Amtrak's 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 ain rhythm on the trip and the travelers.

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

On this trip, I savour ane more unique privilege. Open up on my lap is a new, green-fabric-leap hardcover atlas that traces tens of thousands of miles of railroad runway, 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 manus-drawn maps–a piece of craftsmanship at once so distinctive, and as well then useful, it instantly reveals the sterility of computer-generated maps.

About five miles into Virginia, the purple line in the atlas that traces the old Atlantic Coast Line track says nosotros should be passing the town of Skippers. A tiny village wheels past the window, and merely visible is a dark-green highway sign with white letters. "Skippers," it says. Well, I'll be.

In brusk guild, we are supposed to pass milepost 65, so cross a span over the Meherrin River, followed immediately by the boondocks of Emporia. It'south Amtrak, so we're moving slowly plenty to catch sight of the mileposts. And there it is: Milepost 65 whisks by. In a blink, we're on a span over a river. Almost as before long as we clear the bridge, the train passes a large silver 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 ii. But what's happening here on the Carolinian is different. The lucifer is a thrill, every time. Expect down, spot the crossing with the due east-west rails of the Virginian Railway, whoosh, we're passing right through the intersection. Trace along the track to the side by side water crossing–the Nottoway River–expect out the window, and at that place it comes, correct at milepost 48, only 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 item journey added zest is that Carpenter's maps are so meticulous and engaging–beautiful, really. And I'm taking the train to visit the man who drew them. So it's not the map that has the mileposts where they belong, and the creeks and the curves, it'southward Richard Carpenter. His maps accept mode. They are hand-lettered and hand-fatigued, even the tiniest place-names done in Carpenter'south own careful press. The maps take a point of view, a vocalism. It is as if Richard Carpenter is quietly narrating the trip.

Waiting for me in the chilly morning time at the Stamford, Connecticut, Amtrak station is Dick Carpenter. He'southward the guy standing on the platform who looks just like . . . a train engineer. Carpenter is a retired planning manager for a regional planning bureau in Connecticut, a youthful 70-year-old. He's a big man, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a cap with the archetype logo of the defunct New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. Information technology'south like shooting fish in a barrel to imagine Carpenter jockeying a steam locomotive downward the tracks, cap pulled depression, 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 it is artful. Carpenter aims to draw every mile of railroad runway that existed in the United States in 1946. Volume one, published final summer, covers half dozen mid-Atlantic states and more than than 23,570 miles of active runway. All of which raises a small question and a big i: Why 1946? And why at all?

"No one has ever done this before," says Carpenter, "the portrayal of the tremendous, circuitous, and very loftier-operation rail system that existed correct afterwards World War II." The nation'south railroads had helped win that war, and had yet to feel the bite of competition from airplanes or trucks. The interstate highways didn't exist; back then, the railroads were the interstate highways. In 1946, the railroads were arguably at the acme of their economical power. The nation had more than a quarter-one thousand thousand miles of rail in apply–nearly half dozen times the size of the current interstate arrangement. And in that location was plenty of romance: The demands of war meant that modern diesel locomotives all the same shared the rails with erstwhile steam-powered ones. The atlas, says Carpenter, "is a record, a way of putting down in one place the totality of the arrangement, the geography, the topography. It's a story that needs to be told."

An atlas would seem an unusual vehicle for storytelling, except in the easily of Carpenter. Office of his goal is to capture the richness, complexity, and competitiveness of a organisation that had dozens of major players. The atlas is simply a fix of maps, but it aims to be most history, geography, culture, and business, as well.

On his maps, each railroad gets its own color. So Newark, New Jersey (map 53), for instance, is a tangled yarn brawl of colored tracks from the New York, Susquehanna & Western (dark-green); the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (blue); the New York Central (grey); the Fundamental Railroad Co. of New Jersey (yellow); the Lehigh Valley (orangish); the Reading (chocolate-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 point, 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 book has six separate indexes.

The atlas would exist a quixotic venture except for a couple of things. Information technology is being published past the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Printing, which has plans for at least two more volumes–more if Carpenter tin can keep turning them out. And the atlas, the piece of work of a skilled apprentice edifice a second career out of a hobby, has created a minor stir in railroading and geography circles.

"It is an astonishing piece of work, especially the level of detail," says Maury Klein, professor of history at the Academy of Rhode Isle and the author of a study of the railroad's impact on American life. "It's a treasure trove of obscure information. . . . It answers questions that y'all didn't even think to ask."

"Carpenter has invented his own style of cartography," says John C. Hudson, a professor of geography at Northwestern University. "Artistically, it's a beautiful production. There are no other maps similar this anywhere that I've seen." And then there was Baltimore Sun columnist Fred Rasmussen. "Information technology's the kind of work," Rasmussen wrote, "that only a gang of monks would consider undertaking."

Every bit for Carpenter, he is equally appealingly down-to-earth every bit his work is eccentric. Officially retired for five years, he'due south decorated up in his study, often 7 days a week, working on volumes two, three, iv, and five. 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 record, a way of putting down in i place the totality of the system, the geography, the topography. It's a story that needs to be told."

Dick Carpenter leans over a small low-cal box and starts work on a detail 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 mark. "Gray is the colour their diesels tended to exist," says Carpenter.

For cartoon the colored rails, Carpenter has long since settled on a pen called an Artwin Marvy marker. Each has two points–fine at ane end, medium at the other. Carpenter flips the pen back and forth, like a dental technician using a double-ended tool, picking the bespeak he needs for the line he'due south drawing. He is serious about 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 apply them for also long and risk cartoon muddy lines.

Equally Carpenter draws the tracks and the shorelines, equally he starts to ink in mileposts and the names of stations, what is fascinating is how certain and graceful his lines are. His big right paw has none of the hesitation an ordinary person might have drawing a map. The overall effect is like watching an artist sketch your own face on a blank canvas of paper with a few strokes. It'due south remarkable to picket the features sally. And when he snaps off the light box, the map leaps off the folio. Carpenter grins. "I'yard doing this mainly because I bask it," he says. "Information technology gives me great satisfaction."

Each one of Carpenter'south hundreds of finished maps is the distillation of days of research, and it is the research that gives his atlas its authority, too as its quirky diversity. "It'south sort of similar detective work," Carpenter says. One wall of his modest office is a bookshelf loaded with research that he has filed by railroad. Carpenter doesn't travel the routes he documents. Rather, he uses quondam passenger timetables, more detailed employee timetables, and rail charts that detail every mile. The skill and judgment are in combining not just the sources for each line and non just 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 Academy of Connecticut. He has to be alert for dramatic, modernistic changes to the landscape: Many lakes that be now, for case, are the event of rivers dammed since 1946. At some point, Carpenter decided he wanted to show the management of menstruum of every river and creek, with tiny blue arrows every bit the creeks go out the frame of the map. "Sometimes that's the hardest thing of all to track down, which manner that stream was going," he says.

Carpenter is an amateur mapmaker, but he is not an apprentice geographer. He spent his career every bit a regional planner (he hand-drew his maps in that location, as well), so he's been thinking nigh the mural, and the affect of people and development on the landscape, for fifty years. He started the enquiry and prep maps for what has become the atlas 10 years before 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 get in touch with George Thompson, caput of the Center for American Places, which sometimes teams upward with Johns Hopkins to publish books nigh the American landscape. Thompson connected Carpenter to Johns Hopkins, which publishes the volume in cooperation with his middle.

Carpenter'due south passion for railroads, and for documenting them, goes dorsum to college, and earlier. In some ways, the atlas is the work that, at 70, he'southward been preparing for his whole life.

One of the odder indexes in Carpenter's atlas is besides i that reveals how much more than a set of maps information technology is. It is the "Alphabetize of Runway Pans." In the 1940s, and fifty-fifty earlier, some rail routes were then intensely competitive that railroad companies couldn't afford to waste a minute. The problem: On long routes, steam locomotives needed to be resupplied with water.

So some rail lines were equipped with track pans. For hundreds of feet between the rail at that place was an open up trough, mayhap half-dozen inches deep, filled with water. As a steam locomotive and tender roared over the pan at 60 or 70 miles an 60 minutes, a fireman could lower a scoop and refill the tender with water at full speed.

"These were full-bodied on two lines competing for 16-60 minutes travel time between New York and Chicago," says Carpenter. "Y'all simply couldn't stop and take on water." In the context of 1946, the track pans are as bright a cultural benchmark as instant messaging is today. They are a reminder that we do not live in the commencement 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 motorcar, and drive them down to Baltimore, to deliver them to Johns Hopkins University Printing in person, as he did with the maps for the commencement volume.

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

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