Frisco 4501, one of the road’s three 4500-series 4-8-4s assigned to passenger service, rolls the Meteor into St. Louis. Ben F. Cutler About midnight on a Saturday in 1944 on the station platform in Neosho, Mo., are 500 guys with suntans, each carrying a one-day pass and probably a railway ticket tucked in his wallet. […]
This graph shows the calculated drawbar horsepower curves for five classes in the first wave of 4-8-4s: Lackawanna Q-1, Canadian National U-2-a, Northern Pacific A, Santa Fe 3751, and Canadian Pacific K-1. Neil Carlson In the days of steam it was a normal practice to estimate the horsepower potential of a locomotive. Baldwin Locomotive Works […]
Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac 4-8-4 No. 602, named Governor Thomas Jefferson, rushes an 18-car passenger train toward Washington, D.C., near Four Mile Run, Va., in June 1940. C. W. Whitbeck Back pressure Back pressure is caused by the resistance of the exhaust steam exiting the cylinders. Overcoming this resistance represents negative work done by the […]
Philadelphia Transportation Co. PCC car 2115 cruises east on a Route 56 run along Erie Avenue in 1955. Mert Leet My dad worked as a trolley operator for the Philadelphia Transportation Company. Stationed at the 10th and Luzerne carbarn, he was one of a legion of veterans who found work on the PTC after World […]
Read more about the Rock Island’s 1960s diesel menagerie in a PDF of the article “Christine and the Mongeese” by J. David Ingles, published in the December 1965 issue of TRAINS magazine. Rock Island Diesel Menagerie DOWNLOAD […]
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“Deluxe” cars like these on New Haven train 365 at Darien, Conn., in July 1947 were not what author Paradis experienced on his commuter-train rides. NH The distant rumble warned that the mighty New York Central steam locomotive with its 12 steel coaches would soon round the curve on the Harlem Division and bear down […]
Amtrak GG1 meets an E60 in 1980, two years after the author’s ride behind one of each, plus a Conrail E44. Robert S. McGonigal As the murky fall afternoon began to lengthen, the Silver Meteor I was riding across northern New Jersey began to slow down. Then just east of Rahway, nowhere near a scheduled […]
Seen from the North Shore Line bridge, a Milwaukee Road F7 4-6-4 rips through Rondout, Ill., with train 15, the Olympian, in March 1941. Frank Sellers At Christmastime 1940, when I was 15 years old, my widowed mother spent $4 of her hard-earned money to buy me a Kodak Brownie Special camera. I was thrilled. […]
NYC’s eastbound 20th Century Limited slows for a station stop at South Bend, Ind., in October 1962. Louis A. Marre On Saturday, February 17, 1962, a train wreck at Fonda, N.Y., on New York Central’s Water Level Route main line, blocked all traffic east and west. Because of this, westbound trains were to be diverted […]
Watch video clips of Chicago & North Western steam and diesel trains in action, from the Herron Rail Video collection. […]
For railroad builders in North America, a 2.2 percent climb was considered the standard maximum grade for a well-engineered mountain railroad. But why this number? And how did its adoption become so widespread? Using modern-day analysis of some famous mountain railroad grades, Trains Magazine’s September 2011 issue explores the origins and adoption of 2.2 percent […]
