Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page Model Railroader magazine’s senior editor Jim Hediger returns to the MRVP studio! In this episode, he first explains how a real plant works, before describing how former MR editors Paul Larson and Gordon Odegard engineered a model for use on an HO scale […]
Union Pacific’s City of Denver curves away from North Western Station in Chicago at the start of its run west. Sister streamliner City of Portland once made an unscheduled stop at Oak Park, 9 miles west. Wallace W. Abbey In spring 1955, I was working as a ticket clerk at Chicago & North Western’s Oak […]
Trains collection MILWAUKEE– Jim Scribbins, the career Milwaukee Road employee who became his company’s unofficial historian as well as a prolific railroad author and photographer, died Thanksgiving Day, November 27, at home in West Bend after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 86. Born in 1928, Scribbins dedicated a substantial part of his […]
Westinghouse and partner Baldwin fielded an experimental 4,000 h.p. B-B+B-B gas-turbine-electric in 1950. Dubbed the “Blue Goose” because of its paint scheme (and perhaps for its unusual appearance), No. 4000, pictured at Chicago on the Chicago & North Western, generated no orders. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
On Track: A Field Guide to San Francisco’s Historic Streetcars & Cable Cars By Rick Laubscher Heyday, P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709, 510-549-3564; 128 pages, color photos; softcover, 4.5 x 9 in.; $14.95 Only in San Francisco can you ride a fleet of historic PCC and cable cars through one of the world’s most […]
Watch 8mm home movies from 1945-46 of Seaboard Air Line steam and diesel action around Melrose, N.C. From the collection of James H. D. Helms Jr., whose father took the movies and whose grandfather was an SAL conductor. […]
Watch 8mm home movies from 1945-46 of Seaboard Air Line steam and diesel action around Melrose, N.C. From the collection of James H. D. Helms Jr., whose father took the movies and whose grandfather was an SAL conductor. […]
At frosty Higgins, Texas, on the Santa Fe, author Metzger’s crane parts sit sidetracked as SD40-2s pass with a freight. Bill Metzger While my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the Seattle Seahawks in the 2007 Super Bowl, I got to thinking about where I was the last time the Steelers won football’s biggest game. It […]
Illinois Central 2-8-2 Mikado 1544 is eastbound at Villa Park, Ill., on a cold day in 1951. Henry M. Stange Some years ago, after a reunion of my old 10th Engineer Battalion at Springfield, Ill., I boarded Amtrak’s Statehouse for Chicago. I’d never ridden the former Chicago & Alton before, but I was eager to […]
Garratt Locomotives Reprinted by Heimburger House Publishing, 7236 W. Madison St., Forest Park, IL 60130; 36 pages, 50 illustrations; softcover, 11.5 x 8.5 in.; $18.95 Heimburger House has published this reprint of a 1920s-era Beyer, Peacock & Co. Garratt locomotive catalog. To North American eyes, the Garratt is an unusual-looking machine, but the fact that […]
The Ligonier Valley Rail Road by Robert D. Stutzman Arcadia Publishing, 420 Wando Park Blvd., Charleston, SC 29464; 128 pages; softcover, 6.5 x 9.25 in.; $21.99 Pennsylvania is known today for having more than 50 shortline railroads within its borders, most of which are castoff segments of the Class I railroads. In the 19th and […]
The Twilight of Steam: Great Photography from the Last Days of Steam Locomotives in America By Brian Solomon Voyageur Press, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401; 192 pages, 128 b&w photos; hardcover, 12 x 10 in.; $50.00 More than 50 years after the last steam engines ran in revenue service, the fascination […]
