Steam railroads have captured the imagination of the world for 200 years, ever since the first one was built in Shropshire, England back in 1802, 70 years before Coos County received its first steam locomotive. But locomotives continued to arrive in Coos County for another 70 years, most of them by ship because Coos County rail lines did not connect to the outside world until 1916. By 1930 there had been at least 28 different short-line railroads in the county, most of which had come and gone by that time. Some of the locomotives burned wood, but most burned coal from the local mines. On June 16, 1972, 100 years after Coos County received its first locomotive, the last log-train left the town of Powers on its way to the log-dump at Coos Bay, 45 miles to the north, marking the end of an era.

William A. Lansing has done a fine job in “Can't You Hear the Whistle Blowin': Logs, Lignite, and Locomotives in Coos County, Oregon,” a picture history of that period. The objective is to document the history of the area between 1850 and 1930 by “outlining the construction, locations, and equipment used in developing the timber and coal resources.”

Lansing has been a longtime student/participant of the timber industry, and the industrial history of Coos County. Until he retired two years ago, he was president and CEO of Menasha Forest Products Corp., a major wood products company with ties to Coos Bay going back a hundred years. He graduated in 1969 from the Yale Graduate School of Forestry - one of the premier forestry schools in the world - and spent his entire professional life with Menasha in Coos County. His interest in the timber and coal industries has been both professional and avocational, and this book is apparently an outgrowth of his previously published history of the Menasha Corporation, “Seeing the Forest for the Trees.”

Coos County is replete with published histories, but no attempt has previously been made to pull together all the many short-line railroads in a picture history of the two major industries: logging and coal. “Can't You Hear the Whistle Blowin'” is the first book of its kind for this part of Oregon.

What is unusual about this book is that it is a fully formatted picture book suitable for the most discriminating coffee table. That sets it apart from the others.

While the primary documents are the photographs, it includes a lively and informative narrative of the history and locations of the railroads of the county. It includes chapters on the timber and coal resources of Coos Bay, the first railroads, company histories, and a fascinating chapter on the World War I Spruce Production Division of the U.S. Army. There is an appendix showing 28 of the locomotives with details of their manufacture and ownership histories. A special feature is a 24-by-34-inch map insert showing the locations of the rail lines, plotted by the author.

There is not much to criticize in this book, but if I had been asked to give it a peer review prior to publication, I would have pointed out a few minor items that I caught in captions to some of the photos. I may have suggested that the caption under the top picture on page 25 was hardly a “typical” plank road. I grew up on typical plank roads in Coos County, and the one in the photo is certainly not typical! The caption for the bottom picture on the same page, a photo from the Douglas County Museum, says, “Tail block on high lead logging operation in Coos County circa 1910.” Not likely. The picture is obviously of a rigging crew in front of a Tommy Moore block rigged to a high stump, almost certainly a ground lead operation. That innovation came a little later. On page 57, I would have noted that the “construction crane” was in fact a pile driver. The Seeley and Anderson railroad bridge collapsed and killed six men when the first load went over it November 25, 1912. The photo on page 97 clearly shows why. There was extensive cross-bracing on the bridge, but that there was no longitudinal bracing. When the engineer touched the brakes, the forward momentum of the train brought the entire structure down, tragically.

The very informative section about the Spruce Production Division of the U.S. Army, 1917-18, would also have brought a few comments from me. I would have suggested that the reason many of the spruce logs were rived, or split, was not necessarily because they were too big to handle. Split into quarters, the logs could be “quarter sawn” more easily at the mill, providing more of the higher grade, vertical grain lumber needed for airplane production. I would have suggested that in the labor strike of 1917, the IWW was trying to have the prevailing 10-hour workday reduced to eight hours in the logging camps and sawmills. They had been working on that for seven years, so far unsuccessfully. The timber companies were united against it in a “Lumbermen's Protective Association,” sworn to resist any reduction in the work day. Col. Brice D. Disque, commander of the Army's newly formed “Spruce Division,” persuaded the members of the association to agree to the eight-hour day at a meeting in Portland on Feb. 27, 1918. The new work day became immediately effective in all the logging camps and sawmills in Oregon and Washington, and put a stop to serious labor unrest in the region. Col. Disque should get full credit for his part in that historic breakthrough for labor.

The book is full of new information, and the photos are well chosen and well reproduced. The writing is clear and presents much original information on a subject that is very short on written documentation. As Mr. Lansing says in his prologue, very few detailed records were kept of the activities of loggers and miners. Those old-timers did, however, enjoy showing off their equipment during a time when cameras were a wonderful novelty and as a result there is a wealth of photographic evidence of their activities. It is the photographs that make the book, and they work well as primary sources. Of the 220 of them in the book, about 70 percent came from the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum's collection of perhaps 70,000 photographs, supplemented by photos from the Universities of Oregon and Washington, the Douglas County Historical Museum, and many other sources, both public and private. Some had been previously published, but most had not. For readers interested in historic photos, this book is a treasure trove.

Over the years I have read most of the published histories of Coos County and had never come across more accessible accounts of some of the lumber and logging companies. In fact the narrative of the Smith-Powers Logging company and its successor, the Coos Bay Lumber Company, is the best that I have read of that very complicated story. The same can be said for accounts of the Simpson family companies, the Buehner Lumber Company, McDonald and Vaughn, and many others. The intricate connections among those companies with each other is presented here in very clear form and it is a decided contribution to the history of the area. Railroad buffs will find this book an endless source of interest and fascination, and anyone researching histories of the lumber and logging companies will find it indispensable. It may also be the best Father's Day gift idea available this year, especially for older fathers like myself, who love machinery and nostalgia!