A childhood belief about reading

In the 1930s and 1940s, Virginia Lee Burton wrote and illustrated children's books about anthropomorphic vehicles. There was a steam shovel named Mary Anne, a snow plow named Katy, a cable car named Maybelle, and others.

Several of these stories were collected in a book called something like "Tales of Modern Machinery". (The copy I read to pieces when I was little was probably an original printing that one of my parents had owned since childhood.) I'd never heard the word "modern", before, but I deduced from this book that it meant "old fashioned". Those vehicles looked like the ones in the old photo albums from when my grandparents were newlyweds...