Illinois Central 4-8-2s pass at speed on the double track near Gilman in September 1954. Engine 2539 is southbound, 2418 northbound; both are on freight. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Mountains on the prairie

Illinois Central 4-8-2s pass at speed on the double track near Gilman in September 1954. Engine 2539 is southbound, 2418 northbound; both are on freight. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Car W-933, converted from an old baggage car, is part of a five-car New Haven wire train based out of New Rochelle, N.Y. The platform on the roof provides a place for workers to stand as they repair the overhead catenary. Bruce Owen Nett photo […]
New York Central train 175, having come up overnight from New York City, stands at Canton, N.Y., between Watertown and Massena on the St. Lawrence Division, as a truckload of mail is loaded in 1959. Theodore Shrady photo […]
Mrs. L. H. McBratney, operator at Atlantic Coast Line’s WG Tower in Florence, S.C., sends a telegraph message during her third-trick shift in August 1957. William D. Middleton photo […]
Southern Pacific’s San Francisco–Los Angeles Daylight heads south beside the shimmering Pacific Ocean in the early 1940s. Classic Trains coll. […]
New York Central 4-8-2 3008 looks across the turntable at the Cincinnati Union Terminal roundhouse one evening in September 1954. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Artwork from a brochure promoting the Milwaukee Road’s postwar Olympian Hiawatha shows a family enjoying two double bedrooms en suite in the train’s 8-double-bedroom/Skytop observation car. MILW photo […]
Louisville & Nashville FP7 571 had not been long out of EMD’s plant at La Grange, Ill., when it breezed through London, Ky., with Cincinnati–Knoxville local No. 29 on May 25, 1952. Ed Theisinger photo […]
Pennsylvania Railroad E6s 4-4-2 759 stands on the upper level tracks at 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, waiting to depart with a Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines train from Broad Street Station to Atlantic City in May 1937. E. Stanley Hart Jr. photo […]
Baltimore & Ohio’s Grant Street Station on the north bank of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh opened in 1957 after a road project claimed the road’s grand 1888 depot nearby. B&O’s through trains had long since switched to the P&LE depot on the south side of the Mon. Green Street closed in 1989 with the […]
The second Super C test run set a record with a 34-hour 35-minute run from Chicago to Los Angeles in January 1968. Crane operators had the first trailer on the ground about a minute after arrival. Santa Fe photo […]
The engineer oils the valve gear of Brooks-Scanlon Corp. No. 5, a cabbage-stacked, wood-burning 2-6-2 that hauled forest products in Florida. Note the antlers and candlesticks adorning the headlight. Frank Clodfelter photo […]