The annual Trains News Wire year in review series begins today, which includes a look at the Top 10 news stories of 2024, as selected by a vote of staff members and key contributors. The cutoff date for consideration was Dec. 1.
This year, our voters cast votes for 22 nominees for the Top 10 list. Reflecting a year in which there was no clear-cut top story — unlike last year, when events in East Palestine were a near-unanimous choice — six stories received first-place votes from our panel of 10 voters, and no story was mentioned on all 10 ballots. The top three clearly separated themselves from the rest of the field in the final voting, which we’ll discuss more at the end of the series.
In recent years, we’ve often had a story addressing runners-up in the balloting, but this year, those will be covered in the topic-by-topic reviews that precede the Top 10, beginning with today’s Year in Transit article. One that doesn’t fit within any of those categories will be the story that finished 12th in the balloting: the sale of Trains Magazine and other Kalmbach Media titles to Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Firecrown Media. It has been a year of change for the magazines involved in that sale, and that change and integration into a new corporate family continues to take place, with the most recent development of note seeing the return of the Trains.com forums. The former Kalmbach titles from their longtime Waukesha, Wis.., home on Crossroads Circle to a new office in nearby Brookfield, Wis., this summer; that move would have come in any event, as Kalmbach had sold the Waukesha building before the Firecrown transaction.
As for Kalmbach, the company is continuing an orderly move to its dissolution sometime in 2025, some 91 years after its founding. The lone publication not sold to Firecrown, Discover magazine, was purchased in November by LabX Media Group, which focuses on science and research media, leaving marketing agency Saturn Lounge — which joined the Kalmbach family in 2021 —as the last piece of the company.
The year in review, meanwhile, will be a daily feature of News Wire from now until Jan. 1. And, in case you’ve forgotten, or would like to see how 2023 compares to this year, here are last year’s top stories:
No. 2: Brightline begins service to Orlando
No. 3: The Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger
No. 4: Amtrak’s continuing capacity problems
No. 5: East Broad Top returns to steam
No. 6 (tie): Federal infrastructure spending
No. 6 (tie): Grand Central Madison opens
No. 8: Delays to Amtrak’s new Acela
No. 9: Amtrak leadership and governance issues
No. 10 (tie): Class I railroads’ quality-of-life deals with unions
No. 10 (tie): The BNSF-J.B. Hunt premium intermodal partnership
