Eastern coal railroads issued maps of coal mines they served for the information of customers. This map (redrawn for clarity) shows C&O’s New River and Kanawha (Ka-NAW) Districts in 1966. their common border marks the divide between high and low volatile coal measures, an important distinction that determines whether coal is used to make coke […]
Intermodal haulage on railroads initially resembled loose-car railroading: Cities of varying sizes had ramps that originated a few flatcars, which were added to merchandise freights. A trucker, though, could beat that service easily. Larger cities generated solid intermodal trains, but the cost of terminals, equipment, and operations made the business lucrative only in lanes of […]
As the sun rises over a brutal Chicago morning, Wisconsin Central train T045 stares at a clear signal at Chatham Ave. at CSX’s Barr Yard. The train’s air is slow to come up on a -20 Jan. 17, 1997. William M. Beecher Jr. photo […]
With a normal lens, the photographer takes a photo of the westward California Zephyr running through the Feather River Canyon in east-central California on the Western Pacific Railroad in summer 1968. Thomas Taylor With a normal lens, the photographer takes a shot of Operator Art Simmons putting his feet up at Canadian Pacific Railway’s West […]
An Amtrak special move, with private car Ohio River at the back, rolls along Canadian Pacific’s former Delaware & Hudson main line on Sept. 4, 2009. The train is on its way from Albany, N.Y., to Railfest 2009 in Scranton, Pa. Jim Conroy photo […]
Amtrak’s Texas Eagle for Chicago charges through Terrell, Texas, on Oct. 14, 2008. Photo by Steve Schmollinger […]
Traffic density changes in the past 30 years on freight railroads’ main lines to Chicago reflect factors both geographic and corporate. Geographic factors include the shift of manufacturing from domestic to offshore; air quality regulations that closed high-sulfur Western mines; and general population and economic growth. Corporate factors include the desire of railroad managements to […]
A supplement to the Classic Trains Online Look Back e-mail newsletter A B&LE Pacific with train 13 makes a stop at Adamsville, Pa., 9 miles from the end of its run at Greenville. Fred N. Houser photo Several years ago, in 2001, Norfolk Southern completed a $26 million line change through Erie, Pa., ending 120 […]
The undeniable triumph of U.S. railroading can be seen in this graph of revenue ton-miles: the most basic unit of measurement (hauling one ton of freight one mile) for the work railroads perform. The data for this illustration come from the Association of American Railroads, and are confined to Class I railroads, the largest group […]
Think you’re in a hurry to get to work? The 3,170 trains on this map make it their business to hustle, with a purposefulness matched only by the riders packed aboard their coaches. This is a snapshot of the commuter trains that run every weekday in the Northeast. Without them, some of the biggest cities […]
Before the mega-merger movement of the 1980s, only a few U.S. Class I systems attained route-mileage in five figures. Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Milwaukee Road did so by spanning the transcontinental West, Pennsylvania and New York Central bulked up in the East, and Chicago & North Western and Burlington Route (if you include its […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: When we asked the Class I railroads for input on the May 2010 locomotive column on the subject of A.C. traction diesels, Norfolk Southern Assistant Vice President-Mechanical Don Graab responded by email and provided us some great detail. What follows is his perspective on why some railroads order only A.C. diesels, some D.C., […]
