Would you read it on a train? Would you read it in a plane?

Bookmobiles are very well and good, but as this site indicates, there are many, many different styles of traveling libraries: Bookboats, book-bikes, book-donkeys, book-camels, et cetera. In the U.S., during the Great Depression, the Works Project Administration used many different means to distribute books to remote corners of the country, including most notably the Pack Horse Library Project as described in Kathi Appelt's Down Cut Shin Creek : the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky.

Of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is that a Book Train might make an interesting HO scale model. There were many U.S. prototypes to follow, and to cite as examples should any niggling nitpicker claim that such things "ain't prototypical". True, most of the railroad library cars were for the use of paying passengers only, but that's just part and parcel of the Gilded Age in America.

For a more altruistically inclined roving cultural artifact on rails, perhaps I could model one of the chapel cars that once plied the rails of North America bringing missionary efforts to remote areas and, in one case, serving as a semi-permanent meeting hall after the Upper Peninsula logging town of Ontonagan burned to the ground in 1896.

Thanks to the ever-eclectic Jessamyn West for the link. The Bookboat webpage is affiliated with the Prince Rupert (B.C., Canada) Public Library and "is intended to help us build support for a waterfront location for a new Prince Rupert Library and Archives." I wish them well.