Originally envisioned as just two parts, Ed Ridolph’s exhaustive guide to the decline and rebirth of streetcar systems in the U.S. and Canada, “Rails to Rubber to Rails Again,” is growing so much during production that the series is being expanded to four parts. All four parts will include news current with the dates of publication rather than the cover dates.
Part 1, Alabama to Montana weighed in at a whopping 84 full-color, ad-free pages when published in November 2008, the largest issue of Headlights ever printed.
Part 2, Nebraska–Pennsylvania, which arrived at Fulton Press last week, is 76 full-color, ad-free pages.
Part 3 of the expanded series will cover Rhode Island to Wisconsin and be dated 2006, and Part 4, dated 2007, will cover Canada. It’s too early to predict how long Parts 3 and 4 will run. The overall length of the issues is dependent on how many appropriate images we can find to illustrate the text, and we’ve been finding a lot.
All ERA members in good standing receive the Association’s magazine, Headlights, America’s premier journal dedicated to light rail transit, subways, interurbans, electric railroads and other forms of electric transportation. Currently published twice a year, each ad-free issue is packed with in-depth coverage of transit systems, news and book reviews. Systems visited during the many exciting ERA trips and conventions each year are regularly featured, such as the Czech Republic, Twin Cities, San Francisco, Houston-Dallas and more. With its full-color images by renowned transit photographers, and detailed route maps that appear nowhere else, you’ll see why fans call Headlights “the National Geographic of train magazines.”
Headlights is the product of a handful of unpaid volunteers. Each issue is designed and edited by Sandy Campbell (ERA #5228) with the help of a small staff of contributing editors, John Pappas, Ray Berger and Frank Miklos. Articles and photographs are contributed by leaders in the transit field like Ed Ridolph, John Stern and Trevor Logan.
Printing and mailing of Headlights is paid for with membership dues, not advertising. It is printed in Lititz, Pa. by Fulton Press on state-of-the-art equipment from electronic files composed with Adobe InDesign CS4. Instead of the occassional color page that Headlights used to print in the past, the ERA worked with Fulton’s experts to increase color usage and improve image quality. And as more contributors switch to using digital cameras, the photographic reproduction quality in Headlights will get even better.
Headlights is now full-color with more pages in a single issue than the total pages of past years, often with four-page color map supplements. Part 1 of “Rails to Rubber to Rails Again” is the biggest issue of Headlights ever published, weighing in at a whopping 84 full-color, ad-free pages!