Marketing the Golden State Limited

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By 1919, a three-orange logo had replaced the single piece of fruit that adorned the covers of Golden State travel booklets. The lavish title page of a 1902 Rock Island route guide to its new cross-country passenger train, the Golden State Limited. Rock Island and Southern Pacific inaugurated the train on November 2, 1902. “Every […]

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Carolina circle

Seaboard's coach-only mail train E7 3041 SDP35 1113

Seaboard’s coach-only mail train, No. 5, at Hamlet, N.C., behind E7 3041 and SDP35 1113. J. David Ingles It’s 300 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., to Raleigh, N.C., as the crow flies. But Classic Trains senior editor J. David Ingles parlayed a round trip between the two cities to 1039 miles on a spring weekend in […]

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Stranded streamliner

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A helicopter view of the westbound City of San Francisco buried in snow on Donner Pass. Doug Wornom collection Sixty years ago, on January 13, 1952, the streamlined transcontinental passenger train City of San Francisco encountered a raging blizzard with 90-mph wind gusts and snow drifts 8 to 12 feet deep that marooned the train […]

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The history of Baltimore & Ohio’s Shepherd Branch

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Returning to Benning Yard, CSX local B701 makes its way slowly north on the historic Shepherd Industrial Track, near Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C. Mike Schaller The Baltimore & Ohio was the first railroad to serve Washington, D.C., completing a branch from its main line at Relay, Md., in August 1835. To reach markets south […]

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Ready to serve the nation

Here’s a variation on a familiar World War II theme, the diverse geographical backgrounds of men serving together in the armed forces. It comes to us in the form of some faded sheet music dedicated to the Military Railway Service. The rousing anthem “Railroaders Always” is of interest in its own right, but the cover […]

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