On a hot summer night in the early 1960s, Rock Island E3 626 stands at Waterloo, Iowa, with train 190. Ahead 110 miles: Columbus Junction. J. David Ingles Sad to say, this story is true. Only the name of the guilty is omitted. Sad to say, I knew this man—and still do now. It happened […]
We’re high above Seaboard Coast Line’s Uceta Yard and locomotive shop on Sept. 26 1970. Below is the busy former Atlantic Coast Line yard and the neighboring Seaboard Air Line Yeoman Yard that were brought together under the SCL banner with the 1967 merger. The locomotive shop would distinguish itself in the late 1970s with […]
Q This is a follow-up question to one in the July 2010 issue about the three air hoses on locomotives (page 58). I saw engines in the ’70s and earlier with four hoses and some with only two. Why the difference?— Dan Mirabelli, Neenah, Wis. A The two-line m.u. setup was generally for 14EL-equipped units. […]
Q How do railroad design engineers measure track curvature in the United States? I believe it has something to do with measuring the degrees between two radii of a circle having the track as the arc length, but I don’t fully understand how it is measured, or from where exactly on the tracks the radii […]
Click the image to download this interactive PDF. It ’s not likely that Trains readers would immediately recognize the significance of the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad. However, the ETV&G (whose earliest ancestor lines date to 1856) merged with the Richmond & Danville in 1894 to create a more recognizable company name: Southern Railway. […]
Santa Fe’s premier train, the Chicago-Los Angeles Super Chief, was the first to get dome cars. Santa Fe called them “Pleasure Domes.” Santa Fe Railway Milwaukee Road’s upper-level domes stretched almost the full length of the car, earning the name “Super Dome.” Milwaukee Road Workers service a full-length Milwaukee Road Super Dome from the Olympian […]
Sign over car shop. Employee notifications are posted in English and French. Bob Johnston This unusual RDC4 originally built for Canadian Pacific will be refurbished for VIA’s Sudbury-White River, Ont., train. Bob Johnston A welder works on an RDC. Bob Johnston The new RDC engineer’s cab includes a computer display to monitor train performance. Bob […]
Ringling’s Blue Unit circus train exits Huntsman Canyon at Moapa, Nev., June 15, 2010, oln its way to Las Vegas. This rare view shows the entire 61-car, 5,409-foot, 4,490-ton consist. Kenneth Kuehne The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus rail car fleet is an amazing collection of equipment from many railroads and many configurations. […]
A North Star commuter train waits at the end of the line, Big Lake, Minn, before its return trip to Minneapolis on April 10, 2010. Photo by Rick Johnson […]
Q I’ve read that when some railroads sent their steam locomotives in for a complete overhaul, they changed the main drivers to a disc type. Why would they do this?— Alex Jamieson, Chatham, Ont. A Changing to disc-type drivers was done on a case-by-case basis. The older style spoke drivers had a tendency to break […]
To our family, the ultimate train was not the Broadway, the 20th Century, or the exalted Dominion that plied our home Canadian Pacific rails out of Toronto. For us, the train was CPR’s nameless workaday No. 25, leaving daily at 10:30 (reading as 9:30 in the days when timetables were printed in Standard Time regardless […]
Southern Pacific 2-10-2 3757 rests at Sparks, Nev., in 1948. J. F. Larison I went firing on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Division in 1953. My engineer’s name was Lindsay, a hoghead in the regular San Francisco-Watsonville Junction (Calif.) chain gang. I fired for Lindsay several times and, although he never checked the water level by […]
