About Railroad Man's Magazine

Railroad Man's Magazine

Railroad Man's Magazine was an American pulp magazine founded by Frank A. Munsey and first published in New York City in October 1906. It holds a recognized place in publishing history as the first specialized pulp magazine: where Munsey's famous Argosy offered fiction on every subject, Railroad Man's devoted itself entirely to one — the railroad — mixing fictionalized stories of working railroaders with articles and profiles of real railroad operations, past and present. Its first offices stood in the Flatiron Building, and its first readers were not hobbyists, for no organized railroad enthusiast movement yet existed, but railroad men and retirees themselves.

The magazine's history came in two great acts. The original Railroad Man's Magazine ran from 1906 until January 1919, when it was merged into The Argosy. After a decade's silence it was revived in 1929, was simplified in title to Railroad Stories in 1932 and to Railroad Magazine in 1937, passed with the Munsey company to Popular Publications in 1942, and continued — increasingly as a railfan journal of history and photography — until January 1979, when it merged with Railfan magazine to form Railfan and Railroad. Under its successive names, the line begun in 1906 published for more than seventy years.

Frank Munsey and the First Specialized Pulp

Frank Anderson Munsey (1854–1925), born in Maine, had moved to New York in 1892 and built a publishing empire on a simple insight: cheap fiction, sold cheaply, could sell enormously. His Argosy became in December 1896 the first true all-fiction pulp, printed on rough wood-pulp paper, and by the early 1900s was selling half a million copies a month; Munsey's Magazine, his ten-cent monthly, reached circulations of 700,000. Railroad Man's Magazine, begun in October 1906, applied the pulp formula to a single trade and passion for the first time.

The experiment was quickly imitated — Munsey himself followed it in March 1907 with The Ocean, a pulp of sea stories — but the railroad title was the durable one. Railroading in 1906 was the largest industry in America, employer of well over a million men, and the machine at the center of national life. A magazine that treated engineers, dispatchers, brakemen, and hoboes as heroes of adventure, and that explained the operations readers saw daily, had a constituency no general magazine could serve as directly.

For Railroaders First

The new magazine was aimed initially at working railroaders and retired railroad men, and its cornerstone was the fictionalized story of working on the railroad: tales of runs made and wrecks survived, of boomers drifting between roads, of dispatchers holding a division together through a blizzard night. Alongside the fiction stood fact — profiles of current and historic railroad operations around the country, explanations of practice, and reminiscence. Fiction and nonfiction shared one assumption, that the railroad was a complete world with its own heroes, villains, craft, and lore.

The formula found readers far outside the roundhouse. The young H. P. Lovecraft, later famous as a writer of weird fiction, was known to have read the entire run of the magazine from cover to cover as a boy — a testament to how completely its railroad world could absorb an imaginative reader who had never worked a day on the road. Such readers, devoted but unorganized, were the raw material from which a hobby would later be made, largely by this magazine's own successor.

Merger into The Argosy, 1919

The First World War strained every pulp publisher: paper shortages forced reductions in page counts across the Munsey line, and costs rose sharply during and after the war. Munsey's response was consolidation. After the issue of January 18, 1919, Railroad Man's Magazine was merged into The Argosy, which was briefly retitled Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine before reverting to Argosy alone with the issue of May 31, 1919. The railroad title, as a separate magazine, ceased to exist, and in 1920 Munsey performed a similar merger of All-Story Weekly into Argosy, keeping the combined magazine's price at ten cents while rivals charged twenty.

Munsey died in 1925, leaving, among his legacies, a gift of some 25 million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His company continued under his name, and the dormant railroad title remained among its properties — an asset waiting for the moment when a new generation's interest in railroads made revival worthwhile. That moment arrived at the end of the decade.

Revival in 1929 and Freeman Hubbard

In 1929 the freelance author William Edward Hayes announced that he was bringing out a new railroad pulp of his own. The Munsey Company, rather than compete with him, recruited him to edit instead a revival of Railroad Man's Magazine, and the title returned to the newsstands that year. The arrangement was brief: upon the abrupt departure of the editor-in-chief in 1930, Freeman H. Hubbard took over the editorship and ran the magazine for most of the rest of its life — though, in an oddity of the house, he went uncredited on the masthead for many years.

Under Hubbard the revived magazine found its mature form. In 1932 the title was simplified to Railroad Stories, and in 1937 it became simply Railroad Magazine, the name it would keep for its remaining forty years. Hubbard, who wrote the magazine's retrospective history for its successor in 1979, shaped a journal that was part pulp, part trade reminiscence, and part club bulletin — exactly fitted to the readership that was now forming around it.

Building the Railfan Movement

Through the 1930s Railroad Magazine performed a service no other publication attempted: it helped create the organized railroad enthusiast movement. It encouraged communication between enthusiasts, reported the activities of railroad clubs and museums around the country, and promoted special fan-trip excursions operated with the cooperation of the railroads themselves. Readers who had consumed railroad stories in isolation became, through the magazine's columns, a community with institutions, rituals, and a name — railfans.

The timing mattered. The 1930s were the last great decade of steam and of the railroad's cultural supremacy, and the magazine's mixture of heroic fiction, operating history, and enthusiast news taught its readers to value what was about to vanish. Articles tended toward human interest and legend rather than business or technical analysis — accidents, heroic railroaders, train robberies, and famous runs — the mythology of the iron road, curated monthly. When the pulp fiction eventually faded from its pages, this documentary and communal function is what carried the title forward.

The Popular Publications Era

In December 1942 the magazine's ownership changed with its parent's. Popular Publications, the largest of the pulp houses, purchased the Munsey Company, and Railroad Magazine continued under the new imprint. The mid-century magazine was a substantial monthly operation: its staff in 1951 included editor Henry B. Comstock, associate editors K. M. Campbell and Ted Sanchargin, art editor George H. Mabie, and Stephen B. Maguire editing the Electric Lines department — a structure of specialist columns covering steam, electric traction, and transit that served distinct tribes within the readership.

Across the postwar decades the magazine chronicled, and mourned, the dieselization of American railroading and the collapse of passenger service. Fiction receded; photography, history, and current operations reporting advanced. The magazine's identity shifted from the pulp its name had pioneered to something closer to a journal of record for enthusiasts — while retaining, in features drawn from its fiction years and in its storytelling tone, a flavor no slick rail journal reproduced.

The Final Decade

By the 1970s the magazine was again edited by Freeman Hubbard, half a century after he had first taken it over, with associate editor Gordon T. Wilbur and a bench of department editors for steam locomotives, diesel locomotives, transit topics, passenger trains, technical matters, and the Information Booth readers' service. Observers of the late magazine noted that it had become known as much for photographs featuring conveniently posed attractive women around trains as for editorial content — a newsstand expedient of a title fighting declining revenue and readership in a shrinking market.

The end, when it came, was abrupt. Railroad Magazine ceased publication with its January 1979 issue, without announcement in its own pages. In a deal arranged with Carstens Publications, the title was merged into Carstens' Railfan magazine, subscribers' obligations were fulfilled with the combined Railfan and Railroad, and several of Railroad's columnists — Steve Maguire with Transit Topics and Mike Eagleson with In Search of Steam among them — continued in the new journal. The Railroad Magazine name remained in the combined masthead until 2015, and White River Productions, successor publisher of Railfan and Railroad, retains the copyrights in the magazine's content and trademarks.

Reprints and Historical Standing

The magazine's fiction found a second life in the collector era. In 2015 Bold Venture Press began issuing authorized reprint volumes of stories selected from Railroad Stories, organized by author, series character, and theme, and reprinting illustrated features from the pulp years such as Joe Easley's Along the Iron Pike drawings and Stookie Allen's Who's Who in the Crew. Exhibitions on the railroad in American legend and life have displayed the magazine's issues as artifacts of the culture it created.

Its historical standing rests on two achievements. As Railroad Man's Magazine in 1906, it invented the specialized pulp — the single-subject fiction magazine — a form that would multiply across every hobby and trade. And as Railroad Magazine in the 1930s, it effectively founded organized railfandom, converting solitary readers into a movement whose institutions still thrive. Few magazines have both created a publishing category and organized their own audience; the Munsey railroad title, across its seventy-three years and four names, did both.