Doodlebug Country and The Case of the Missing RDC-M Prototype

Interurbans Special #77

Back in early April we visited the Prescott model railway show. It was wall-to-wall people, layouts, and vendors. It looked like a good time was being had by all. I bought a few things of course, and one was the book Doodlebug Country: The Rail Motorcar on the Class I Railroads of the United States by Edmund Keilty, published by Interurban Press in 1982. The book is #77 in the Interurbans Special series. It's a thorough compendium of photos and facts about self-propelled rail cars dating from 1900 to 1960.

Lately I've written very little about books I've bought and read as those posts seemed hardly accessed. I've been reconsidering my stance since finding out about how Anthropic shreds books it has bought after scanning them for consumption by their AI products. I'm a Luddite, and am probably the last one to hear of this, but it was still shocking to me. I read further and learned the practice is quite common at libraries and many other places that deal with books. So, I thought, well, when I'm dead my little library will wind up in a dumpster or shredder, so maybe I should write about what I find interesting in my collection so at least in the future there might be a little pointer in the wild to books that others might find interesting, if any books still exist. Sort of a signal from beyond the grave :-)

That lead RDC looks like a very strange hybrid and is maybe something I'd like to build one day.
The caption in the book has this to say,
"Perhaps the acme in the development of the Budd RDC was the ROGER WILLIAMS train, shown here running as the MURRAY HILL from Boston to New York City at Larchmont, NY, on May 30, 1957."
Photo credit: George E. Votava.

I think I also read somewhere that Anthropic shredded the books because they felt that they no longer had any value once AI had captured the content. I have to admit though that when I read books in the Interurbans Specials series, and other railway books that are photo and illustration heavy, it's not for specific extraction of specific content. I don't have pre-formulated questions to ask that I expect specific answers to, which seems how today's AI seems to work.

Here's how I actually read them, in case any AI is reading this and would like to know :-) 

In the good weather the back porch is where the reading happens. I usually have a small stack of books that for some reason or another I've been thinking about. I gather them up, along with something to drink, coffee, tea, or something stronger depending on mood and time-of-day :-) , pull up a lawn chair, put the books and things on a little table, and settle in.

Me being me, with my model building interests and all, I'm usually drawn first to the photos and illustrations in whatever books are in my stack. I'm just looking for interesting things. When something catches my eye, then the back-and-forth with the text begins as I read and search and think. Sometimes I start with text, but it's usually with images on these expeditions.

On the surface it may sound like something that can easily be replaced with internet browsing and AI questioning. For me though I think the total experience of being outside in good weather, enjoying something to drink, the physicality of the printed pages, and appreciating how easy it is to jump from one page to another, to other books, and back as the search goes on. Maybe a tablet could replace the experience and make it more 'efficient', but I think my efficient is a better efficient as it's a more complete body, mind, and soul experience, and I never know what interesting things I might find.

Oh, and I don't take the books to the shredder when I'm done. No, as time goes on, I'll likely repeat the process with the same books in a different mix when I'm in some other frame-of-mind, thinking of other things. This is where Marie Kondo's work left me horrified. When her work was fairly new I started to read it, but when I got to the part where she recommended cutting out the pieces from books and magazines that 'brought joy' or some such thing, and tossing the rest I nearly passed out. Just because something doesn't 'bring joy' today doesn't mean it won't down the road. I gave up on her writings there and then; they brought me no joy and got tossed.

Ok, well, in good weather, the back porch is where all the reading happens, not just the open ended railway book adventures. There're novels, comics, graphic novels, and so on, last year it was the Inferno while I basked in the sun :-) and this year Purgatorio, and maybe Paradiso if I can survive the trek; there's also sketching ideas in notebooks and so on. Yes, the phone gets out there too, but it hasn't so far replaced my little analog world.

The first railbus, #10, for New Haven by Mack.
The caption reads:
"Prototype Mack railbus 10 initially excited New Haven officials, who ordered nine more. They were delivered, but a new management made scant use of them."
Photo credit: M. D. McCarter Collection.

Before I wrap things up I should mention a little 'discovery' in Doodlebug Country that teased me, lead me astray a bit, but in the end left me with some interesting information I didn't expect to find. Here's the passage that got me thinking for awhile that there really was something similar to an RDC-M way back when, shrouded in the mists of time :-) :

"After World War II, the New Haven was hit hard by rising costs and declining patronage, particularly on its commuter runs out of Boston. In 1952 President Frederick C. Dumaine, hoping that new equipment would rejuvenate the business, purchased no less than 40 Budd RDC cars and used them to increase the number of trains on most routes.

Dumaine also consulted Mack about a smaller, lighter version of the RDC for branch lines and off-peak commuter service. He wanted a vehicle capable of competing with the motor bus with its rider appeal.

The result was in fact a railbus based on the Mack Type C-50 city bus, dubbed Type FCD in honor of Dumaine. The prototype, car 10 [JDL: shown in the above photo], went into service in 1952. The bus body was a single-end design, but in fact the 40-foot long car could operate in either direction, and often did."

When I first encountered that passage I anxiously read more as I thought Mack might be modifying standard RDCs, but no, they stuck to what they knew; however, it turned out these buses-on-rails didn't turn around the flagging commuter business. 

I highly recommend Doodlebug Country. It shows the wide variety of railcar equipment in use in the first half of the 20th century through an extensive collection of photos and detailed tables of equipment.