Introducing the all-new Trains.com Forum! Become a part of our Community! >>VISIT NOW
On a hot afternoon in August 1960, the year before the author began his Erie employment there, five Alco cab units thundered past SN Tower with a 99 freight. J. David Ingles In 1961 my dream came true. For the past six months or so I had been hanging out at various towers on the […]
Bruceton was a busy junction in west Tennessee on the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. One engineer who worked out of there was known for his pompous, stuffed-shirt manner and lordly bearing which often grated upon others. Drawing a hotshot run out of Bruceton, this engineer put his 2-8-2 to serious work and was […]
Way back in 1940, I took a fling at railroading. After ditching art school, I went to work for the Alton Railroad at its roundhouse at Glenn Yard in southwest Chicago. My job was mechanic’s helper. One of my duties was to tighten the bolts on locomotive cylinder heads. I attacked the task with vim […]
Depot and diesel wear different heralds, but nothing is out of the ordinary as a Chicago Great Western freight ambles past the Rock Island station in Waterloo, Iowa, in June 1961. Richard J. Anderson A family visit took me to Waterloo, Iowa, on a June day in 1961, but it was good ol’ railfan instinct […]
A supplement to the Classic Trains Online Look Back e-mail newsletter In modern-day Toronto, Ontario, I’m told the Skydome Hotel occupies what was once the site of Canadian National Railway’s Spadina Avenue engine terminal. Back on September 4, 1958, I spent part of a warm, late-summer night at Spadina, lugging cameras and a tripod and […]
A supplement to the Classic Trains Online Look Back e-mail newsletter The pride of Sandusky, Ohio, is the huge Cedar Point Amusement Park on a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie north of downtown. The pride of Cedar Point, at least for railfans, is its 2-foot-gauge steam-powered railroad. On June 26, 1966, Cedar Point was a […]
A supplement to the Classic Trains Online Look Back e-mail newsletter Looking as proud as ever, CN 4-8-4 6205 rides the turntable at London, Ont., in July 1959, headed for the ash pit, the dead line, and oblivion. Ken Kraemer photo By spring 1959, steam locomotives were just about gone from regular service on most […]
A supplement to the Classic Trains Online Look Back e-mail newsletter Susquehanna 2514, a well-cared-for Pacific built for the Erie in 1905, strides out of Pompton Lakes, N.J., with a westbound commuter run. Theodore B. Kerr The New York Susquehanna & Western Railroad evokes in me almost palpable feelings of ownership. Having been born a […]
The stack-top addition to John J. Craig Co. Shay No. 2147 may have caused more sparks than it arrested. T. G. King photo, C. K. Marsh Jr. collection Hard by the campus of the 1950’s-era University of Tennessee lay the modest Knoxville terminal of the storied Smoky Mountain Railroad. Several postwar railfan students, including me, […]
Rare find: Working in Cajon Pass helper service, Santa Fe center-cab Baldwin 2600 heads west at Summit. David Lustig collection I think I was about 14 or 15 when the word got out that I liked trains. It was not a secret, you understand, but unless I seriously misjudged him, I don’t think my father […]
A window in Thrums By Steven Duff Thrums is a name that somehow resonates above most others, a name, as we say these days, that has Attitude. It is a Scottish word, immortalized in Sir James Barrie’s novel, A Window in Thrums, and is perpetuated in Canada by a small town in British Columbia. In […]
In June 1949, my friend Bob Wagner and I decided to head from our Los Angels-area homes for the Owens Valley in eastern central California to see, and hopefully ride, Southern Pacific’s former Carson & Colorado narrow gauge, which still operated with steam power 70 miles between Keeler and Laws. We got a late start […]
