News & Products for the week of March 3rd 2025

An orange model scale test car

News & Products for the week of March 3rd 2025   Model railroad operators and builders can get the latest information about locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, tools, track, and more by reading Model Railroader’s frequent product updates. The following are the products Model Railroader editors have news on for the week of March 3rd, […]

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The Rio Grande’s Farmington Branch

Low-angle photo of smoking black steam locomotive with large snow plow

  It was an oddball branch line with a just-as-odd history that is still worth recounting.   The Rio Grande’s Farmington Branch was built in 1905 to connect Carbon Junction, Colo. (just outside of Durango to the southeast), and Farmington, N.M. It was a modest, 47.68-mile standard gauge line (later narrow gauge) that followed the […]

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Classic Toy Trains new products for March 2025

model of red flatcar with two trailers on top

Locomotives & rolling stock METCA offers an MTH custom-run 4-Bay Hopper as part of the RailKing line. The cars feature O-27 operation and Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey graphics (30-75762 shown).  Expected delivery in March 2025. Price: $64.95. Order from metca.org Public Delivery Track is selling a custom-run MTH RS1 locomotive as part of the RailKing […]

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Maine two-footer special

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Bridgton & Harrison 2-4-4T No. 8 creeps around a rock outcropping at the head of a special train in 1940. The second-to-last Maine two-foot road to operate, the B&H closed the following year. Robert B. Adams photo […]

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Mike Eagleson was all about steam

Steam steam locomotives with passenger train on curve

The trend toward professional archival preservation of the work of major railroad photographers continues, lately with the news that the huge collection of negatives, slides, and films of the late Mike Eagleson has gone to the Industrial Archives & Library based in Bethlehem, Pa. This is a big “get” for the IAL, buttressing its mission […]

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C&O Allegheny 1624

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Chesapeake & Ohio 2-6-6-6 1624 has cut off from its eastbound coal train to take sand, coal, and water at Thurmond, W.Va., in September 1955. Philip R. Hastings photo […]

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Missouri Pacific locomotives remembered

Striped mid-cab diesel locomotive

Missouri Pacific locomotives, both steam and diesel, display a variety typical of their era.     The “MoPac,” as it was called, merged several railroads during the diesel era, notably the International-Great Northern and St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico in 1956, the Texas & Pacific (which it had long controlled) and Chicago & Eastern Illinois […]

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