BOCA RATON, Fla. — Many events can affect Amtrak service, but a Florida tragedy illustrates that some are far from the passenger operator’s control. A fatal private plane crash Friday, April 11, on tracks used by Tri-Rail and Amtrak trains caused cancellation of the day’s northbound Floridian and its counterpart east from Chicago today (Sunday, […]
CHICAGO — J.D. Danton’s shift at Metra’s 16th Street Tower on Friday night and Saturday morning (April 11-12, 2025) was certainly nothing new. And yet, the dilapidated structure had never seen anything like it — and never will again. Danton was the operator on duty when the interlocking tower dating to 1901 relinquished its control […]
Typical of their brethren everywhere, even a century after the fact many railroaders still called certain southern Michigan branchline segments “the Air Line.” But unlike many such monikers elsewhere for short-cuts or straight-track segments, this one had an ancestor with that actual name. The Michigan Air Line Railroad was planned to link the Canada […]
Excessive track noise was one of the main reasons I decided to rebuild my HO scale Daneville & Donner River layout. I hadn’t paid much attention to the noise level until I started using locomotives with sound decoders. That’s when I recognized how the wheel noise from rolling freight cars nearly overpowered the sound of […]
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Wilmington & Western Railroad, which announced an indefinite halt to operations earlier this year, has experienced more turmoil, with unhappy volunteers picketing the railroad, potential legal action, and the operation briefly posting then removing an announcement that excursions would return this fall. On Thursday, about 20 volunteers mounted a protest outside […]
DENVER — There’s a pachyderm of a quandary haunting the executive conference rooms of Class I railroads, and short lines may be the solution. Carload volumes have been falling since 2008-2009, almost a generation’s worth of declines that began with the global financial crisis and accelerated during the fall of coal and the hollowing out […]
Forty years ago, there was a lot going on in “Train World.” New museums, mainline steam programs, railroad-specific historical societies, and innovative preservation projects spawned a sense that railroad heritage had entered a different, more mature, phase. There were conversations about the emerging “railway heritage movement.” In hindsight, that was a tad optimistic. It had […]
When Kalmbach Publishing Co. moved from Milwaukee to the western suburb of Waukesha in 1989, the Milwaukee, Racine & Troy had a blank slate. The ink-stained concrete floor; large, drafty windows; and sun-faded scenery were in the past. “Our new layout room is a beautiful place, an open, rectangular space with a tile floor, drop […]
WASHINGTON — Railroads and retailers are praising a bipartisan bill in Congress that aims to reduce cargo theft. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which was introduced yesterday, would create a coordinated federal response to a rising wave of sophisticated cargo thefts, many of which target consumer goods in containers carried on double-stack trains. “Organized […]
The trade war between the U.S. and China has prompted a Utah iron ore mine to shut down, a move that at least temporarily ends Union Pacific unit train operations between Cedar City, Utah, and the Port of Long Beach, Calif. Utah Iron LLC announced on Wednesday that it would close the Cedar City mine […]
COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a small sign of support for rail passenger service, Ohio legislators have included funding for the state to rejoin a regional rail group. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the state’s $61 billion, two-year budget passed by the state House of Representatives includes $25,000 in funding each year for the state to […]
MAMMOTH SPRING, Ark. — BNSF has reopened its Thayer South Subdivision through Arkansas, just five days after a bridge washed out under a stopped train. A new bridge over the Warm Fork Spring River in Mammoth Spring State Park was completed on Thursday morning, April 10, after around-the-clock work. The opening came some 24 hours […]
