a family's 1869 journey across America on the newly completed transcontinental railroad. A mother and two children serve as our surrogates on this trip, but they are essentially extras in a book whose star is the train itself, from steam engine to caboose, along with everyone and everything that keeps it thundering down the track toward Californ-eye-ay. Floca, whose previous books include "Moonshot" and "Lightship," seems intent on doing for modes of transport what David Macaulay has done for cathedrals, castles and pyramids. "Locomotive" incorporates many dollops of technical detail about 19th-century railroading, but while flirting at times with book-report dryness, Floca mostly keeps things vivid. Mordant humor helps: "Here's what they say about switchmen: / You can tell that one is new to the job / if he still has all his fingers." "Locomotive" is unusual for a picture book in that it is intended to please a fairly wide age group, which means it may also frustrate some readers or listeners. Older children will appreciate the wealth of detail and history, while younger ones will be entranced by the appropriately chugga-chugga rhythm of Floca's free verse and his abundant use of sound effects (playfully emphasized with well-muscled, 19th-century-style typefaces): "Now comes the locomotive!/The iron horse, the great machine! / Fifty feet and forty tons /Hear the clear, hard call of her bell:/CLANG-CLANG! CLANG-CLANG! CLANG-CLANG! / Hear the HISSSSSSSSS and the SPIT of the steam!/Hear the engine breathe like a beast: / HUFF HUFF HUFF! " Of course, the risk is that younger readers might get bored by, say, the digression on braking protocol, while older children will find the clang-clang business babyish. But everyone - parents, too - will be thrilled to learn how a train toilet worked in 1869. (It sat atop a simple hole; not polite to use while in a station.) Everyone will be even more thrilled by Floca's illustrations. He's a brilliant, exacting draftsman; he also knows how to give his pictures a cinematic energy, especially in the way he "cuts" from page to page. A spread showing the train crossing a rickety wooden bridge uses a funny visual trick to jolt your eyeballs along with the passengers. Flipping through this book made me smile with pleasure before I even read it. Elisha Cooper's "Train" updates "Locomotive" by taking a contemporary, more impressionistic cross-country journey, one that begins in a New York City for which Cooper has imagined a far more graceful point of embarkation than the miserable, smelly dungeon that is our real-life Penn Station. (Memo to self: idea for Gothic romance set in the haunted bowels of Penn Station - "The Hunchback of New Jersey Transit"?) Cooper's trip starts with a commuter train, segues to a passenger train, then a freight train, and so on, until we find ourselves on a futuristic bullet train whizzing optimistically into a fanciful San Francisco terminus that looks as if it were designed by Eero Saarinen. Cooper's prose is more restrained than Floca's, but just as vivid and often singing with poetic specificity. I love this passage: "As the train approaches a rail crossing, it sounds like a storm. As the train passes, it sounds like dropped pots and pans. As the train leaves, it sounds like the da dum da dum of a beating heart. Then, silence." Cooper's illustrations have a similar feel, detailed yet impressionistic - no mean feat. I saved my favorite for last. "How to Train a Train" is exactly that: a guidebook that teaches children how to capture and tame wild trains. "First, get up really early in the morning and find a good hiding spot close to some trains. . . . As the sun rises, the trains will begin to stir and start their engines. Watch them work and play. It's only natural that you'll want to take home all the trains, but don't just grab the first one you see. Take your time and choose one that's right for you. Got one? Time to make your move." As you can tell, Jason Carter Eaton's deadpan prose is calibrated just-so. He wisely leaves the abundant belly laughs to John Rocco's paintings, which have their own zany style but also owe something to the absurdist scales and perspectives of the great Bruce McCall. Alarmed parents will be relieved to learn that trains make terrific pets, capable of learning tricks and amenable to baths, so next time the kids are begging, maybe skip the hamsters and go diesel. "How to Train a Train" doesn't deal with the ultimate pet-related question - mortality - but my advice is to parry any anxious queries with the old fib about sending it to a nice roundhouse upstate. BRUCE HANDY is a writer and editor at Vanity Fair.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 10, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Floca follows up the acclaimed Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 (2009) with this ebullient, breathtaking look at a family's 1869 journey from Omaha to Sacramento via the newly completed Transcontinental Railroad. The unnamed family is a launching point for Floca's irrepressible exploration into, well, everything about early rail travel, from crew responsibilities and machinery specifics to the sensory thrills of a bridge rumbling beneath and the wind blasting into your face. The substantial text is delivered in nonrhyming stanzas as enlightening as they are poetic: the smoke and cinders, / ash and sweat of the coal engine and the Great Plains stretching out empty as an ocean. Blasting through these artful compositions are the bellows of the conductor ( FULL STEAM AHEAD ) and the scream of the train whistle, so loud that it bleeds off the page: WHOOOOOOO! Font styles swap restlessly to best embody each noise (see the blunt, bold SPIT versus the ornate, ballooning HUFF HUFF HUFF ). Just as heart pounding are Floca's bold, detailed watercolors, which swap massive close-ups of barreling locomotives with sweeping bird's-eye views that show how even these metal giants were dwarfed by nature. It's impossible to turn a page without learning something, but it's these multiple wow moments that will knock readers from their chairs. Fantastic opening and closing notes make this the book for young train enthusiasts.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1869, not long after the golden spike is driven into the rails at Promontory Summit, a mother and her two children climb aboard the Transcontinental Railroad, leaving behind their old life in Omaha for a new one in California, where Papa awaits. Floca (Moonshot) chronicles their journey from multiple perspectives: documentarian, poet, historian, tour guide, and irrepressible railroad geek. With the rhythmic, verselike text that's become his signature; expressive typography; and handsome, detailed watercolor, ink, and gouache paintings, he celebrates the majestic (the passing western landscape), the marvelous (the engineering and sheer manpower required to keep the engine safely on its course), and the mundane, from the primitiveness of the toilets to the iffiness of depot food ("If the chicken/ tastes like prairie dog,/ don't ask why"). It's a magisterial work (even the endpapers command close reading), but always approachable in its artistry and erudition. And readers will come away understanding that the railroad wasn't just about getting a group of passengers from Point A to Point B; it carried an entire nation into a new, more rapid world: "Faster, faster, turn the wheels,/ faster, faster breathes the engine!/ The country runs by, the cottonwoods and river./ Westward, westward,/ runs the train,/ through the prairies,/ to the Great Plains,/ on to the frontier." Ages 4-10. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 3-5-It all started with "a new road of rails/made for people to ride" where "covered wagons used to crawl." Almost 150 years ago-just after the Civil War-the completion of the transcontinental railway radically changed both this country's landscape and the opportunities of its people. The book traces the advent of cross-country train travel, focusing on an early trip from Omaha to Sacramento. As in Moonshot (2009) and Lightship (2007, both S & S), Floca proves himself masterful with words, art, and ideas. The book's large format offers space for a robust story in a hefty package of information. Set in well-paced blank verse, the text begins with a quick sketch of "how this road was built" and moves abruptly to the passengers on the platform and the approaching train. The author smoothly integrates descriptions of the structure and mechanics of the locomotive, tasks of crew members, passing landscapes, and experiences of passengers. Simply sketched people and backgrounds, striking views of the locomotive, and broad scenes of unpopulated terrain are framed in small vignettes or sweep across the page. Though a bit technical in explaining engine parts, the travelogue scheme will read aloud nicely and also offers absorbing details for leisurely personal reading. Substantial introductory and concluding sections serve older readers. There's also a detailed explanation of the author's efforts and sources in exploring his subject. Train buffs and history fans of many ages will find much to savor in this gorgeously rendered and intelligent effort.-Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review

Talk about a youth librarian's dream come true: a big new book about those ever-popular trains from a bona fide picture-book-nonfiction all-star. Striking cinematic endpapers lay the groundwork, describing the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. Then, in a sort of historical-fiction-meets-travelogue narrative, Floca zeroes in on one family's journey from Omaha to San Francisco. Floca excels at juxtaposing sweeping panoramas with intimate, slice-of-life moments: here a widescreen shot of the train chugging across the Great Plains; later a vignette at a "dollar for dinner" hash house ("If the chicken tastes like prairie dog, don't ask why," cautions the narrator). Varied font sizes and styles on the large pages beautifully capture the onomatopoeia ("Hisssssssss"; "huff huff huff"; "chug-chug chug-chug chug-chug") of the train and the feel of the Old West. One spread finds the train precariously crossing a trestle ("The train is so heavy, the bridge is so narrow, and rickety rickety rickety!"); the concluding ricketys are displayed in an appropriately jarring shadowed font alongside a picture of passengers shaking -- and praying -- in their seats. Luckily, our family makes it safely to its destination: "the country's far corners have been pulled together. . .thanks to the locomotive." An author's note and thorough discussion of the sources used are included, and don't miss the back endpapers -- the steam power diagram would make David Macaulay proud. sam bloom (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Floca took readers to the moon with the Apollo 11 mission in Moonshot (2009); now he takes them across the country on an equally historic journey of 100 years earlier. In a collegial direct address, he invites readers to join a family--mother, daughter and son--on one of the first passenger trips from Omaha to Sacramento after the meeting of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific in May 1869. With encyclopedic enthusiasm, Floca visually documents the trip, vignettes illustrating the train's equipment as well as such must-know details as toilet and sleeping conditions. Full- and double-page spreads take advantage of the book's unusually large trim for breathtaking long shots of the American landscape and thrilling perspectives of the muscular engine itself. The nameless girl and boy provide touchstones for readers throughout, dubiously eyeing an unidentifiable dinner, juddering across a trestle, staring out with wide-eyed wonder. Unjustly undersung as a writer, Floca soars with his free-verse narrative, exploiting alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme to reinforce the rhythms of the journey. Frequent variations in font and type ("HUFF HUFF HUFF!" is spelled out in ornate, antique letters) further boost the excitement. Front endpapers provide detail on the building of the transcontinental railroad; back endpapers show the steam engine in cross section, explaining exactly how coal and water made it go. Nothing short of spectacular, just like the journey it describes. (Informational picture book. 4-10)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.