Book Review: Delaware & Hudson Power in color

Recently for Christmas my lovely wife bought me a new book: Delaware & Hudson Power in Color - Three Diesel Eras between 1944 and 1991 by Robert Yanosey. It is a new book (2019), and the subject is one that is right up my alley as anyone familiar with my blog knows how much I love to study D&H locomotives... especially those from 1984! It seems to me that there have been a lot of recent D&H books released in the past five years though that perception might be because I am now buying them and they aren't cheap. While going through it, I was first immediately impressed with how it was laid out. Each class of diesel engine has its own section, and the pictures are very good. Being that it is a "In Color" book I wouldn't expect anything less, but there were many shots of the later diesels that I hadn't seen before.

When it got to the second generation models, especially the RS11 and RS36 engines, I started to laugh because it looked a lot like my own blog. When I started breaking down the D&H diesel engines by road number and paint scheme this book didn't exist, and perhaps if it did I wouldn't have bothered doing it myself. That being said, I plan to finish my series on the blog but for those who want to see just how crazy the D&H's paint shop got this book is a must.

The sections featuring the GE-U boats probably contained the most new knowledge to me as I am pretty ignorant to GE engines as they generally look the same. I wish there was more coverage on the EMD Geeps (there were two of them total) but there was at least one picture of one of them. I was a bit disappointed that the last chapter dealing with the later years didn't feature a lot of the engines that were painted pure Guilford or were from the NYS&W. But, the author's focus was on engines lettered for the "D&H" and not Guilford so technically they wouldn't count.

Admittedly, if you have some of the other color guide books then you probably have seen different pictures of all of the engines featured here (though I don't recall there being any repeat pictures). However, this book is definitely worth the money if you are interested in this niche area.