Louisville & Nashville E8 No. 787 leads the head-end cars and lone coach of Evansville–St. Louis train 10 out of East St. Louis in May 1968. R. R. Wallin, George W. Hamlin coll. “No, that train doesn’t stop here. You’ll have to go up to ‘Hoptown’ to get it,” was the less-than-helpful information from the […]
An E unit leads a train through Berwyn, Ill., on a lazy day in August 1963. Such scenes were part of daily life along the Burlington’s triple-track main west of Chicago. Larry Kostka It didn’t matter how often you rode the trains, or even if you did at all. Growing up in the postwar era […]
Like many old steam men, PRR engineman W. A. Eby disliked diesels, but he manages a smile in the cab of S12 No. 8734 working the Bellefonte local in 1957. Michael Hauk collection I never knew Walter A. Eby, my dad’s foster father. He passed away in 1963, when I was two years old. I […]
A hot-metal “bottle car,” one of three in an Erie train that included eight hopper cars as spacers, passes DeForest Junction, between Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, in 1966. Clifford A. Redanz One of the more interesting aspects of steel-mill railroading were the “hot-metal runs” that moved molten iron from the blast furnaces to the open […]
Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo’s two ex-NYC J-1e’s were among the Hudsons that captivated a Buffalo boy in the late 1940s. Frank Clodfelter While growing up in Cleveland and Buffalo after World War II, a close encounter with a Hudson-type locomotive was just a train ride away. My first memory was as a four-year-old. My family […]
Erie RS2 904 clatters into the Lackawanna’s Hoboken Terminal with a Main Line local in 1956. Richard H. Young Youth is wasted on young people, so the saying goes. Kids don’t have the … well … maturity to know what’s special in their world. Watch the crowds at Disneyland. It’s the adults who are agog […]
On June 15, 1972 — six years before author Olson’s ride on it — Illinois Central Gulf SD40 6000 pulls into Markham Yard at Homewood, Ill., with GP40 3011. J. David Ingles I have always had a thing for “class units,” that is, the first in a series, and “my engine” is Illinois Central 6000, […]
Empty refrigerator cars race across the Union Pacific in Nebraska in the early ’50s. A UP conductor in Idaho talked his way out of a jam when his reefer train blocked a crossing, but got into trouble when he tried to enter the produce business himself. Linn H. Westcott Within any group, whether depicted in […]
N&W four- and six-motor EMDs rest at Crewe, Va., in 1981, three years after author Siik became acquainted with similar units during a strike on former Nickel Plate lines in Ohio. Curt Tillotson Jr. It happened nearly four decades ago, but still fresh are my memories of following the ghosts of 2-8-4 Berkshires and Bluebird […]
Running left-handed per C&NW practice, E-class Pacific 1634 skirts Lake Monona as she departs Madison with the evening local to Chicago. Frank Rogers Back in the days when there were enough railroad companies to make train-watching really interesting, Madison, Wis., was served by three: the Milwaukee Road, the Chicago & North Western, and the Illinois […]
Two E8As and an E7B lead NYC 26, the 20th Century Limited, eastbound at VIckers, Ohio, on a summer evening in 1966, the train’s last full year. William L. Gwyer This picture was just about the last railroad photo I took. It was the culmination of my photographic exploration of contemporary railroading in the early […]
CP Consolidation 3422, pictured at North Bay, Ont., in October 1954, was among the engines author Quastler came to know during his 1959 summer at London, Ont. Mert Leet In that memorable summer, I was 18 and about to enter my sophomore year in college. My father worked for a Detroit firm that had a […]
