When we drove off Illinois Route 92 onto former Rock Island property recently at Silvis, I was singularly focused on seeing steam locomotives. Three of them, to be specific, including one very special engine, former Union Pacific 4-6-6-4 Challenger No. 3985. The Challenger was among equipment that made headlines last year as Railroading Heritage […]
Any time the UPS truck drops a new railroad book on my porch, it’s a good day. But “good” is hardly adequate to describe the feeling I had a few days ago when a box from Indiana University Press showed up by the front door. Only superlatives will do when the subject is photographer […]
The Lionel Sandy Andy Automatic Gravel Loader was one of a kind. This 1970s accessory didn’t last very long in the catalog and there might be a few reasons why. On the other hand, it’s an exceptionally engineered product in certain ways and takes full advantage of physics! It’s all plastic and free of batteries […]
The railroad industry has created more than its share of publicity photographs over the past 150 years. Here, standing in Kalmbach Media’s David P. Morgan Memorial Library, I’m surrounded by tens of thousands of them, mostly 8 x 10 black-and-white prints, all of which came flooding into the company after the 1940 launch of […]
Like trilobites and brachiopods, the paper carcasses of 19th-century railroads seem forever locked away in the sediments of corporate archives and government files. They fill the pages of old Official Guides and Poor’s Manual of the Railroads by the hundreds. Nearly all of them are dormant — but some are not. Consider the case […]
On a day when snow is flying back home in Milwaukee, I’m 900 miles away, luxuriating in 70-degree temperatures and enjoying the refreshing shade of the huge live oak that hugs the generous eaves encircling one of the South’s most distinctive train stations. The building is a replica, but don’t hold that against it. […]
Presumably, David P. Morgan never met engineer Jeff Schmid. The late editor of Trains magazine died in 1990, just as Schmid’s career as a BN engineer was spooling up toward greater things. But D.P.M. had Schmid down to a “T” when, way back in 1956, he described a gallant New York Central engineer he encountered: […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
The O gauge Lionel ES44AC locomotive is a release that really captures the essence of modern rail power. This Legacy model has returned rather quickly to the train-maker’s catalog in 2022 with new road names. Those include several heritage paint schemes, like the Canadian National’s Elgin, Joliet & Eastern livery shown in this video. With […]
