Two of my favorite things...

appear on this brand new future cover for the All Aboard PAX collection where Last Train to Clarkdale will be one of the five featured tales. They are, of course, trains and hunky guys! This one is totally drool-worthy and I am on pins and needles as I wait for the bound-to-be-awesome cover for Last Train! I'll share as soon as I get it!

For just a little background, I first have to admit that both my grandfathers were career railroaders. It skipped a generation then but my brother, with whom I now share a home, put in close to forty years in the industry and between us we have many friends who are or have been associated with the train business.

My earlier tale, Workin' on the Rairoad, celebrated the side of the business my brother was involved in, the critical aspect of maintaining the track to keep those monsters rolling. I am working on a sequel titled Second Summer which I may have ready to submit before the end of the year so it should be released in 2014.

Last Train depicts quite a different side since one hero is involved in administrative work, the scheduling and shipment of large and high-priority freight cargo. And it also features a real-life wonderful scenic tourist excursion which uses the tracks that originally brought Santa Fe freight into our home area in Arizona's beautiful Verde Valley. Add a bit of bulk to the reclining eye candy here and a neat beard, make the eyes blue and you'd have a good facsimile of the second hero in Last Train.

I am so delighted to be able to keep "the romance of the rail" alive in some of my fiction. While passenger travel is not a big thing anymore, I can assure you that rail freight is very much alive and well. It's a critical link in the world economy  getting raw materials where they are needed and the end products to where we can buy them. If you are interested or curious, there is a great magazine, called simply Trains and they have a web site with lots of neat photos, articles and news as well. The URL for it is http://trc.Trains,com/   in case you'd like to take a look. They also have a Classic Trains magazine about historical/nostalgic railoading which I subscribe to and use as a reference aid. Wearing my "Gwynn Morgan" hat, I'm in the developmental stages of a novel about a "Harvey Girl" back around 1900 or so and another tale of the construction of a narrow gauge line into the booming mining town of Jerome, AZ a bit earlier. More on them in some future day!