Overland Route A trim Southern Pacific 4-6-2 makes better than 60 mph with Overland Limited east of Elko, Nev., in 1918, when Overland Route rail service was already nearly 50 years old, and the top trains were numbered 1 and 2. Fred Jukes photo […]
Shasta Daylight The Oakland-bound Shasta Daylight rumbles over the big, curved trestle at Redding, Calif., in mid-1950. The Shasta was diesel-powered from its July 1949 launch. James L. Martin photo […]
Union Pacific Challengers in service were one of the great sights of American railroading in the 1940s and 1950s, when they were near the pinnacle of super-powered steam. Please enjoy this digitized 8mm video originally take by Dick Wallin in 1959 east of Cheyenne, Wyo. Only from Classic Trains! […]
In 1981, I was Director, Freight Car Engineering, for Berwick Forge & Fabricating, a railcar manufacturer. The company decided to start producing grain covered hopper cars, which seemed to still have a significant market. I developed a prototype car that weighed more than desired, reducing the available load capacity. Although we stenciled the car with […]
Railroad man Gainesville Midland Railroad conductor L. C. Birchfield is perched in a caboose cupola in the late 1950s. The railroad ran between Gainesville and Athens in northern Georgia and one time had a branch to Monroe. Seaboard Air Line purchased the road in June 1959. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Rolling fortress With two big engines leading a dozen heavyweight cars into the desert, the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited looks like a rolling fortress at Palm Springs, Calif., sometime in the mid-1940s. Walter H. Thrall Jr. photo […]
Western Pacific Railroad history The Western Pacific Railroad almost “had it all.” It ran passenger and freight trains, in mountain and desert scenery, behind vintage steam engines that survived World War II and hauled excursions, and then colorful diesels, from early green-and-yellow FTs through orange-and-silver Fs and Geeps to dark-green second-generation EMDs and GEs. It […]
Keeping an even keel It was important for boxcar loads of grain to be level. Sometimes workers had to enter the cars and level the loads by hand, as with this carload of wheat. Jeff Wilson collection […]
The BL2 was a mistake at diesel locomotive leader EMD EMD’s BL2 diesel locomotive was a mistake of historic proportions. During the 1930s and ’40s — when diesel-locomotive sales grew from smoldering embers to white-hot inferno — Electro-Motive Corp. (after 1940, General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division) seemingly could do no wrong. With the technical and marketing […]
Cab-forward conveyance A puff of oil smoke hangs in the air over Truckee as AC 4-8-8-2 No. 4185 gets the westbound Overland moving after a station stop. In 6 hours, the train will arrive at Oakland Pier. Jim Morley photo […]
Shortline savior North Carolina’s Laurinburg & Southern was a GE 70-tonner bastion in the Southeast. A pair works Dixie Guano in Laurinburg in September 1984. The GE small locomotive line enabled great savings for short lines that adopted them, keeping some of them running for years longer than if powered by steam. Jim Wrinn photo […]
Man at work Baltimore & Ohio Dispatcher Carl Donald makes an entry on his trainsheet in DR Tower in Deshler, Ohio, in the early 1950s. Deshler lies at the crossing of the B&O’s Pittsburgh to Chicago and Toledo to Cincinnati main lines. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
