As railroad fans, we are in one form or another, closet historians. “The station used to be right there. You can still see the foundation if you look carefully,” we point out to neophytes to a particular area. “The railroad used to have a switcher based here to service the local industries. Today, there is […]
General Electric’s U23B General Electric broke into the domestic road-switcher locomotive market over six decades ago with its U25B model in 1961. The U-series line would continue to evolve and grow, laying the foundation for the company’s ascent to becoming the No. 1 locomotive builder in North America in later decades. The U23B was essentially […]
Illinois Terminal locomotives included steam, electric, and diesel over its existence. The Illinois Terminal was an electric interurban line serving western Illinois down to the St. Louis area. In the mid-1950s the railroad abandoned its electric operations, moving to all-diesel operation — the last steam ran in 1950, and dieselization had begun with […]
I haven’t counted every last owner one time or another of Florida East Coast 4-6-2 No. 148, but it must be close to a record. For a mainline-size engine, the Pacific was incredibly peripatetic, sort of like former Burlington 2-8-2 No. 4960 before it landed at the Grand Canyon Railway. The 148 emerged from Alco’s […]
Amtrak has been using unpowered F40PH locomotives for decades in various corridors across the country. For its shorter-distance trains — where one or both ends of the run lack turning facilities — these units allow Amtrak to assign only one powered locomotive instead of two. The first F40PH converted was AMTK No. 200, which had […]
Few, if any railroads, duplicated what the Wabash Railroad did in 1930 and ’31 when it ordered 50 big locomotives from the Baldwin Locomotive Co., split half and half between the tried-and-true 4-8-2 wheel Mountain type and the still relatively new 4-8-4 Northern. It was a remarkable decision, given the slight differences between the […]
Locomotive déjà vu On October 15 of this year, senior Southern California train fans experienced locomotive déjà vu. It was fascinating and sad at the same time. Similar to photos seen in Trains Magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, a set of modern locomotives was hauling yesterday’s power off the property in a single pull. […]
Atlanta & West Point locomotives were carefully curated alongside those of its sister roads. Although much of the West Point roads’ 20th-century steam locomotive fleet looked like the “Georgian Locomotive” memorialized by H. Stafford Bryant Jr. in his book of the same name — a handsome, elegant group — perhaps the most interesting […]
Q: Why are the flanges on model steam engine drive wheels so much larger than on the prototypes? Is it because the models don’t weigh very much? Or is it because they have to navigate tight curves? And do larger scales (like G scale and live-steam models) have flanges that are closer to the prototypes? […]
A locomotive has two pilots, one on each end where it interfaces with other units and/or the cars its hauling. The main component is the coupler on each end, along with the adjacently mounted train line air hose. These are the basic connections between all freight cars and other locomotives. Working outward from the coupler […]
Amtrak RS3 diesel locomotives supported operations on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C. The RS3 was Alco’s best-selling road switcher model with 1,265 units sold to more than 50 railroads between 1948 and 1962. Marketed as a multi-purpose unit, some roads, including but not limited to Pennsylvania, Rock Island, and Western […]
The steam community is in a happy state of shock this week with the news that New York Central 3001, one of the NYC’s famed 4-8-2 Mohawk engines, might be restored to operating condition by the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, operators of famed Nickel Plate Road 2-8-4 No. 765. The announcement came Oct. 9 […]
