The first Lionel Conrail cars and engines came shortly after the federal government created the railroad in 1976. Fundimensions, the division of General Mills then licensed to manufacture and market Lionel trains and accessories, announced an O gauge boxcar with Conrail graphics in the 1977 consumer catalog. The quick move was actually atypical. Earlier mergers […]
The Lionel X6454 Baby Ruth boxcar is one of the most basic freight cars ever made. It looks unassuming and familiar, but it’s among the toughest postwar cars to find and own. Lionel cataloged this 9¼-inch model only in 1948. It was one of three new single-door boxcars introduced that year, all of them designated […]
Basic parts of a gauge-1 switch: Switches are necessary any time one wants to send a train in an alternate direction. They’re what makes it possible to store one train on a siding and run another around it, or any other basic operation. They’re essential if you want your trains to do more than just […]
Earthwork on the project railroad: We are ready to begin grading the line. The first thing we had to do was to transfer our design to the ground. This would give us a feeling for how the railroad would actually sit in its site and it would also delineate where the earthwork had to be […]
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If you’re driving on Main Street through Hardeeville, S.C., it’s easy to miss the little steam locomotive tucked away in a small open shelter alongside the city’s library. As engines go, it doesn’t get much smaller than Argent Lumber Co. narrow-gauge 2-8-0 No. 7. I found the engine, though, during a brief stop last […]
Of all the railroads that tried various gambits to get out of the passenger business in the 1960s, perhaps none attracted as much vitriol as Southern Pacific. Not that SP downgraded or got rid of the most trains — that honor probably goes to New York Central — but its 1966 substitution of an […]
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Some photographs grab your imagination and won’t let go. Case in point: this simple but quietly affecting portrait of what I’m guessing are some teenage girls giving two friends a sendoff as they board Louisville & Nashville train No. 3 on the platform of the joint L&N and Southern Railway station in Calera, […]
F3s, Hudsons, and Girls’ trains – those are the postwar jackpots that everybody knows about. Here, though, are 5 postwar Lionel collectibles on the rise. Models courtesy Joe Algozzini What’s hot today among postwar Lionel trains and accessories? I attend several train shows each year, check out eBay listings almost every day, and edit the […]
A few weeks ago, I made an embarrassing blunder in the pages of Classic Trains. In a brief, bylined description of the Budd Rail Diesel Car, or RDC, I had casually and quite spectacularly goofed by describing its diesel engines as “rooftop.” Yes, rooftop. What was I thinking? I knew its V-6 diesel […]
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