Hi guys, I saw in another post that IDMT129 mentioned an issue that he had with the new n scale freight set that he bought and also commented about Bob Gurr having a new book out. I replied about the freight set in that post and was going to comment about the Bob Gurr book but I thought any comments about Bob's book may get missed by others so I thought I would start a seperate post dedicated to the book.

Let me start by saying that I have no affiliation with the publisher or Bob. Just a huge Disney fan like everyone else here on Burnsland.

I should probably say that I knew the book was out for awhile but was having a hard time justifying the $70.20 price tag. That is the total price with shipping. I'm not sure that I have ever paid that much for a book other than school books 20 years ago. I eventually talked myself into it being that I've spent money on worse things over the years and $70 bucks was not going to break the bank.

I ordered the book and received it a few days later and although I thought shipping was expensive, it came Priority Mail and the price on the mail label was within pennies, if not exactly what I paid for shipping. Would I have rather seen it take a few more days to get to me for less money.......probably.

The first thing that I noticed is that the book is very well made. The quality of the cover material looks very good and the printing of its 215 pages looks excellent. The paper seems just a bit thicker than most books and the quality of the pictures is near perfect. I skimmed through it just to look at the pictures and I would say that 90% or better are pictures that I have never seen before. I was a little concerned that the photos along with the written content were going to be repeat information. If you guys are like me you've spent countless hours reading up on Disney stuff, it all starts to look and sound the same after a while.

I'm a reader but typically only a few chapters a day but I'm also known to be reading 3 or 4 books at a time getting a few chapters from each book in every day or so. Well once I started reading this book, I found myself nearly 50 pages into it the first night before putting it down. That's pretty unheard for me, just based on the amount of time that I usually take to read.

I think what was really holding my interest with the book is that the chapters are on average, 3 pages long and although he sets up each story well, he gets right to the meat of each topic and in each fairly short chapter gets very detailed. I kind of felt like I was able to sit down with Bob and say "Ok, I've read everyone else's books and spent countless hours online, tell me what reallly happened and how you guys did this or that". He specifically mentions companies names of the parts that they used on ride vehicles along with if and who they outsourced manufacturing to.

I found myself stopping at places and grabbing the iPad to look up some of the companies and people's names that he mentions. So I had this whole other research project going on while reading the book.

Many of the still pictures in the book appear to be Bob's own personal pictures and it also contains a lot of his concept drawings. We've all seen the Monorail concept drawings but there are many more from other projects that I hadn't seen.

Prior to reading the book, I had thought that Bob's only claim to fame was the Monorail. After reading the book it appears as though he's touched nearly every attraction in the parks in some way or another. Some of the things he did were very small but most were significant.

So you might find yourself asking "is there anything related to the railroads in the book?". Yes, there is a section that he talks about the "Excursion Train" and how they had to redesign the cars. He mentions Rogger Broggie very often in many of the chapters in the book and continually refers to him as "my boss, Roger Broggie". I was always aware that Bob didn't have as much to do with the railroad as others so I really wasn't expecting to find much, if anything in the book about the railroad. Bob pretty much comes right out and says that Michael Broggie's book is the definitive guide to the railroad.

I think one of the biggest things that I took away from the book was that a lot of these guys were put in way over their heads with Walt was trying to accomplish but they were each able to put their creative skills together and learn from their mistakes to produce many things that had not been done before. There was a lot of failure that proceeded the success that we know of today and Walt knew that it wasn't going to be easy and that these failures were just one step closer to the success that he was striving for. Bob talk very often very specifically about their failures and what they did to resolve the problems.

I feel like I've left a lot out of what I read and should have included more of what I read from the book but I didn't want this to be a spoiler.

Well, should you buy the book? I'll leave that up to you. I'd would never want to see someone spend money that they shouldn't be spending but if you've got $70 bucks sitting around and you think you know all there is to know about Disney, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised about what you didn't know. I still have small handfull of chapters left to read but I can see myself going back to this book in years to come as a good reference.

Excellent review, thank you!

QUESTION: Are there any scale drawings of the monorail in the book?

None that I can find. There is a full page blueprint type drawing from Bob's Community Transportation Services days showing various sides of a monorail but there aren't any dimensions on the drawing. The drawing title is Basic Model Typical Configurations

There is a lot of good technical information about the monorails and Viewliner in the book.

I forgot one chapter that is train related which is titled "Steam Freaks". The sub title for this chapter is "Longenfelder, Bagley, Kinball - Disneyland locomotive first steam up".

Bob is self published. He knows how many of each book he has and just about everyone who he sold the Red book to. The books were done in the same fashion as the monorail, RED and BLUE, and that is right from Bob's mouth. I talked with him at lentgh at Disneyana on the 22nd.

There are many things about Bob I neve knew such as he failed Geometry. He had to self teach himself Trigonometry and had 10 months to calculate all the speeds and variables on the bobsled. The amazing thing is what takes people normally years to develop a rollercoaster took Bob 10 months with out computer aid. He took into account how long the car had been running, time of day, weather and if the passengers had their arms up or spread wide!

How nuts it that!?

I was late to the party on finding out about this book and was very unhappy to discover that I had missed the boat on getting a signed and numbered Red copy. But as luck would have it, another Disney forum was having a meet-n-greet and lunch with Bob and still had spaces available. Best part, attendees received a Red copy. They even had an additional copy for me to purchase for a friend who was unable to attend.
The event was a lot of fun and Bob shared some interesting anecdotes. After the Q&A everyone lined up to have their books personalized. As I was seated in the far corner of the room, I instantly found myself at the back end of a very long line to meet Bob.
Just when I thought my luck had run out, seated at a table near me and happy to engage fans, was none other than Mr Rolly Crump. He was a delight, I brought up some of my favorite of his more well known escapades like the Haunted Mansion janitor scaring and getting frisky with the cavegirl (which got a big laugh out of him). He gave me some insights into why their work environment was so successful, signed a page and took a picture with me.
When I made it to Bob's table, he signed both copies of his book (one to my friend) and took a picture. It was a great day meeting my 2 favorite Imagineers and cant wait until Rolly's book comes out later this year.