Hardcover, 128 pages, standard portrait format, Color photographs with captions.
There are some really neat pictures here. Some cars are away from their home road but look like they just came out of the paint shop - maybe they did. Some small roads get multiple pages and images like the Ann Arbor and Minneapolis & St. Louis. Some small roads and private owner cars get one picture. It's not all "Boxcar Red' as there were many colorful cars seen in the 1950s. This book begins with Ann Arbor and ends with Norfolk & Western and is arranged alphabetically. So, no PRR and Southern Pacific and many others. Maybe another volume will cover those companies.
The 1950s are arguably the classic era for freight cars, pre-dating the mergers that would erase many venerable railroads and leave us with new names such as Penn Central, Seaboard Coast Line, and Erie-Lackawanna. In the 1950s, "boxcar red" was everywhere, but colorful new paint schemes were arriving and turning heads. It was the final decade of friction bearings and roofwalks, and the ultimate years of stock cars, ice-bunker refrigerator cars, and even the XM 40' boxcar! s, standard portrait size, Color images with captions.