Fiddletown & Copperopolis

Several persons, at least, have wondered if there actually is, or ever was, a railroad called the Fiddletown & Copperopolis. Admittedly, in an age of Hubble spacecraft and cell cloning, this is hardly a question of burning import. Of all the railroads that might have been, however, surely the most deserving is the Fiddletown & Copperopolis.

Carl Fallberg, a former assistant director and storyman on Walt Disney feature-length animated cartoons, has captured the flavor of worn out, run-down narrow gauge railroads in his illustrated book entitled none other than Fiddletown & Copperopolis, or as Fallberg liked to say, “The Life and Times of an Uncommon Carrier.”

To anyone familiar with the lore of America’s celebrated three-foot railroad lines, the feeling persists that within these 144 pages lies a disguised pictorial history of prototype narrow gauge railroads in a very humerous vein. Fallberg, now deceased, chronicles the saga of the colorful Fiddletown & Copperopolis (“The Line of Least Resistance”) in drawings which are both inordinately detailed and witty. The key word in Fallberg’s illustrations is exaggeration, which he invokes frequently.
Artist Fallberg worked for the Chicago & NorthWestern Railroad, and during World War II, served as a master sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Section. It was during this period that he conceived the F&C railroad, and later it came to life on the pages of Railroad magazine.

Heimburger House, a leading publisher of railroad books and magazines, reintroduced a second edition of Fiddletown & Copperopolis in 1985 after a lapse of some 25 years. The new 1997 edition features a four-color cover and all the original Fallberg illustrations that make the Fiddle-town & Copper-opolis a very special railroad. The 9 5/8 x 6 1/4” softcover book is 144 pages, one cartoon per page.