The year is 1929, and Georgia Collins lives with her family in a home made of railroad cars. The Norfolk and Southern Railroad has promised to build the Collins family a real house at the foot of the bridge where Georgia's father is the maintenance foreman, but for the time being, the company has placed four unused railroad cars on a spur line to be the Collins' home.

Georgia doesn't mind so much that when she wants to go from one room to another, she has to go outside, climb down a set of metal steps, walk to the next car and climb aboard. Of course, if she wants to go all the way from the front car to the back, and she doesn't want to climb up and down steps along the way, she can simply run beside the track until she gets to the car she wants. That isn't terribly unpleasant—except, of course, when the weather is bitterly cold or a thunderstorm is raging.

What is terribly unpleasant about living in railroad cars is the windows. Each of the four converted Pullman passenger cars has eleven windows on each side—twenty-two windows per car! That's 88 windows. Windows that Mama Alice insists be sparkling clean at all times--a near impossibility with dozens of coal-fired, soot-breathing engines daily rushing by only a few yards away.

Although Georgia believes that a new house will mean better times, she soon discovers that good times will be hard to come by for the next few years as The Great Depression strikes the United States. She must face her fear of the "rail riders" who hitch rides on the trains in search of work, and see her friends suffer as their fathers lose their jobs.

When she faces her fear of a strange "hobo", she finds the courage to create a place that will bring some sunshine into the lives of her neighbors. Read this book to find out how Georgia becomes "Georgia of Collins Beach."