Rolling fortress With two big engines leading a dozen heavyweight cars into the desert, the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited looks like a rolling fortress at Palm Springs, Calif., sometime in the mid-1940s. Walter H. Thrall Jr. photo […]
Western Pacific Railroad history The Western Pacific Railroad almost “had it all.” It ran passenger and freight trains, in mountain and desert scenery, behind vintage steam engines that survived World War II and hauled excursions, and then colorful diesels, from early green-and-yellow FTs through orange-and-silver Fs and Geeps to dark-green second-generation EMDs and GEs. It […]
Looking for a station to accompany your passenger line? Join David Popp and assistant digital editor Sammi DiVito as they review the Walthers Cornerstone Modern Suburban Station kit, reviewing all the interesting details and additions that make up the structure. […]
Looking for a station to accompany your passenger line? Join David Popp and assistant digital editor Sammi DiVito as they review the Walthers Cornerstone Modern Suburban Station kit, reviewing all the interesting details and additions that make up the structure. […]
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WASHINGTON – The Surface Transportation Board has accepted CSX Transportation’s beefed up Pan Am Railways merger application and established a schedule for reviewing the deal that would expand CSX’s presence in New England. If the board approves the deal, Pan Am would become a fallen flag on May 1, 2022. Comments on the merger are due […]
For veteran business writer and Trains author Dan Machalaba, there was virtually nothing about transportation that wasn’t fascinating. Big-rig trucks, coal-hauling unit trains, bush planes, container ships — all of them drew his scrutiny at one time or another in a journalism career that spanned more than four decades, including 33 years at the Wall […]
CALGARY, Alberta — Canadian Pacific is asking Kansas City Southern stockholders to vote against the railroad’s proposed merger with Canadian National. The railroad filed a proxy statement to that effect on Thursday, with Canadian Pacific CEO Keith Creel saying his railroad would have preferred not to appeal to the KCS shareholders, but that with a meeting […]
PULLMAN, Ill. — The grand opening of the National Park Service’s Pullman National Monument and Pullman State Historic Site Factory Grounds is set for Labor Day weekend, Sept. 4-6. Free events will include tours, site visits, and historic tours at the community built for the Pullman Co’s factory and as a community for its workers, […]
Keeping an even keel It was important for boxcar loads of grain to be level. Sometimes workers had to enter the cars and level the loads by hand, as with this carload of wheat. Jeff Wilson collection […]
WASHINGTON – A coalition representing a broad range of rail shippers has asked the Surface Transportation Board to increase competition among railroads by finalizing rules that would permit reciprocal switching. “Given the dramatic concentration of market power in the railroad industry, rethinking policies designed for a different era is both timely and smart. Reciprocal switching […]
The BL2 was a mistake at diesel locomotive leader EMD EMD’s BL2 diesel locomotive was a mistake of historic proportions. During the 1930s and ’40s — when diesel-locomotive sales grew from smoldering embers to white-hot inferno — Electro-Motive Corp. (after 1940, General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division) seemingly could do no wrong. With the technical and marketing […]
