Amtrak'due south train #80, the Carolinian, is rocking steadily north out of the Carolinas, into Virginia. And like every form of transportation, the Carolinian has begun to impose its own rhythm on the trip and the travelers.

Even in ordinary charabanc class, train seats are roomier than airplane seats, and there's no seat belt to cinch yourself in with. A railroad train trip begins with a kind of relaxation, an exhalation.

On this trip, I bask one more unique privilege. Open on my lap is a new, greenish-material-bound hardcover atlas that traces tens of thousands of miles of railroad track, and I'm expecting to be able to watch our progress both out the window and on the crisp, colored lines in the atlas.

The atlas is the work of Richard Carpenter: 220 hand-fatigued maps–a piece of craftsmanship at one time and so distinctive, and also so useful, information technology instantly reveals the sterility of reckoner-generated maps.

Most v miles into Virginia, the purple line in the atlas that traces the old Atlantic Coast Line rail says we should be passing the town of Skippers. A tiny village wheels by the window, and just visible is a green highway sign with white messages. "Skippers," it says. Well, I'll be.

In brusk social club, nosotros are supposed to pass milepost 65, and then cross a span over the Meherrin River, followed immediately past the town of Emporia. It's Amtrak, so we're moving slowly enough to catch sight of the mileposts. And there it is: Milepost 65 whisks by. In a blink, nosotros're on a bridge over a river. Almost as before long as nosotros clear the bridge, the train passes a large silvery equipment box stenciled "Emporia."

I've been traveling with maps on my lap for decades. I like the traveling and the maps, and the reassurance that comes from matching up the two. But what's happening here on the Carolinian is different. The friction match is a thrill, every time. Look down, spot the crossing with the east-due west track of the Virginian Railway, whoosh, we're passing right through the intersection. Trace along the track to the next water crossing–the Nottoway River–look out the window, and at that place information technology comes, right at milepost 48, just as the atlas says it should.

Adults don't much marvel that things are where a map says they should be. With satellites and computers, how hard is that? What gives this detail journeying added zest is that Carpenter'due south maps are so meticulous and engaging–beautiful, really. And I'm taking the train to visit the human who drew them. And then it's not the map that has the mileposts where they belong, and the creeks and the curves, information technology's Richard Carpenter. His maps accept style. They are hand-lettered and paw-drawn, fifty-fifty the tiniest place-names done in Carpenter'due south own careful printing. The maps have a point of view, a vocalization. It is as if Richard Carpenter is quietly narrating the trip.

Waiting for me in the chilly morn at the Stamford, Connecticut, Amtrak station is Dick Carpenter. He's the guy continuing on the platform who looks just like . . . a train engineer. Carpenter is a retired planning managing director for a regional planning agency in Connecticut, a youthful seventy-yr-onetime. He'southward a big human, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a cap with the archetype logo of the defunct New York, New Oasis, and Hartford Railroad. It's easy to imagine Carpenter jockeying a steam locomotive downwards the tracks, cap pulled low, optics squinting, elbow out the window.

What Dick Carpenter has engineered is A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, an encyclopedic work that is as audacious as information technology is artful. Carpenter aims to draw every mile of railroad track that existed in the United states in 1946. Volume ane, published final summer, covers 6 mid-Atlantic states and more 23,570 miles of active track. All of which raises a pocket-size question and a big one: Why 1946? And why at all?

"No i has always washed this before," says Carpenter, "the portrayal of the tremendous, complex, and very loftier-performance rail system that existed right afterwards World War Two." The nation'due south railroads had helped win that state of war, and had yet to experience the bite of competition from airplanes or trucks. The interstate highways didn't be; back so, the railroads were the interstate highways. In 1946, the railroads were arguably at the acme of their economic power. The nation had more than a quarter-million miles of rail in utilise–nearly six times the size of the current interstate system. And at that place was plenty of romance: The demands of war meant that modern diesel locomotives nevertheless shared the rails with one-time steam-powered ones. The atlas, says Carpenter, "is a record, a way of putting down in 1 place the totality of the arrangement, the geography, the topography. Information technology's a story that needs to be told."

An atlas would seem an unusual vehicle for storytelling, except in the hands of Carpenter. Part of his goal is to capture the richness, complexity, and competitiveness of a system that had dozens of major players. The atlas is just a set of maps, but information technology aims to be about history, geography, culture, and business, likewise.

On his maps, each railroad gets its own color. So Newark, New Jersey (map 53), for instance, is a tangled yarn ball of colored tracks from the New York, Susquehanna & Western (light-green); the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (blue); the New York Central (grayness); the Central Railroad Co. of New Jersey (yellowish); the Lehigh Valley (orangish); the Reading (brown); the Morristown & Erie (black); and the Pennsylvania (red).

But the atlas doesn't just show tracks. Carpenter shows, and names, every station–passenger and nonpassenger. He shows every point tower, every crew-change signal, every tunnel, every bridge; he shows mileposts for every railroad every five miles, except in the 43 detail maps, where he shows every milepost. The atlas has an appendix with the name of every railroad documented (213). The volume has half-dozen separate indexes.

The atlas would be a quixotic venture except for a couple of things. Information technology is being published by the prestigious Johns Hopkins Academy Press, which has plans for at least two more volumes–more than if Carpenter can continue turning them out. And the atlas, the piece of work of a skilled amateur building a 2nd career out of a hobby, has created a minor stir in railroading and geography circles.

"Information technology is an amazing piece of work, peculiarly the level of detail," says Maury Klein, professor of history at the University of Rhode Isle and the writer of a study of the railroad's impact on American life. "It's a treasure trove of obscure data. . . . It answers questions that you lot didn't even recall to ask."

"Carpenter has invented his ain fashion of cartography," says John C. Hudson, a professor of geography at Northwestern University. "Artistically, it's a beautiful product. In that location are no other maps like this anywhere that I've seen." And and so there was Baltimore Sun columnist Fred Rasmussen. "Information technology'southward the kind of work," Rasmussen wrote, "that only a gang of monks would consider undertaking."

Every bit for Carpenter, he is as appealingly downward-to-earth as his work is eccentric. Officially retired for v years, he's busy up in his report, oftentimes vii days a week, working on volumes two, iii, four, and v. His maps are both compulsively detailed and artistically rendered, and in that way, they are a reflection of the unlikely mix of Carpenter's ain personality. The atlas opens with an introduction illustrated by elegant, wistful line drawings of railroad scenes. Carpenter did the line drawings, too.

The atlas "is a tape, a way of putting down in one place the totality of the system, the geography, the topography. It's a story that needs to exist told."

Dick Carpenter leans over a small light box and starts piece of work on a particular map of the railroads converging in Albany, New York. The Hudson River comes to life in blue, its shore a little ragged and uneven through Albany. The New York Central tracks are laid in next, using a gray marker. "Gray is the color their diesels tended to be," says Carpenter.

For drawing the colored rails, Carpenter has long since settled on a pen called an Artwin Marvy marker. Each has 2 points–fine at one cease, medium at the other. Carpenter flips the pen back and forth, similar a dental technician using a double-ended tool, picking the point he needs for the line he'southward drawing. He is serious nearly his pens; each one has a tiny slip of paper taped to the shaft with the date it went into service. This is and then he doesn't use them for as well long and risk drawing muddy lines.

As Carpenter draws the tracks and the shorelines, as he starts to ink in mileposts and the names of stations, what is fascinating is how sure and svelte his lines are. His big right hand has none of the hesitation an ordinary person might have cartoon a map. The overall effect is similar watching an creative person sketch your own face on a blank sheet of paper with a few strokes. It'due south remarkable to watch the features emerge. And when he snaps off the calorie-free box, the map leaps off the page. Carpenter grins. "I'one thousand doing this mainly because I bask it," he says. "Information technology gives me great satisfaction."

Each one of Carpenter's hundreds of finished maps is the distillation of days of research, and it is the enquiry that gives his atlas its potency, as well equally its quirky multifariousness. "It's sort of like detective work," Carpenter says. One wall of his pocket-sized function is a bookshelf loaded with research that he has filed past railroad. Carpenter doesn't travel the routes he documents. Rather, he uses old rider timetables, more than detailed employee timetables, and rail charts that detail every mile. The skill and judgment are in combining non only the sources for each line and not but all the lines onto a single map. They are also in resolving conflicts.

Carpenter occasionally travels to consult map collections at the New York Public Library and the University of Connecticut. He has to exist alert for dramatic, modern changes to the landscape: Many lakes that exist now, for case, are the result of rivers dammed since 1946. At some point, Carpenter decided he wanted to show the management of flow of every river and creek, with tiny blue arrows every bit the creeks leave the frame of the map. "Sometimes that's the hardest thing of all to track downwards, which way that stream was going," he says.

Carpenter is an amateur mapmaker, just he is non an amateur geographer. He spent his career as a regional planner (he hand-drew his maps at that place, likewise), and so he's been thinking about the landscape, and the impact of people and evolution on the landscape, for l years. He started the research and prep maps for what has become the atlas 10 years earlier he retired. In the late 1990s, Carpenter sent a few of his maps to an old friend, a professor at Rutgers, who recommended that Carpenter make it touch with George Thompson, head of the Center for American Places, which sometimes teams up with Johns Hopkins to publish books well-nigh the American landscape. Thompson connected Carpenter to Johns Hopkins, which publishes the book in cooperation with his heart.

Carpenter's passion for railroads, and for documenting them, goes back to higher, and earlier. In some ways, the atlas is the work that, at 70, he's been preparing for his whole life.

One of the odder indexes in Carpenter'southward atlas is also one that reveals how much more than a set of maps it is. Information technology is the "Alphabetize of Rail Pans." In the 1940s, and even earlier, some rail routes were so intensely competitive that railroad companies couldn't afford to waste matter a minute. The problem: On long routes, steam locomotives needed to be resupplied with h2o.

So some rail lines were equipped with rail pans. For hundreds of anxiety between the rails in that location was an open trough, perhaps half dozen inches deep, filled with water. As a steam locomotive and tender roared over the pan at 60 or lxx miles an hour, a fireman could lower a scoop and refill the tender with water at total speed.

"These were concentrated on two lines competing for 16-hour travel time between New York and Chicago," says Carpenter. "You lot just couldn't cease and take on water." In the context of 1946, the rail pans are equally vivid a cultural criterion as instant messaging is today. They are a reminder that nosotros do non live in the offset age of urgency or ingenuity.

Carpenter expected to turn in the finished maps for volume two (New York and New England) in January. He planned to pack them in a box, put them in the backseat of his car, and bulldoze them down to Baltimore, to deliver them to Johns Hopkins University Press in person, every bit he did with the maps for the first volume.

Carpenter keeps his prep maps in blue 3-ring binders on the shelves in his study. He appreciates not but his own skill only the remarkable fact that an academic press is publishing his piece of work–and doing so in such fine fashion. He realizes that the maps in the bluish binders could easily accept stayed on the shelves of his report.

"A lot of people have something to say and never have the chance to say it," says Carpenter. "I'1000 lucky. And I like to express myself with maps."