By Donald Crews
A train made of colored cars rolls across the page and keeps picking up speed until the whole thing is a blur, with almost no words in it.
It starts still. A red caboose, an orange tank car, a green cattle car, a purple box car, all sitting on the track with their names printed underneath. Then the train begins to move. It rolls through tunnels and past cities, by day and into the dark, and Crews smears the colors together as it speeds up until the words say only 'going, going, gone.' There's no story here in the usual sense, no character to follow, no problem to solve. It's a train crossing the page and getting faster, and for a train-mad two-year-old that is the whole point.
This is the train stripped down to the two things a small child actually loves about trains: the colors and the going. Crews names each car, so your child picks up a fistful of new words, then he takes the train from a standstill to a blur so they feel the speed on the page. The near-total absence of words is the point. A child too little to read can carry the whole book themselves. It won a Caldecott Honor in 1979 and has stayed in print ever since.