Pennsylvania Railroad’s coast-to-coast air-rail service, run jointly with the Santa Fe and Trancontinental Air Transport, was championed by PRR president Gen. William Wallace Atterbury. (A promotional video clip of that service is available on our site. See the link at the bottom of this story.) The Winter 2003 issue of Classic Trains magazine takes an […]
Section: Railroads
Wabash Railway Steam Locomotives in the 20th Century
The Wabash Railway of 1900 was part of the empire that George Gould inherited from his father Jay. Its lines linked Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and Des Moines, and formed major hubs at Decatur, Ill., and Moberly, Mo. It had just received trackage rights on the rails of the Grand Trunk […]
New York, Chicago & St. Louis: the Nickel Plate Road
In 1879 and 1880, a syndicate headed by George I. Seney, a New York banker, assembled the Lake Erie & Western Railway, a line from Fremont, Ohio, to Bloomington, Ill. After a dispute with the New York Central System about the routing of freight, Seney decided to build a line to connect the LE&W to […]
Baltimore & Ohio timeline
Baltimore & Ohio timeline: 1827 Charter approved 1828 Official start of construction on July 4 1830 Scheduled service begins, Baltimore-Ellicotts Mills, May 24 1831 Service begins to Frederick, Md. 1832 Service begins to Point of Rocks, Md. 1835 Service begins on Relay-Washington branch, construction having begun in 1833 1837 Potomac River bridged at Harper’s Ferry, […]
Marketing the Golden State Limited
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 […]
Carolina circle
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 […]
Stranded streamliner
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 […]
The history of Baltimore & Ohio’s Shepherd Branch
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 […]
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 […]
Lake Michigan carferries
Ann Arbor RS1 No. 20 unloads freight cars off the Lake Michigan carferry Arthur K. Atkinson at Frankfort, Mich., in April 1982, the railroad’s last year of carferry operation. Forrest L. Becht For over 100 years, trains and ships were partners in serving the eastern and western shores of Lake Michigan. This unique form of […]
On SP’s Narrow Gauge, 1949 Became the 1880s
In June 1949, my friend Bob Wagner and I decided to head from our Los Angels-area homes for the Owens Valley in eastern central California to see, and hopefully ride, Southern Pacific’s former Carson & Colorado narrow gauge, which still operated with steam power 70 miles between Keeler and Laws. We got a late start […]
The Gift
The gift By Curtis L.Katz I have always been fascinated with trains. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bannister, a grandmotherly woman wiry and wise, once told my mother that most little children go through a phase when they are interested in trains or ships or trucks, “but with Curtis, trains are a hobby.” Had my 5-yeard-old […]
