Every time Jim Chiddix was stuck in traffic, crawling over Red Hill on Moanalua Freeway, he'd think about the OR&L and sigh.

Chiddix is co-author, with MacKinnon Simpson, of "Next Stop Honolulu! The Story of the Oahu Railway & Land Company," which won a Historic Hawai'i Foundation Preservation Honor Award and a Hawai'i Book Publishers' Association Ka Palapala Award for excellence in nonfiction recently.

While living in the Islands and researching the book, Chiddix couldn't help thinking that if the railway company's 20 or so passenger trains a day were still chugging in and out of Honolulu, a whole lot of us might be catching up on our reading, snoozing or socializing instead of steaming on the freeway.

The narrow-gauge rail system, brainchild of dealer and dreamer Benjamin "Ben" Franklin Dillingham, was built primarily to serve the sugar plantations, which, up to then, had been hauling refined sugar to Honolulu's main port via schooner from small ports around the island. "It was an incredibly inefficient method," Simpson said. Rail made sense both for sugar and pineapple. "At peak harvest time, up to 80 trains a day ran as close to five minutes apart from the pine sidings above Wahiawa to the Libby, Del Monte and Dole canning plants," Chiddix said. "The sugar and pineapple industries, which built fortunes and provided thousands of jobs, would not have been practical at large scale without cheap, fast, transportation."

But it wasn't only agricultural products that benefited from the rail system, which existed from 1889 to 1947, with its peak years from the turn of the century through World War II. "Virtually everything else on the island moved by rail, including people," said Chiddix, who now lives on the Mainland.

Ever wondered what that rather nice-looking period building is on King Street at Iwilei, across from 'A'ala Park? That was the main Honolulu train station, and a very busy place it was. Peruse the newspapers of the early 20th century and you'll see advertisement after advertisement for places like the Hale'iwa Hotel, urging folks to come and stay, or at least take a round-trip excursion around the rugged Wai'anae Coast ($5.50, including lunch at the hotel).

It's interesting to note that there's no way to take that trip today except by foot or offshore.

Among 18 previous books by Simpson — a historian, writer and graphic designer — is 2000's "Street Car Days in Honolulu," which he wrote with John Brizdle. Simpson said that book and this one show the profound effect that affordable transport had on the landscape of Honolulu. Before the trolley and the train, he said, you had to live where you worked.

The trolley allowed Honolulu to grow eastward, into the valleys and up the ridges from Manoa to Wilhelmina Rise, Simpson said. The train allowed Honolulu to expand to the north and west, and served the first planned-unit development in Hawai'i history, Pearl City (not coincidentally also masterminded by Dillingham).

Though the business community was skeptical at first, and Dillingham had a difficult time persuading investors to come on board, the railway proved a profitable venture — and no more so than during World War II, when thousands of workers and military personnel used the trains to get to and from various bases (most of which weren't yet envisioned when the railway came into existence).

In chronicling these developments, Simpson said, "People look at it as a train book, but in reality, it's a Hawaiian history book."

The history of the OR&L ends after World War II, when ridership fell below pre-war levels because, said Simpson, "everybody wanted a car." The tracks had been hard used during the war, but profits didn't allow for upkeep, and the devastating tsunami of 1946 didn't help. The enterprise folded in 1947.

Train books can be deadly dull if you're not a fanatic train buff.

But Chiddix, former chief engineer for Oceanic Cable, is a master at explaining technology so that average minds can grasp it, and he's been fascinated by the OR&L for years. His cable experience, he said, gave him "a kinship with the folks who built a very different kind of network around the island." Simpson knows how to dig up photographs, artifacts, newspaper clippings and other ephemera that keep you turning the pages.

The authors never lose sight of the human story — of Dillingham and James Campbell, both men with humble roots and lofty visions, and of all those engineers and conductors and train riders. And there's a section filled with statistics that will make train buffs' eyes glaze with pleasure.

Chiddix said there were many surprises as he researched the book. For example, cucumbers raised in Makua Valley on the Wai'anae Coast were shipped by train to markets in Honolulu. (Today's restaurant chefs would love that to happen again!)

But he said the most striking thing is that "such an extensive and important enterprise could have so nearly completely vanished. ... We can only regret the day that the rights of way were returned to the state and sold off."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.