INDIANAPOLIS — The Iowa Traction Railway has received the inaugural “Outstanding Railroad Historic Preservation Award,” presented Monday at the opening day of Railway Interchange by the National Railway Historical Society in conjunction with the magazines Railway Age and Railway Track & Structures. The award honors a North American common-carrier railroad for a historically significant preservation […]
WASHINGTON – The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded up to $5,000,000 by the Federal Railroad Administration to establish the National University Rail Center of Excellence. The Center would be dedicated to developing a future railroad workforce while advancing research to enhance the safety, efficiency, and reliability of passenger and freight rail transportation. […]
DULUTH, Minn. – The North Shore Scenic Railroad resumed service Sept. 29, quickly recovering from washouts that closed the railroad’s route to Two Harbors, Minn., for several days. Northeast Minnesota saw record rainfall the weekend of Sept. 23-24, with the town of Knife River on NSSR receiving 7.6 inches of rain in less that 8 […]
The estate of noted western rail photographer Ronald C. Hill has made a financial contribution totaling a little more than $1 million to the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, which is based in Madison, Wis. The gift is directed to the CRP&A Endowment Fund. “We’re over the moon and feeling tremendously grateful and humbled […]
WASHINGTON – Federal regulators have issued a 626-page draft environmental assessment for Savage Tooele Railroad’s proposed 11-mile Utah spur project. The Surface Transportation Board’s Office of Environmental Analysis will accept public comment on the draft report through Oct. 30. Savage Tooele proposes connecting the Lakeview Business Park in Grantsville, Utah, with Union Pacific’s Shafter Subdivision […]
EMD F2 diesel locomotive For a number of years, there was a streamlined diesel road locomotive hiding in plain sight, and it was only the savviest of fans with a penchant for details and numbers that could ferret them out from the rest of the herd. It is the EMD F2. Only 104 were built […]
WASHINGTON – The Federal Railroad Administration issued two safety advisories last week: One covering crossing gates and another regarding the operation of track maintenance machines. The grade crossing advisory notes that crossing gates attached using a king pin system could fail suddenly. King pin assemblies came into use in the early 1990s as railroads shifted […]
DELTA, British Columbia — The British Columbia government has provided environmental clearance for expansion of the container port at Roberts Bank, B.C., the Canadian Press reports, saying it could not prohibit the project from going forward in light of earlier federal approval. The C$3.5 billion Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project was approved by the Canadian […]
NEWINGTON, Conn. — The Connecticut Department of Transportation will hold the first of a series of hearings on proposed changes to rail and bus service today in New Haven, Conn., with three other hearing also set for this week. Fare increases are also being proposed. The most significant changes will come on the Shore Line […]
ATLANTA — Norfolk Southern operations were disrupted by an outage at its data center on Friday night, the railroad reports, the second time in little more than a month that technical issues have affected rail operations. The railroad said in a statement that the issue, which affected dispatching, train movements, and its terminal operating system, […]
I wrote last month about working grain trains west as a young brakeman. This month’s story, entitled “Trust me,” is from late 2008 when I was working as a locomotive engineer. In my 42 years on the railroad, the last 30 as an engineer, I took pride in being qualified on three mountain-grade territories: Stampede […]
October We’re always adding new content to our website! Here’s a sneak peek at a few items coming up soon … Mind-blowing facts about the GM Aerotrain By the 1950s it was clear that the passenger train was not the wave of the future. Automobiles and airliners were the next chapter in personal transportation for […]
