Crowds swarm around Burlington Route 9901 and 9902, the original three-car Twin Zephyr diesel trains, during a publicity event before the pair entered service between Chicago and the Twin Cities in April 1935. CB&Q photo […]
Twin Zephyr hoopla
Section: Railroads
Closing the gap on the Santa Fe
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 […]
Icing the reefers at Roseville
Workers load ice blocks into the end bunkers of refrigerator cars at the big ice dock at Roseville, Calif., on the Southern Pacific in 1948. Jim Morley photo […]
The search for real heritage locomotives
Heritage locomotives Over the last few decades, railroads have rolled out dozens of specially painted locomotives. Whether they were wrapped or painted, we’re fortunate to live in an era where honoring a company’s past is so visual. We are also lucky we live in an era where paint booths are far and few between and […]
New England States at Chicago
A red cap walks past businessmen who’ve just arrived at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station on New York Central’s New England States streamliner one morning in 1952. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
“Black Marias” on the New Haven
Alco’s initial answer to EMD’s wildly successful FT freight diesel of 1939 was a three-unit locomotive built as a testbed/demonstrator in 1945. Its lines and paint job led observers to dub it “Black Maria,” a slang term for a police wagon. Nos. 1500A, B, and C tested for barely a year on several New England […]
Historical Hot Spot: Santa Paula station still open for business
Santa Paula station In the 1880s, Santa Paula was a bustling little farming community in Southern California’s Santa Clara River Valley. A hub of local agricultural products, it was an ideal area to grow fruit and vegetables, with its mild temperatures and cool breezes flowing in from the nearby Pacific Ocean. It still is today. […]
Baldwin’s first “Centipede” diesel
Completed in 1943, this immense Baldwin Locomotive Works product was powered by four of an intended eight crossways-mounted 750 h.p. V8 diesels and had a 2-D+D-2 wheel arrangement. Designed for passenger service, the giant proved unsatisfactory, but its running gear was later used for Seaboard Air Line DR12-8-3000 No. 4500. Baldwin photo […]
Unusual locomotives – Alaska
EMD’s introduction of the 50-series road switchers in 1979 offered customers four variations of the design: the 3,500-hp, four-axle GP50, and its bigger brother, the six-axle SD50. The builder produced more than 275 of the former, and more than 425 of the latter. Also offered as part of the 50 line was the GP49, utilizing […]
Empire Builder on the Stone Arch Bridge
Great Northern’s Chicago–Seattle/Portland Empire Builder is seen on the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in a 1929 publicity photo. Amtrak’s Empire Builder does not use this bridge, which, though preserved as a landmark, has been devoid of tracks for years. GN photo […]
B&O and NYC at Shelby, Ohio
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 […]
Streamliner harbor
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 […]
