Dining on the ‘Century’ Passengers enjoy high-class service aboard a New York Central 20th Century Limited dining car. New York Central photo […]
Dining on the ‘Century’
Era: 1946 - 1970
Menards Santa Fe O gauge locomotive
Menards Santa Fe O gauge locomotive program is underway. Asking some 200 people to take a chance on this new product is bold. To request they test it on their layouts and report what the maker got right — and more importantly, wrong — takes even more guts. It is something I’ve never heard of […]
Meet the Modeler: John Hudak
What was your first train set (or locomotive)? My first train set was the Lionel 1434W Burlington GP diesel with three passenger cars from 1955 or 1956. Being a passenger set, it had limited play value for me. I also had a no. 52 fire car. My trains are primarily from this era (i.e. prewar, […]
‘Shasta Daylight’
Shasta Daylight The Oakland-bound Shasta Daylight rumbles over the big, curved trestle at Redding, Calif., in mid-1950. The Shasta was diesel-powered from its July 1949 launch. James L. Martin photo […]
Railroad man
Railroad man Gainesville Midland Railroad conductor L. C. Birchfield is perched in a caboose cupola in the late 1950s. The railroad ran between Gainesville and Athens in northern Georgia and one time had a branch to Monroe. Seaboard Air Line purchased the road in June 1959. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Truck’s Toy Trains: Episode 11 – Postwar Lionel blister packs and barrel cars
Host John Truckenbrod and Classic Toy Trains’ Roger Carp share collector insights regarding the various iterations of barrel cars the Lionel Corp. produced, along with a look at the packaging for the barrels themselves. Then they check out the variety of products that were sold by dealers in clear plastic packaging – the more customers […]
Truck’s Toy Trains: Episode 11 – Postwar Lionel blister packs and barrel cars
Host John Truckenbrod and Classic Toy Trains’ Roger Carp share collector insights regarding the various iterations of barrel cars the Lionel Corp. produced, along with a look at the packaging for the barrels themselves. Then they check out the variety of products that were sold by dealers in clear plastic packaging – the more customers […]
Keeping an even keel
Keeping an even keel It was important for boxcar loads of grain to be level. Sometimes workers had to enter the cars and level the loads by hand, as with this carload of wheat. Jeff Wilson collection […]
Man at work
Man at work Baltimore & Ohio Dispatcher Carl Donald makes an entry on his trainsheet in DR Tower in Deshler, Ohio, in the early 1950s. Deshler lies at the crossing of the B&O’s Pittsburgh to Chicago and Toledo to Cincinnati main lines. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
Getting grain to market
Getting grain to market A truck dumps its load of wheat through the floor grate into the bin at an elevator in Fowlerville, Mich., in 1950. The framework in the background is for elevating wagons and trucks that don’t dump on their own. The town is located on the Chesapeake & Ohio’s Pere Marquette main […]
Dominion
Dominion Oil-fired Canadian Pacific G3 4-6-2 Pacific 2388 awaits departure from Vancouver with the Dominion on a June 1952 evening; the Mountaineer left an hour earlier. John C. Illman photo […]
Riding a caboose in central Illinois in the mid-20th century
In the late 1960s and in to the ’70s, I had numerous rides on Toledo, Peoria & Western freight trains in both directions out of Peoria, Ill., where I grew up. The TP&W interchanged with the Pennsylvania Railroad and its successors 108 miles east at Effner, Ind., and with the Santa Fe 114 miles west […]
