History According to Hediger: Interlocking insights

Man with model interlocking machine

Having trouble viewing this video?   Please visit our Video FAQ page Model Railroader magazine’s senior editor Jim Hediger returns to the MRVP studio! In this episode, he first explains how a real plant works, before describing how former MR editors Paul Larson and Gordon Odegard engineered a model for use on an HO scale […]

Read More…

History According to Hediger: Interlocking insights

Man with model interlocking machine

Having trouble viewing this video?   Please visit our Video FAQ page Model Railroader magazine’s senior editor Jim Hediger returns to the MRVP studio! In this episode, he first explains how a real plant works, before describing how former MR editors Paul Larson and Gordon Odegard engineered a model for use on an HO scale […]

Read More…

On creating the world’s largest fusee

C of Denver lv Chi

Union Pacific’s City of Denver curves away from North Western Station in Chicago at the start of its run west. Sister streamliner City of Portland once made an unscheduled stop at Oak Park, 9 miles west. Wallace W. Abbey In spring 1955, I was working as a ticket clerk at Chicago & North Western’s Oak […]

Read More…

Author, historian Jim Scribbins dies NEWSWIRE

Scribbins

Trains collection MILWAUKEE– Jim Scribbins, the career Milwaukee Road employee who became his company’s unofficial historian as well as a prolific railroad author and photographer, died Thanksgiving Day, November 27, at home in West Bend after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 86. Born in 1928, Scribbins dedicated a substantial part of his […]

Read More…

Turbine orphan

20141125

Westinghouse and partner Baldwin fielded an experimental 4,000 h.p. B-B+B-B gas-turbine-electric in 1950. Dubbed the “Blue Goose” because of its paint scheme (and perhaps for its unusual appearance), No. 4000, pictured at Chicago on the Chicago & North Western, generated no orders. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]

Read More…

Seaboard Air Line at Melrose, N.C.

Red caboose on rear of freight train

Watch 8mm home movies from 1945-46 of Seaboard Air Line steam and diesel action around Melrose, N.C. From the collection of James H. D. Helms Jr., whose father took the movies and whose grandfather was an SAL conductor. […]

Read More…

Super Bowl Sunday on the Santa Fe

ATSF-HigginsTX

At frosty Higgins, Texas, on the Santa Fe, author Metzger’s crane parts sit sidetracked as SD40-2s pass with a freight. Bill Metzger While my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the Seattle Seahawks in the 2007 Super Bowl, I got to thinking about where I was the last time the Steelers won football’s biggest game. It […]

Read More…

A hard way to make a living

ic 1544

Illinois Central 2-8-2 Mikado 1544 is eastbound at Villa Park, Ill., on a cold day in 1951. Henry M. Stange Some years ago, after a reunion of my old 10th Engineer Battalion at Springfield, Ill., I boarded Amtrak’s Statehouse for Chicago. I’d never ridden the former Chicago & Alton before, but I was eager to […]

Read More…

Book Review: Garratt Locomotives

Garratt Locomotives

Garratt Locomotives Reprinted by Heimburger House Publishing, 7236 W. Madison St., Forest Park, IL 60130; 36 pages, 50 illustrations; softcover, 11.5 x 8.5 in.; $18.95 Heimburger House has published this reprint of a 1920s-era Beyer, Peacock & Co. Garratt locomotive catalog. To North American eyes, the Garratt is an unusual-looking machine, but the fact that […]

Read More…

Book Review: The Ligonier Valley Rail Road

The Ligonier Valley Rail Road by Robert D. Stutzman Arcadia Publishing, 420 Wando Park Blvd., Charleston, SC 29464; 128 pages; softcover, 6.5 x 9.25 in.; $21.99 Pennsylvania is known today for having more than 50 shortline railroads within its borders, most of which are castoff segments of the Class I railroads. In the 19th and […]

Read More…