Oct. 7, 1997, was a perfect day to witness Conrail’s Office Car Special rolling east through the Berkshires on the Boston & Albany line at Bancroft, Mass. Photo by Robert Jordan […]
Fall vision
Train Topic: Fallen Flags
History According to Hediger: An engine ride on the Cannonball
Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page When Jim Hediger was a youngster, he wrote the president of the Wabash RR to see if he could ride in the cab of the locomotive on a trip to St. Louis. Much to everyone’s surprise, Jim got a letter and an invitation […]
History According to Hediger: An engine ride on the Cannonball
Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page When Jim Hediger was a youngster, he wrote the president of the Wabash RR to see if he could ride in the cab of the locomotive on a trip to St. Louis. Much to everyone’s surprise, Jim got a letter and an invitation […]
F3 to Monon
Red and gray Monon F3’s on the Louisville–Chicago Tippecanoe pause at Crawfordsville, Ind., in fall 1948. Dick Howell Back in the 1950s, when I was working for Kalmbach Publishing Co. but before I moved my family to be with me in Milwaukee, the Monon Route played an important role in getting me to and from Indianapolis […]
An underrated diesel
Once a proud hauler of crack passenger trains and fast freights as a DL109 diesel locomotive, New Haven test vehicle PP 716 languishes in Boston in 1968, awaiting its fate: the scrapper’s torch. Bruce Beardsley If Alco’s famous PA diesel is perhaps a bit overrated, as implied in the January 2004 issue of Trains magazine, then the […]
First train to Tower Grove usually wins
St. Louis, late 1940s: After a “race” that was not as close as the one author John Mills saw in 1941, MP 4-6-2 5327 rolls the Missourian past a Terminal Railroad Association Baldwin diesel as Frisco 4-8-2 4401 backs the Will Rogers into Union Station. Harold E. Williams What could be more exciting to an 11-year-old […]
Green beans and trains
Erie Pacific 2707, a sister to the engine that enthralled author Noble during Ohio summers, is seen at Dunkirk, N.Y., 200 miles and two seasons away, but coincidently also alongside an NYC line. Al Rung My dad, after changing jobs following World War II, from Crosley Corp., in Cincinnati to one at Wright-Patterson Air Force […]
‘Happy 10th birthday, David Watson!’
A trio of new Seaboard E4 diesels, perhaps the very ones “David Watson” saw in Florida three months earlier, shows off the citrus-hued Orange Blossom Special livery in March 1939. Hugh M. Comer, David W. Salter coll. To be addressed by my first and middle names by my parents meant one of two things. Either […]
An accidental beginning
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 […]
Railroading in Maine at 40 below zero
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 […]
Night ride to Valparaiso
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 […]
Industrial landscape
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 […]
