Vintage Intercity Electric Railway Industry In Canada 1966 – John F Due, University Of Toronto Press, Dust Jacket, Hardcover

The Intercity Electric Railway Industry in Canada by John F. Due, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1966 as number eighteen in the Canadian Studies in Economics series. A hardcover in blue cloth, lettered on the spine, in its original green jacket with a line drawing of an interurban car on the front.

The interurban was neither a streetcar nor a steam railway but the thing between: an electric line running town to town, and in Canada the whole industry lasted from 1887 to 1959. Seventy-two years, opened and closed.

Due wrote it in two halves. The first takes the industry as a whole — how it grew, how the companies were financed, why it went. The second gives a short history of each of the twenty-five firms that ever operated one, which is the half that gets used: it is the only place several of those companies are written up at all. Photographs were gathered with the Upper Canada Railway Society; the maps came from Stanford, McGraw-Hill and Southam-Maclean.

Published 1966, stated on the title page, with the series list opposite placing it at number eighteen. The preface is signed from Urbana, Illinois, where Due taught. The jacket is the one it was issued in — green paper, unclipped — which on an academic hardcover is the part that usually goes first, thrown out or taped over by a library.

A companion to the study Due wrote with George Hilton on the American interurbans in 1960, made separate because he thought Canada different enough to need its own book. One line in the preface is worth having: in the early fifties I had visited the lines then still in operation. He rode them. By the time this was printed the last had been shut seven years.