HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – The 2021 Autumn Colors Express railroad passenger excursions in the New River Gorge have been postponed. “An overwhelming number of customers have expressed concern about this year’s event. The current surge in COVID-19 cases in West Virginia has local hospitals operating at emergency levels, making postponement our best and only option this […]
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WASHINGTON — During a presentation to the Rail Passengers Association this week, Amtrak’s Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, Roger Harris, revealed that beginning some time in October, business class passengers on the Seattle-Los Angeles Coast Starlight will be permitted to purchase food in the train’s dining car. But he also said restoring coach and sleeping […]
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Stockcars are among the types of rolling stock some railroads had a lot of. When it was time to move livestock to market, railroads would often make up entire trains of these or string together long blocks of them in their speediest freight trains. Since they were dealing with live animals, it was imperative they […]
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — High natural gas prices have electric utilities once again relying on railroading’s oldest friend – coal. Natural-gas futures have notched upward to $5.10 per million British thermal units in recent days, reflecting a 95% increase from six months ago when natural gas was $2.61 per million BTUs. This upward trend, which has […]
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Steam in snow Milwaukee Road 2-8-2 No. 327 rolls south on the Indiana Harbor Belt at La Grange, Ill., in December 1950, bound for Terre Haute, Ind. Robert Milner photo […]
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In this final series video, Trains.com resident DCC expert Ben Lake covers signal installation with JMRI. Using the Canadian Canyons N scale layout scale as his workbench, Ben walks and talks viewers through signal decoder setup, signal wiring schematics, PanelPro configuration, and more! […]
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Full-sized railroads loved EMD Geeps and kept ordering them from their initial release in 1949 right into the beginning of the 21st century. Railroads looking for new Geeps in the late 1950s bought GP18s until 1963, and now you can add that model to your layout in HO scale from Athearn Genesis. The Electro-Motive Division […]
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WASHINGTON — Virginia’s Buckingham Branch Railroad seeks to acquire a line that it presently leases from CSX Transportation. It encompasses 164.22 miles of line from milepost 276 in Clifton Forge to milepost 111.78 at Doswell. The railroad has leased the line, part of which hosts Amtrak’s Cardinal, since 2005. It was originally Chesapeake & Ohio. […]
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Q: I have an N scale Model Power 4-6-2 steam engine whose tender derails on my Atlas code 55 turnouts. Though the major problem was related to the drawbar, I also found that the tender’s wheel flanges were bottoming out through the frog’s shallow flangeways. I thought when I bought the engine many years ago that […]
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WASHINGTON — The California High-Speed Rail Authority has filed two petitions with the Surface Transportation Board to reopen proceedings to make changes to two aspects of its high speed rail line under construction in the Central Valley. The first document seeks to reexamine an exemption granted for 65 miles of high-speed line between Merced and […]
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When Classic Toy Trains Editor Hal Miller told me next up for review was a 4-6-0 steam locomotive, I remember scrunching up my eyebrows. My first thought was that it would be a frilly Ten-Wheeler worthy of an episode of the old Petticoat Junction or Gunsmoke TV series. I mean the wheel arrangement arrived in […]
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10-million bushels The Santa Fe’s 10-million bushel grain elevator at Argentine (Kansas City), Kan., was among the largest in the country when photographed here in 1943. Jack Delano photo […]
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