Class A 4-4-2 No. 2 hauls the Milwaukee Road’s newly launched Hiawatha up the hill and around the curve out of Chicago Union Station in mid-1935. Alexander Maxwell photo […]
Milwaukee’s original Hiawatha departs Chicago
Icebound!
Read the full story of Jeff Mast’s adventure on the carferry Viking in his article, “Ice Capades,” from the December 2005 issue of Trains magazine. Download the story by clicking here. […]
History According to Hediger: Modeling the Auto-Train in HO scale
Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page In the 1970s, then editor Linn Westcott asked young associate editor Jim Hediger to build an HO model of the Auto-Train for the cover of the December 1974 issue of MR – all 38 cars of it! Jim shares the models he built […]
Nickel Plate yard at Frankfort, Ind.
Looking west at Frankfort, Ind., in 1944, we see the westbound yard with its east-end ladder angling off to the right, and in the distance the eastbound yard’s east ladder running the other way. Beyond the east yard ladder are the icing platform and the ice plant. Jay Williams photo […]
Inside Nickel Plate’s Conneaut roundhouse
In the Nickel Plate Road’s roundhouse at Conneaut, Ohio — one of the last citadels of high-speed steam freight locomotives — Berkshire 731 and another engine rest on March 16, 1957. Classic Trains coll. […]
An underrated diesel
Once a proud hauler of crack passenger trains and fast freights as a DL109 diesel locomotive, New Haven test vehicle PP 716 languishes in Boston in 1968, awaiting its fate: the scrapper’s torch. Bruce Beardsley If Alco’s famous PA diesel is perhaps a bit overrated, as implied in the January 2004 issue of Trains magazine, then the […]
Classic Trains, Fall 2013
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History According to Hediger: Riding the Auto-Train
Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page Planes, trains, automobiles, and even a tornado, this episode has it all! Jim recounts his trip to Florida in the 1970s on the then-new Auto-Train, but half the adventure proved to be just getting to the station! Related Topics: history according to hediger […]
First train to Tower Grove usually wins
St. Louis, late 1940s: After a “race” that was not as close as the one author John Mills saw in 1941, MP 4-6-2 5327 rolls the Missourian past a Terminal Railroad Association Baldwin diesel as Frisco 4-8-2 4401 backs the Will Rogers into Union Station. Harold E. Williams What could be more exciting to an 11-year-old […]
History According to Hediger: Fantrip on the Wabash
Having trouble viewing this video? Please visit our Video FAQ page It’s into the Way-Back Machine for this episode of History According to Hediger. In 1959 Jim was part of a fantrip on the Wabash RR, put on by the Michigan Railroad Club, and he shares many great pictures from the event in this […]
Green beans and trains
Erie Pacific 2707, a sister to the engine that enthralled author Noble during Ohio summers, is seen at Dunkirk, N.Y., 200 miles and two seasons away, but coincidently also alongside an NYC line. Al Rung My dad, after changing jobs following World War II, from Crosley Corp., in Cincinnati to one at Wright-Patterson Air Force […]
‘Happy 10th birthday, David Watson!’
A trio of new Seaboard E4 diesels, perhaps the very ones “David Watson” saw in Florida three months earlier, shows off the citrus-hued Orange Blossom Special livery in March 1939. Hugh M. Comer, David W. Salter coll. To be addressed by my first and middle names by my parents meant one of two things. Either […]
