Pelican Road is a screaming train ride of a book, with sharp curves and downhill grades that are taken at breakneck speeds, but it is a not a train you want to stop and not a train you wish to alight from until the bitter end. It follows the world of steam engine trains on the cusp of WWII and the men who run the route between Louisiana and Mississippi, most of them aging as are the trains themselves.

There was an added level of enjoyment for me, brought about by the fact of my brother being a railroad man back in the days when telegraph was still the method of communication and when handing off messages to the moving trains was still a practice. I have heard his stories of traveling the railways and staying the small towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I recognized some of the language and, while the time portrayed here is far earlier than my brother’s time, I could recognize the special camaraderie he felt with his fellow railroad men.

I cared about all of these men, flawed as they were, and loved them for their devotion to the job and to one another. I especially felt the connection to Artemus and Frank and thought the flashbacks to their war days added a level of depth and understanding to them that would have missed without that background.

What an amazing writer Howard Bahr is. His descriptive passages are remarkable in their ability to touch all your senses. At the same time, I felt no word was unnecessary or wasted. There was meaning in every sentence. Bahr is a careful writer, he is as careful and professional with his craft as those men he portrayed on the Pelican Road were with theirs.
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I’ve been wanting to read Howard Bahr’s books for a long time but it wasn’t until Diane at the Goodreads On the Southern Literary Trail group chose Pelican Road as a group selection that I finally had a chance to read and discuss one with others, so thank you ma’am for that.

If you are in any way interested in trains, this is the book for you. It even reads like a train ride, starting out slowly with lots of fits and starts, then building up steam until soon it is barreling along at a break-neck pace closing in relentlessly on its inevitable final destination. We meet many people on our journey, most of them train crewmen, but even in the midst of their shared camaraderie there is a sense of loneliness. It is Christmas Eve and everyone else is rushing home to be with their families for the holidays. But not Frank Smith, or A.P. Dunn, or Eddie Cox, the fireman making his last run before retiring, or Bobby Necaise, or Artemus Kane or even Ira Nussbaum, the irascible conductor who is as determined as any to get his passengers home safely.

Theirs was a dangerous job. The slightest lapse in attention could cause a trainman a finger, if he is lucky, or his life if he wasn’t. To successfully run a railroad, with multiple trains running in different directions at different speeds required intricate timing where a error in judgement could spell disaster.

And so the tension builds. The reader knows that disaster looms ahead. But can the eminently capable train crews avert disaster? Who is to say? Howard Bahr, of course.

Bottom line: This book holds few surprises but it is still very enjoyable. Bahr’s prose and descriptive ability is magnificent. I am very interested in reading his Civil War trilogy starting with The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War.
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FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It is southern fiction, about railroaders back around WWII. Well written and I found it compelling.

A good railroad story - interesting characters and a plot that kept you involved. Better than I thought it would be. ( )