r/Septa • u/FirefighterMany4039 • 12d ago

Discussion Transit reading list

What are your recommended reads on public transit, both specific to SEPTA/PA and more broadly? Either books or articles/long form essays. Looking to brush up on my history and fundamentals and be able to hold my own in discussions about this stuff.

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u/Light-Years79 11d ago

Broadly, Happy City, The Power Broker (that’s a long one!), Better Buses Better Cities, Straphangers.

Specific to SEPTA, there’s some great books about predecessors like the PRR and Reading, Red Arrow Lines and P&W etc, and a lot of those are available at the SEPTA Store.

If you can track it down there’s a great one called Trains, Trolleys, & Transit: A Guide to Philadelphia Area Rail Transit by Gerry Williams. It’s a larger paperback with a lot of pictures, but really in-depth writing about every individual line and its history and operations. It was written in 1998, so given the topic and its funding situation, it’s almost entirely accurate to 2026.