Two Little Trains

Readers follow the cross country journey of two trains, a sleek, modern bullet train and a traditional steam engine train. The two trains journey west across long steel tracks as they puff and chug through a variety of settings: over a bridge, through a tunnel, and up a mountainside. In one of the few instances of rhyming in the story, they also “got white and furry” though “still in a hurry” as they travel through a snowstorm. There are reflective notes, like “Look down that long steel track / where you and I must go; / that long steel track and strong cross bars, / before we travel home,” though the text is changed to refer to an “old man singing in the West” rather than “a black man singing in the West.” Pizzoli’s illustrations are playful and abstract, created using custom rubber stamps. While modern and fun, they also greatly change a reader’s understanding of the story from the original 1949 illustrations by two-time Caldecott Medalists Leo and Diane Dillon, which parallel an actual train’s journey and a toy train’s journey. In Pizzoli’s depiction, the story seems lacking in a substantive storyline, making it an actual but confusing, almost pointless journey of an old and a new train to the West that Pizzoli terminates in the middle of a desert.