The Wabash Railway of 1900 was part of the empire that George Gould inherited from his father Jay. Its lines linked Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and Des Moines, and formed major hubs at Decatur, Ill., and Moberly, Mo. It had just received trackage rights on the rails of the Grand Trunk […]
Align every rail joint Every rail joint must be carefully aligned, properly fitted, and level. Sight along the rail to check the alignment through the rail joiner. After the track is spiked down, use a fine file to smooth the top and inside corner of the rail joint until you can slide a fingernail across […]
In 1879 and 1880, a syndicate headed by George I. Seney, a New York banker, assembled the Lake Erie & Western Railway, a line from Fremont, Ohio, to Bloomington, Ill. After a dispute with the New York Central System about the routing of freight, Seney decided to build a line to connect the LE&W to […]
Baltimore & Ohio timeline: 1827 Charter approved 1828 Official start of construction on July 4 1830 Scheduled service begins, Baltimore-Ellicotts Mills, May 24 1831 Service begins to Frederick, Md. 1832 Service begins to Point of Rocks, Md. 1835 Service begins on Relay-Washington branch, construction having begun in 1833 1837 Potomac River bridged at Harper’s Ferry, […]
In June 1949, my friend Bob Wagner and I decided to head from our Los Angels-area homes for the Owens Valley in eastern central California to see, and hopefully ride, Southern Pacific’s former Carson & Colorado narrow gauge, which still operated with steam power 70 miles between Keeler and Laws. We got a late start […]
The gift By Curtis L.Katz I have always been fascinated with trains. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bannister, a grandmotherly woman wiry and wise, once told my mother that most little children go through a phase when they are interested in trains or ships or trucks, “but with Curtis, trains are a hobby.” Had my 5-yeard-old […]
When I read Rev. Richard Anderson’s account in the Summer 2000 Classic Trains [pages 93-95] of his travels on the Rock Island, I was filled with nostalgia. His description of boarding the woebegone Cherokee at 2:45 a.m. at Little Rock got me thinking back to my own experiences with the Rock Island in the Arkansas […]
I hired out in 1944 with the Santa Fe as an agent/operator apprentice and in August was assigned to the agent/operator pool. In about a year I was 26th up from the bottom of the list, so I was able to successfully bid on some openings. One night in about 1946, I was working relief […]
During my career as an engineman on the Southern Pacific, I ran and fired locomotives carrying from 185 to 300 psi of superheated steam. The engine in this story was a 3700-class 2-10-2 which carried 200 psi of steam at 510 degrees F. Every road locomotive had two water glasses, one on the engineer’s side […]
The year was 1966; I was 19 years old and starting my second summer working on the Great Lakes. This year I was called to be a deckhand on the Leon Falk Jr. of the Hanna fleet. At 730 feet overall, she was one of the largest boats on the Great Lakes, and could haul […]
Merger? What merger? Two tariffs equal one trip By J. David Ingles As railroad mergers were sweeping the land through the 1960’s, passenger services of individual carriers were on a one-way trip to oblivion, culminating in Amtrak’s formation in 1971. For most roads, this couldn’t happen soon enough, and this attitude, couple with the regulatory […]
As an Episcopal priest serving in Iowa in the 1960’s, I was lucky to have Gordon V. Smith as my bishop. Bishop Smith was always eager to do whatever he could to make life easier and happier for us clergy who were in his jurisdiction. He was fascinated with my interest in railroads, and was […]
