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Looking for interesting uses for cabooses? If you’re of a certain age (myself included), you remember when a caboose was on the end of almost every train. Then, in the 1990s, cabooses began to disappear. Instead of a friendly wave at the end of a train, you were greeted by a blinking red light on […]
The Nickel Plate Road’s major components were all in place by 1949. The Nickel Plate, formally the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, was conceived in 1881 as a Buffalo-Chicago project to compete with the parallel Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (later New York Central) of William H. Vanderbilt. To thwart rival […]
The Fairbanks-Morse H12-44TS locomotive was a familiar-looking unit with different internals. FM was a fierce competitor in the early days of dieselization, perhaps remembered most for its H24-66 Train Master, a six-axle 2,400 hp road-switcher that impressed almost every railroad it demonstrated on. Among its lesser-known successes were three specialized units produced […]
Kansas City Southern locomotives were full of surprises in both the steam and diesel fleets. Steam locomotives saw a gradual evolution, from 2-8-0 to articulated 0-6-6-0s (an oddball in the industry for road service) and 2-8-8-0s and eventually the much-vaunted 2-10-4s of 1937. The 0-6-6-0s were the largest group of the type built […]
Kansas City Southern passenger trains All through April 2023, Classic Trains editors are celebrating the grit and grandeur that has been one heck of a railroad: Kansas City Southern. As KCS rides into history on the back of a new merger with Canadian Pacific, please enjoy this photo gallery of Kansas City Southern passenger trains […]
On a day when snow is flying back home in Milwaukee, I’m 900 miles away, luxuriating in 70-degree temperatures and enjoying the refreshing shade of the huge live oak that hugs the generous eaves encircling one of the South’s most distinctive train stations. The building is a replica, but don’t hold that against it. […]
An A-B-B-A quartet of Southern Pacific F units dressed in the distinctive “Black Widow” livery lift an eastbound freight up into the town of Tehachapi, Calif., in 1949. Exhaust from a 4-8-8-2 cab-forward helper rises in the distance. Linn Westcott photo […]
A crane places one of four 100-foot deck girders between piers 1 and 2 of the Santa Fe’s new bridge over the Colorado River at Needles, Calif. The double-track bridge opened in 1944 to replace a single-track span from 1890. Santa Fe photo […]
Baltimore & Ohio 2-8-2 4594 waits behind horizontal semaphore blades as New York Central E8’s breeze through with a westbound passenger train at Shelby, Ohio, in September 1955. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
A World War II-era view at Chicago & North Western’s 40th Street coach yard in Chicago shows four streamliners. From left: C&NW’s Twin Cities 400, the C&NW-UP City of Denver, the C&NW-UP City of Los Angeles (apparently coupled behind C&NW E3 5001B), and the C&NW-UP-SP City of San Francisco. C&NW photo […]
Having your own YouTube channel is a cool thing. Getting your own custom-decorated locomotive is also pretty spectacular. Trainworld, in conjunction with Chris Raines, the creator behind YouTube toy-train channel RBP Trains, is producing a Lionel Legacy ES44AC in a modified Union Pacific heritage Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway paint scheme. RBP Trains, Trainworld make custom locomotive If […]
Santa Fe FP45’s 100 and 102 race west of Gallup, N.Mex., with the inaugural run of the road’s premium piggyback train the Super C on January 18, 1968. Road Foreman of Engines Jack Elwood is at the throttle; he wrote about the trip in Classic Trains‘ Special Edition No. 7, Fast Trains. ATSF photo […]
