Sunday, February 15, 2009

I've Been Working on the Railroad...

Here are two great train related records I picked up this weekend at the local thrift shop.
The first is "The Little Engine that Could" from RCA Victor on two 78 Long Play records and in a nice record jacket with artwork and words inside. The Little Engine that Could was one of the first books I gave to my son. I found a great old vintage copy of the book at a thrift shop and read it to him. He liked it so much that we bought him his own copy reproduction copy of the book for his bookshelf. I'm sure we'll have fun listening to this new version together as well.
I could not find a date anywhere on the jacket or albums, but my guess would be that it is from the 1940's. If you would like to take a listen to this one, you can surf over to Kiddie Records Weekly where they posted a great mp3 file of this recording as well as many more vintage kids records.
The second record is "Railroad Sounds - The Sounds of a Vanishing Era" from 1957. What we get here is literally 20+ minutes of clickety clack, clickety clack, whistle whistle, chug chug. I am going to guess that this wasn't a huge seller. Hard to imagine someone pulling this off the shelve and putting it on the turn table, turning up the volume and sitting back to listen to the sounds of trains.

1 comment:

DSB said...

Wow, I actually had this. I used it for backgrounds when recording stupid 'radio dramas' with my friends. I had a bunch of sound effect ones. I thought the same as you: who would actually listen to this?