TY  - BOOK
AU  - Optic,Oliver
AU  - Kilburn,Samuel Smith
AU  - Sayer,Reimunt
TI  - Lightning Express
T2  - The Lake Shore series
AV  - PZ 
PY  - 2025///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
KW  - Railroad stories
N1  - Release date is 2025-09-17; Terry Jeffress and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.); Originally published; Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1869
N2  - "Lightning Express; or, The Rival Academies" by Oliver Optic is a juvenile adventure novel written in the late 19th century. It centers on a student-run railroad and an escalating rivalry between the Toppleton Institute and the Wimpleton Academy along Lake Ucayga. The story follows Wolf Penniman, a level-headed young engineer, alongside the imperious Tommy Toppleton and the reckless Waddie Wimpleton, as schoolboy politics, railroading, and military-style drills spark real-world tensions. Themes of leadership, pride, and moral duty frame the spirited contests between the two academies.  The opening of the novel unfolds at a noisy stockholders’ meeting of the student-managed Lake Shore Railroad, where Tommy Toppleton’s heavy-handed presidency faces a revolt. After a procedural tussle, the boys adjourn to Grass Springs for an election and a celebratory supper; Tommy is humiliatingly voted out on the first ballot, restored on a second only because his rival, Skotchley, refuses the office. The students then choose the Horse Shoe island for their annual encampment—largely to needle their Wimpleton rivals—and prepare a rapid march. Wolf, urged by Major Toppleton to “keep the peace,” helps expedite transport, but at Grass Springs the Wimpleton flotilla blocks the channel. Tommy rashly orders a steamer to force passage; Wolf and the captain try to avoid harm, yet Waddie leads a bold boarding that seizes the forward deck, locks Company B below, and stops the engine. With the steamer captured and tempers high, Waddie tries to coerce Wolf into running the machinery, setting the stage for a dangerous standoff. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://archive.org/details/lightningexpress00inopti/page/n6/mode/1up
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76892
ER  -