SP 4229, the cab-forward on which author Anderson was firing as the second engine of a doubleheader when lead engine 4208 threw a rod, hauls L.A.-bound freight 766 up Casamilia Hill on the Coast Line in 1947. Jim Morley As an 18-year-old kid going firing on Southern Pacific’s Coast Division in 1953, my life was […]
Five years after author Dow’s Bangor & Aroostook experience, in March 1955, a 103-car freight waits at snowy West Seboois, Maine, for a meet with the Aroostook Flyer. Allen A. Sharp The temperature on that February 1950 morning at Oakfield, Maine, was a savage 40 degrees below zero. The sky was clear, with little or […]
As on the train artist buddies Gil Reid and Howard Fogg rode, an open-platform observation car brings up the rear of PRR’s Detroit Arrow at Englewood on the South Side of Chicago. R. S. Stemier One day in 1940 or ’41, I was in my Chicago apartment trying to make up my mind about whether […]
Two of the few remaining Elgin, Joliet & Eastern-painted SD38-2s are switching the industrial plants east of Morris, Ill., on Dec. 30, 2012. Canadian National acquired the “J” in 2009. Photo by Jonathan Hill […]
Models posed in the lounge of a Milwaukee Road Skytop sleeper-observation car appear to be better behaved than some of the soldiers who rode the Olympian Hiawatha after the Korean War. Milwaukee Road When the Korean conflict was halted by a truce in 1953, there was a rush to get most of our troops home. […]
National Cash Register’s 0-4-0F Dayton trundles through the big NCR plant at Dayton, Ohio. National Cash Register Co. I attended the University of Dayton, just two blocks up Stewart Street from the National Cash Register Co. that had been started by John M. Patterson. A great leader, Mr. Patterson nevertheless did have his odd ways. […]
Flashbulbs highlight the snowflakes swirling around B&O 4-8-2 709 and caboose C1406 at B&OCT’s 14th Street Tower in Chicago on a stormy night in 1958. Edward J. Prendergast It truly was a dark and stormy night in Chicago in 1958, and I was a 19-year-old college student. Nineteen is an awkward age for a male—you’re […]
Great train, great scenery: NP’s North Coast Limited rolls west along the Clark Fork River in Montana. Classic Trains coll. My 1947 journey on Northern Pacific’s North Coast Limited is a treasured memory. I had come to love good trains through numerous trips between Washington, D.C., and my childhood home in Florida. My first ride […]
This story was related to me by those personally involved in a new but somewhat less-than-satisfactory method of unloading sand. The time was in the middle of the Great Depression. The locale was the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the “U.P.” The two unloaders were the sons of a local Methodist preacher, long in spirit and […]
Two of the South Shore Line’s air-conditioned M.U. cars stand at the road’s downtown South Bend, Ind., depot on La Salle Street in 1967. H. G. Goerke; J. David Ingles coll. It was about 14 years before this evocative photo was snapped by my late train-chasing buddy Hank Goerke that I first stepped off a […]
An operator pulls the armstrong levers to align a route at busy State Line Tower, near Hammond, Ind., on the Chicago & Western Indiana. As the track diagram shows, several railroads operated through the 200-plus lever plant. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
Video clips courtesy of Herron Rail Video. […]
