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What was your first byline in Trains? Doug Riddell: My first byline in Trains appeared in the February 2000 issue: “A dose of perspective” (Readers Platform). I’d just run into a retired Chesapeake & Ohio conductor, Gilly Parker, who shared a story with me. He’d worked passenger service between Richmond and Newport News in the early […]
France’s 1949 Merci Train left a legacy of European rail equipment displays throughout the U.S. During the period around World War I and II a number of European railroads utilized a small boxcar — small by American standards. The cars rode on four wheels and carried all of 20 tons. In France, such […]
Lake Shore Limited dining car In profiling a train for Trains’ 1,000th issue whose New York and Boston sections average just under 1,000 miles, it isn’t possible to relate more than a fraction of what has made trips aboard the Lake Shore Limited so memorable through the years. [See “Lake Shore Limited: A Survivor,” Trains, […]
Private cars Private cars also called private varnish is a side of railroading that is a mystery to many. Imagine being trackside one day and seeing a historic passenger car attached to an Amtrak train. Who’s in that car? Where are they going? How are they able to do that? What does it cost? These […]
Lake Shore Limited Oct. 3, 2011, wasn’t just another day in the life of the Lake Shore Limited. That’s because just ahead of two New York Viewliner sleeping cars on eastbound train 48 out of Chicago was dining car No. 8400, on its first revenue run after a top-to-bottom refurbishment at Amtrak’s Beech Grove Heavy […]
LIRR FA2 It’s an unusual sight — what looks almost like a diesel B unit, resting on the cold ground in an Ohio scrapyard. A closer look reveals that this wasn’t always a B unit — it had a cab at one point, removed with significantly greater care than any scrapyard could give. On its […]
Mojave Subdivision You have heard me mention in a couple of previous stories that I’m proud to be qualified on three different mountain grades; Stampede Pass (former Northern Pacific), my home territory, Stevens Pass (Great Northern), and Tehachapi Pass (Southern Pacific/Santa Fe) on the Mojave Subdivision. How did I end up in southern California, far […]
Wabash Railway history started with the Northern Cross, the first railroad in Illinois, in 1837. The term “Fallen Flag” first appeared in Trains in 1974, as the title for a series of thumbnail histories of merged-away railroads. The series began with the Wabash, and employed the road’s flag emblem outline to illustrate the series’ […]
What are couplers? Ever since the locomotive was invented, a coupling device was needed to pull cars behind it. Link and pin couplers were the start of couplers in the United States. In fact, they were famous for crushing fingers and hands of brakeman who held the link in one hand while dropping the pin […]
One thousand issues One thousand issues of Trains Magazine have put tens of thousands of railroad photographs in the public eye. The most memorable of these images do far more than portray a locomotive or a train in motion. They preserve a moment of railroading and capture the spirit of a place, a railroad, and […]
Breakdown of Streamliners What are streamliners? Essentially, it’s a sleek design for lightweight passenger rail equipment that once had a faster schedule with fewer stops than other trains on the same route. They often included nicer amenities like stewardess service, reserved coach seating, barber shops, and libraries. Before 1970, three major manufacturers built passenger cars […]
This is a picture worth a thousand words. For decades, artists and photographers awed us with images of mighty locomotives scorching the high iron with hundreds of passengers or thousands of tons of freight in tow. The sun shines brightly as the wind blows the hair of the fearless engineer, perched on the armrest. The […]
