Making Tracks

On his maps, each railroad gets its own color. So Newark, New Jersey (map 53), for instance, is a tangled yarn ball of colored tracks from the New York, Susquehanna & Western (green); the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (blue); the New York Central (gray); the Central Railroad Co. of New Jersey (yellow); the Lehigh Valley (orange); the Reading (brown); the Morristown & Erie (black); and the Pennsylvania (red).

But the atlas doesn't just show tracks. Carpenter shows, and names, every station--passenger and nonpassenger. He shows every signal tower, every crew-change point, every tunnel, every bridge; he shows mileposts for every railroad every 5 miles, except in the 43 detail maps, where he shows every milepost. The atlas has an appendix with the name of every railroad documented (213). The volume has six separate indexes.

The atlas would be a quixotic venture except for a couple of things. It is being published by the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Press, which has plans for at least two more volumes--more if Carpenter can keep turning them out. And the atlas, the work of a skilled amateur building a second career out of a hobby, has created a minor stir in railroading and geography circles.

"It is an amazing piece of work, especially the level of detail," says Maury Klein, professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and the author of a study of the railroad's impact on American life. "It's a treasure trove of obscure information. . . . It answers questions that you didn't even think to ask."

"Carpenter has invented his own style of cartography," says John C. Hudson, a professor of geography at Northwestern University. "Artistically, it's a beautiful product. There are no other maps like this anywhere that I've seen." And then there was Baltimore Sun columnist Fred Rasmussen. "It's the kind of work," Rasmussen wrote, "that only a gang of monks would consider undertaking."

As for Carpenter, he is as appealingly down-to-earth as his work is eccentric. Officially retired for five years, he's busy up in his study, often seven days a week, working on volumes two, three, four, and five. His maps are both compulsively detailed and artistically rendered, and in that way, they are a reflection of the unlikely mix of Carpenter's own personality. The atlas opens with an introduction illustrated by elegant, wistful line drawings of railroad scenes. Carpenter did the line drawings, too.

The atlas "is a record, a way of putting down in one place the totality of the system, the geography, the topography. It's a story that needs to be told."

Dick Carpenter leans over a small light box and starts work on a detail map of the railroads converging in Albany, New York. The Hudson River comes to life in blue, its shore a little ragged and uneven through Albany. The New York Central tracks are laid in next, using a gray marker. "Gray is the color their diesels tended to be," says Carpenter.

For drawing the colored rails, Carpenter has long since settled on a pen called an Artwin Marvy marker. Each has two points--fine at one end, medium at the other. Carpenter flips the pen back and forth, like a dental technician using a double-ended tool, picking the point he needs for the line he's drawing. He is serious about his pens; each one has a tiny slip of paper taped to the shaft with the date it went into service. This is so he doesn't use them for too long and risk drawing muddy lines.

As Carpenter draws the tracks and the shorelines, as he starts to ink in mileposts and the names of stations, what is fascinating is how certain and graceful his lines are. His big right hand has none of the hesitation an ordinary person might have drawing a map. The overall effect is like watching an artist sketch your own face on a blank sheet of paper with a few strokes. It's remarkable to watch the features emerge. And when he snaps off the light box, the map leaps off the page. Carpenter grins. "I'm doing this mainly because I enjoy it," he says. "It gives me great satisfaction."

Each one of Carpenter's hundreds of finished maps is the distillation of days of research, and it is the research that gives his atlas its authority, as well as its quirky variety. "It's sort of like detective work," Carpenter says. One wall of his modest office is a bookshelf loaded with research that he has filed by railroad. Carpenter doesn't travel the routes he documents. Rather, he uses old passenger timetables, more detailed employee timetables, and track charts that detail every mile. The skill and judgment are in combining not just the sources for each line and not just all the lines onto a single map. They are also in resolving conflicts.