FEW OF THE locomotives that I’ve reviewed strike me as elegant. After all, in the real world these were just machines made to pull heavy loads. All the same, I would even forsake my beloved New York Central to say that the Southern Railway Ps-4-class 4-6-2 Pacific in that railroad’s wonderful green, gold, and white […]
WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT is not a locomotive DNA experiment gone terribly wrong. It’s a steam locomotive known as a Garratt. A fellow named H.W. Garratt came up with a patented design for an articulated locomotive with a water tank up front, a boiler in the middle, and a coal bunker (and smaller water tank) […]
THE K-LINE K4s 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive needs little introduction to railroad hobbyists because the prototype steamer was the standard Pacific-type favored by the Pennsylvania Railroad. In its search for the perfect 4-6-2, an engine that could adequately handle freight or passenger work, the Pennsy stumbled onto the K4s design and liked it so much that […]
LET ME SAY RIGHT OFF THE BAT, this is the sort of quality entry-level locomotive that Lionel should have come out with five years ago! But I’m not complaining, because it’s here now and it’s a winner! While Lionel has offered a few saddle tank locomotives in the past, this model is brand new. It […]
ONE OF THE MOST distinctive locomotive styles on any railroad – real or 1:48 scale – is the “Camelback,” also known as “Mother Hubbard.” The name “Camelback” came from the early days of railroading, when some steam locomotives were designed with their cabs atop the boiler. “Mother Hubbard” referred to locomotives that had the engineer […]
WORN DOWN BY THE Depression and the war years, the Virginian Railway embarked on a program in the 1940s to revive its aging fleet of locomotives using existing designs developed for railroads briefly owned by the Van Sweringen Brothers (Chesapeake & Ohio, Erie, Nickel Plate Road, and Pere Marquette). From these plans the Virginian produced […]
AMONG THE MOST MASSIVE locomotives on North American rails just about 100 years ago was the 0-8-8-0. Surprisingly, 85 locomotives with this wheel arrangement were in service in the early years of the 20th century. Surely the most interesting of them all were the Camelback, or Mother Hubbard, 0-8-8-0s run by the Erie Railroad. The […]
THE STORY OF THE A2a-class Berkshires of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad is a pretty sad one. In the waning days of steam operation, the company decided that it needed to replace its World War I-vintage H7-class 2-8-2 Mikados with newer power. The railroad didn’t believe there was a viable diesel on the market […]
NO, THIS ISN’T THE review about the blue Erie 0-8-8-0. While this Triplex locomotive shares much in common with the 0-8-8-0 (blue boiler, Erie Railroad, same O gauge manufacturer), it’s got even more wheels – 28 in total! A Baldwin Locomotive Works engineer created the Triplex to balance the costs (in men and machines) associated […]
REMEMBER THE Visible V-8? When I was a kid, I begged and begged my mom and dad to get me one for Christmas. The Visible V-8 was a clear plastic model of an automobile engine. It was big – 14 inches long. And it worked. In the original version, flashlight batteries hidden within a “car […]
A SMALL BUT NOTABLE trend in our hobby is the steady re-emergence of British three-rail O gauge toy trains, led by Ace Trains in London. In recent years we’ve reviewed Ace’s 4-4-4T steamers, electric multiple-unit commuter trains, passenger car sets, and, most recently, its new line of O gauge tank wagons. Each is beautifully crafted […]
IT WAS THE DAWN of time. Electrification hadn’t strayed far from Thomas Edison’s lab. In the 1880s mechanical coal stoker was a wild fantasy of overworked firemen. Balloon stacks ruled the rails, and the Pennsylvania was still struggling to make its claim as the Standard Railroad of the World. It was in this dark era […]
