A North Star commuter train waits at the end of the line, Big Lake, Minn, before its return trip to Minneapolis on April 10, 2010. Photo by Rick Johnson […]
North Star in waiting
Subscription: Metered
Athearn Genesis SD70ACe diesel locomotive
Athearn HO scale SD70ACe diesel locomotive I just received my Athearn Genesis SD70ACes this week. Wow! For me, Christmas came early, literally! These units were not due until mid-to-late December. The Model Railroader review of the MTH SD70Ace, by Dana Kawala, has the history and numbers behind this locomotive model from EMD which first hit […]
Ask Trains from December 2010
Q I’ve read that when some railroads sent their steam locomotives in for a complete overhaul, they changed the main drivers to a disc type. Why would they do this?— Alex Jamieson, Chatham, Ont. A Changing to disc-type drivers was done on a case-by-case basis. The older style spoke drivers had a tendency to break […]
A sandwich on the house
To our family, the ultimate train was not the Broadway, the 20th Century, or the exalted Dominion that plied our home Canadian Pacific rails out of Toronto. For us, the train was CPR’s nameless workaday No. 25, leaving daily at 10:30 (reading as 9:30 in the days when timetables were printed in Standard Time regardless […]
Nice to fire for, but a bit strange
Southern Pacific 2-10-2 3757 rests at Sparks, Nev., in 1948. J. F. Larison I went firing on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Division in 1953. My engineer’s name was Lindsay, a hoghead in the regular San Francisco-Watsonville Junction (Calif.) chain gang. I fired for Lindsay several times and, although he never checked the water level by […]
A key connection
A southbound Norfolk & Western freight train approaches the Southern Railway junction at Front Royal, Va., in this undated photo. The junction here will become a key connection when N&W and Southern merge to form the Norfolk Southern Railway in 1982. Photo by Michael S. Murray […]
Atlas HO dash 8-40C diesel Locomotive
Atlas HO dash 8-40C diesel Locomotive I just purchased two Atlas Series Dash 8-40C diesel electric locomotives in Direct-Current version in Union Pacific colors. I went shopping for a mixture of second and third generation Union Pacific motive power to handle coal trains and manifest freight cars on my Bayou Division, since UP has trackage […]
The Milwaukee, Racine & Troy
Read the original article about Model Railroader‘s HO scale club layout, the Milwaukee, Racine & Troy by clicking here. It was originally published in December 1989. […]
A modeler’s guide to USRA locomotives
USRA locomotives were born under unique circumstances. A confluence of circumstances led to the nationalization of many of America’s railroads under President Woodrow Wilson in 1917. The outbreak of World War I, which necessitated a ramp-up of American industrial production capacity, and the financial circumstances of the early 1910s led to a liquidity crisis for […]
The Life and Times of Nickel Plate Road No. 765
With its restoration complete but its boiler jacket incomplete, Nickel Plate Road 2-8-4 No. 765 tests on Sept. 20, 1979. Wayne York, Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society With its restoration complete but its boiler jacket incomplete, Nickel Plate Road 2-8-4 No. 765 tests on Sept. 20, 1979. Wayne York, Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society With […]
O gauge Erie GP9 by Lionel
This is the ultra-basic Lionel Geep of olden times updated with electronics under the hood. No see-through screens, no add-on grab irons, no crew figures, no smoke unit. Everything that can be said about the exterior of the model has probably been said. It is a decent representation of the real thing, but not a […]
O gauge Santa Fe Vision Line 2-10-10-2 by Lionel
Okay, I’m scratching my head with this one. Years back, when I first read the story of the Santa Fe 3000-series 2-10-10-2s, I thought something like, “Why’d they do something crazy like that?” When I took this Lionel model out of the box, as Yogi Berra said, “It was deja vu all over again.” The […]
