Books: Old School Ties

ALL ABOARD WITH E.M. FRIMBO by ROGERS E.M. WHITAKER & ANTHONY HISS 235 pages. Grossman. $8.95.

The estimable Ernest M. Frimbo is the Baron Munchausen of railroads, with a puff of Lucius Beebe and a chuff of Cervantes thrown in. Frimbo—the "world's greatest railroad buff'—is the brain child of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who has himself bumpety-thumped across 2,334,000 miles of rails from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Ill. By inventing Frimbo—lexicographer, gourmet, jazz fan, connoisseur of contessas and, of course, compulsive investigator of trains—Whitaker has transmuted what might have been a soda-water sermon on the glory and decline of the trains into a...