In Roger Carp’s coffee-table book, Lights, Camera, Lionel Trains!, the author documents the history of the Lionel toy train, conveying the magic of electric playthings that “mysteriously” move “on [their] “own via household current.”

Starting around 1901, when electricity was still considered a marvel, Carp follows the Lionel company development from its first owners, Joshua Lionel Cowen and Harry Grant, to one of its final incarnations in the 1980s and 1990s under Richard Kughn.

Carp characterizes the trains as American cultural icons and throughout his book emphasizes how the trains embodied an “extraordinary appeal and meaning,” showing “the mystical connection Lionel trains nurtured between boys and their fathers.” Many of the numerous photographs (color and black and white), consequently, depict boys and their fathers juxtaposed to trains. Others show just the trains, along with boys in their Sunday or Christmas best.

Carp also discusses Lionel’s various advertising and promotional campaigns and includes photos of magazine covers, movie and television shots, and publicity stills with various celebrities like Betty Grable, Joe DiMaggio and Count Basie. Of course, Carp also highlights the trains with pictures of train sets as they evolved through the years, emphasizing whimsical grace points, such as smokestacks billowing white smoke and milk cars with miniature, tin milk containers.

This is a meticulously detailed book, written in a light-hearted and conversational manner that’s easy to read. Anecdotes abound. Carp even includes stories of some of the workers behind the scenes like Larry Young, “a superb salesman,” who found his “career ended in 1956, when he refused Joshua Cowen’s order to sweep the showroom.”

While the text, in places, can be overblown (“In bungalows, apartments, ranch houses, and mansions, a Lionel set was as essential as a Christmas tree with ornaments and a sweet-smelling wreath hung on the front door.”) this is a quibble.

Lights, Camera, Lionel Trains! is a delightfully nostalgic pictorial history of Lionel trains, worthy of a place on any collector’s shelf.