EMD F2 diesel locomotive For a number of years, there was a streamlined diesel road locomotive hiding in plain sight, and it was only the savviest of fans with a penchant for details and numbers that could ferret them out from the rest of the herd. It is the EMD F2. Only 104 were built […]
WASHINGTON – The Federal Railroad Administration issued two safety advisories last week: One covering crossing gates and another regarding the operation of track maintenance machines. The grade crossing advisory notes that crossing gates attached using a king pin system could fail suddenly. King pin assemblies came into use in the early 1990s as railroads shifted […]
DELTA, British Columbia — The British Columbia government has provided environmental clearance for expansion of the container port at Roberts Bank, B.C., the Canadian Press reports, saying it could not prohibit the project from going forward in light of earlier federal approval. The C$3.5 billion Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project was approved by the Canadian […]
NEWINGTON, Conn. — The Connecticut Department of Transportation will hold the first of a series of hearings on proposed changes to rail and bus service today in New Haven, Conn., with three other hearing also set for this week. Fare increases are also being proposed. The most significant changes will come on the Shore Line […]
ATLANTA — Norfolk Southern operations were disrupted by an outage at its data center on Friday night, the railroad reports, the second time in little more than a month that technical issues have affected rail operations. The railroad said in a statement that the issue, which affected dispatching, train movements, and its terminal operating system, […]
Did you ever wonder about the history of the word kitbashing? Kitbashing is a basic term modelers of every stripe learn almost immediately after they enter the hobby of model railroading or start building models of vintage airplanes and ships, historic military equipment, contemporary automobiles, or futuristic spacecraft. But what does “kitbashing” mean? How did […]
by Eric Mueller The Oberammergau, Ogden & Olomana Railroad (a.k.a. the Triple O) operates across eras and continents on a small piece of land on Oahu’s windward coast (see Garden railroading in Hawaii – Trains). We have employed the German toy line Playmobil to bring it to life in all its incarnations, whether European, Wild […]
I wrote last month about working grain trains west as a young brakeman. This month’s story, entitled “Trust me,” is from late 2008 when I was working as a locomotive engineer. In my 42 years on the railroad, the last 30 as an engineer, I took pride in being qualified on three mountain-grade territories: Stampede […]
EDMONTON — Canadian National has donated a former British Columbia Railway C40-8M locomotive — a wide-cab locomotive featuring the “Draper Taper” design behind the cab for improved rearward visibility — to the Alberta Railway Museum. CN retired its fleet of the 4,000-hp General Electric locomotives earlier this year, but set aside No. 4618 for the […]
Erie Railroad history starts, surprisingly, with a canal. “The Work of the Age” was a proclamation by New York City’s Common Council upon the opening of the 300-mile New York & Erie Railway in 1851, “Erie” referring to one of the Great Lakes. New York City had become the natural gateway to the […]
For much of the first half of the 20th century, the 2-8-2 Mikado was the dominant freight locomotive of the steam era. With its medium weight and medium power, it became the go-to, general-purpose engine — sort of the GP38 of its era. Consider how the World War I-era United States Railroad Administration divvied up […]
STUART, Fla. — The Florida East Coast Railway drawbridge over the St. Lucie River was rendered impassible to marine traffic today (Saturday, Sept. 30) after being struck by a tugboat pulling a barge, according to information from Brightline posted on the Martin County Board of County Commissioners Facebook page. The tugboat struck the northwest fender […]
