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 […]
Canadian National U-class 4-8-4 locomotives proved to be the most versatile of the type operated in North America. It’s generally accepted that the ultimate in steam power was the 4-8-4 Northern type, if defined by criteria that includes speed, power, technology, and, perhaps most importantly, versatility. A lot of railroads capped off the steam […]
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-A trio of 1,500 h.p. Alco freight diesels (in later nomenclature, two FA1’s and an FB1) rolls a train on the Lehigh & New England, a 178-mile anthracite hauler and Pennsylvania-New Jersey-New York bridge line that dieselized in 1949. Alco-GE photo […]
Central Railroad of New Jersey box-cab No. 1000, built by an Alco/General Electric/Ingersoll-Rand consortium, gained the title of “first commercially successful diesel-electric locomotive” when CNJ put it to work on October 22, 1925. After a three-decade career, the unit was retired to the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. CNJ photo […]
Missouri Pacific 2-8-4 No. 1119 rolls a southbound freight over a new highway bridge at Austin, Texas, in 1948. Bruce F. Wilson photo […]
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 […]
An aerial view from the 1940s shows the roundhouse for Cincinnati Union Terminal, opened in 1933. Marsh Photographic Studios photo […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
