The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 47, July 1943 - April, 1944 Page: 82

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

the Atlantic Coast Line in handling perishables from Florida
to New York and New England.
Uncommon bits of information presented by the author are
that the Louisville & Nashville maintains the longest run
handled by a coal-fired train in this country, that between Bir-
mingham and Nashville, a distance of 205.4 miles. The Louis-
ville & Nashville also is responsible for a bit of unusual pub-
licity; just south of Nashville a microphone, placed beside the
track, picks up the sound of the whistle of the road's crack
train, the "Pan-American." Then, too, there is the story
of the snowsheds on the Southern Pacific between Emigrant
Gap and Andover, a distance of twenty-eight miles. Within
this stretch of twenty-eight miles there were twenty miles of
sheds, called the "longest house in the world." Most of these
sheds have now been discontinued.
The book contains brief sketches of the Louisville & Nash-
ville, the Pennsylvania, and the Denver & Rio Grande Western.
These sketches appear to be taken from the corporate his-
tories of the roads and contain very little historical background.
While the author narrates a few interesting experiences in
railroading, his book is more of a compendium of facts concern-
ing railroads with a few episodes thrown in.
A. B. ARMSTRONG
North Texas Agricultural College
British West Florida, 1763-1783. By Cecil Johnson. New Haven
(Yale University Press), 1943. Pp. xi+258. Maps. $3.00.
Twenty years form but a brief span in the recorded history
of mankind, but during this brief span England owned and
governed the region which history knows as West Florida.
For England's American colonies this brief span was an event-
ful period, and when it was over England returned the Floridas
to Spain and gave the colonies between the Floridas and Can-
ada their freedom.
The province of West Florida comprised, after its enlarge-
ment in 1764, all of the land in North America, except the
Isle of Orleans, between the Mississippi and the Chattahoochee
south of a parallel of latitude whose western point was the
junction of the Yazoo with the Mississippi. The author ex-
plains that the enlargement was made after a report by Gov-
ernor George Johnstone in whose opinion the colony, with the

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