Your child hears a train two streets away before you do, lines the engines up nose to tail on the rug, and wants one more train book at bedtime. Seven train books here, and you pick by your child's age and by which part of the obsession you're feeding tonight: the engine with a face and feelings, the sheer motion of a real train going by, a train ride to somewhere, or the real steel machine and how it works.
There are a few different things a train-obsessed child is chasing, and this shelf sorts them. Some want the engine with a face and feelings, which is particular to trains in a way it isn't to cars - that's The Little Engine That Could, where a small blue engine hauls a stranded train over the mountain on 'I think I can,' and Thomas the Tank Engine, a treasury of short stories about engines who boast and sulk and get put right. Some want the pure motion of a real train, the color and the going and the sound, and that's Freight Train, near-wordless, a train speeding up until it blurs. Some want the ride - a train carrying them somewhere - and that's Steam Train, Dream Train, a night train that loads up and drifts off to sleep, and The Polar Express, the Christmas Eve ride to the North Pole. And some want the real steel machine and how it actually works, which is Locomotive, Brian Floca's true story of crossing the country by rail in 1869, and DK Eyewitness: Train, real photographs and no story at all. Start wherever your child already is.