How to Train a Train

Everything you need to know about finding, keeping, and training your very own pet train.

Finding advice on caring for a dog, a cat, a fish, even a dinosaur is easy. But what if somebody’s taste in pets runs to the more mechanical kind? What about those who like cogs and gears more than feathers and fur? People who prefer the call of a train whistle to the squeal of a guinea pig? Or maybe dream of a smudge of soot on their cheek, not slobber? In this spectacularly illustrated picture book, kids who love locomotives (and what kid doesn’t?) will discover where trains live, what they like to eat, and the best train tricks around—everything it takes to lay the tracks for a long and happy friendship. All aboard!

Jason Carter Eaton is the author of the picture book The Day My Runny Nose Ran Away and the YA novel The Facttracker. He has written for such diverse venues as McSweeney’s, Cartoon Network, MGM, and BBC Radio and has done extensive work at 20th Century Fox animation, Blue Sky Studios, where he received story credit for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Jason Carter Eaton lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife, two kids, dog, cat, and pet steam engine.

John Rocco is the illustrator of The Flint Heart, a 2011 abridgment crafted by Katherine and John Paterson from the 1910 Eden Phillpotts fantasy. John Rocco’s picture book Blackout earned him a 2012 Caldecott Honor. His other picture books include Fu Finds the Way, Wolf! Wolf!, and Moonpowder. He is the jacket artist for Rick Riordan’s best-selling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and collaborated with Whoopi Goldberg on the picture book Alice. He was previously creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering and served as preproduction director at Dreamworks for the film Shrek. John Rocco lives in Brooklyn.