A man and girl walk past the Blue Bird’s dome-observation car as they board the Wabash’s streamliner to St. Louis at Dearborn Station, Chicago, in the 1950s. Bill Wight photo […]
Boarding Wabash’s Blue Bird
Tag: Railroads
Charlie’s Trackside Postcards – Columbia Gorge: A Tale of Ten Tunnels
In this last leg of their trek to the Columbia River Gorge, Charlie and Tom Danneman keep the cameras rolling to capture the various tunnels and trains along the BNSF main line. You’ll enjoy the numerous run-bys they captured before returning to Portland, Ore. […]
Galvanic corrosion
This coal hopper, seen in Butler, Wis., has a main body built from aluminum and a center sill made of steel. Freight-car makers use non-conductive materials to separate the metals and prevent galvanic corrosion. Steve Sweeney Q There are aluminum-body Talgos and aluminum-body coal cars, both with steel center sills. High school chemistry teaches that […]
E5 with new bi-levels
An E5 heads up one of the first Burlington Route commuter train to sport the new bi-level “gallery” cars delivered by Budd in 1950. The train is eastbound at famous Naperville curve on the triple-track west of Chicago. Bob Borcherding photo […]
Erie PA at Hoboken
Erie Railroad Alco passenger diesel No. 860 stands with a train at Hoboken, N.J., in April 1959. Erie’s 14 PAs all went to the Erie-Lackawanna upon the Erie’s merger with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western in 1960. Erie began using Lackawanna’s Hoboken terminal a few years before the two roads merged. Louis A. Marre collection […]
Inside the Train of Tomorrow
Models pose for the camera inside Moon Glow, the Train of Tomorrow’s dome-observation-lounge car. GM and Pullman-Standard built the four-car, E7-powered ToT in 1947. General Motors photo […]
Santa Fe FTs in the desert
Crewmen wave and the white extra flags are taut as four FTs speed a freight west across the desert between Needles and Barstow, Calif., in the early 1940s. Wendell H. Kinney photo […]
Chicago: the video!
Chicago is still the North American railroad capital, and Trains Magazine takes you there with this all-new DVD production. You’ll see heavy freights, fast passenger runs, and the transit system that takes a major city to work. Be sure to check out the companion issue: Chicago, America’s Railroad Capital. Both are available in January! […]
Trains Presents: North Shore Scenic Railroad
Trains Magazine Assistant Editor Brian Schmidt takes you along for a look at the North Shore Scenic Railroad‘s operations in September 2016. The railroad, part of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum, operates excursion trains on its line between Duluth and Two Harbors, Minn., with historic equipment from the Upper Midwest’s fallen flags. You’ll see Duluth, […]
The time I got to run ‘my unit’
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, […]
Baltimore yards and rail lines, 1948
It was an act of sheer audacity that made Baltimore the cradle of American railroading. Baltimore’s topography of hills broken by short, steep valleys was exactly wrong for a canal, and the city’s outlet to the west, the National Road, was expensive and slow. So city leaders proposed a railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, to […]
1990s B units
Santa Fe management ordered 23 GP60B units in 1991 for road service. Today, these four-axle veterans still ply BNSF Railway rails, but mostly on local jobs. Bob Miller Q I was watching railroad videos of the 1990s and saw locomotives without cabs in various consists. I rarely see these units on the main lines of […]
