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The gift By Curtis L.Katz I have always been fascinated with trains. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bannister, a grandmotherly woman wiry and wise, once told my mother that most little children go through a phase when they are interested in trains or ships or trucks, “but with Curtis, trains are a hobby.” Had my 5-yeard-old […]
When I read Rev. Richard Anderson’s account in the Summer 2000 Classic Trains [pages 93-95] of his travels on the Rock Island, I was filled with nostalgia. His description of boarding the woebegone Cherokee at 2:45 a.m. at Little Rock got me thinking back to my own experiences with the Rock Island in the Arkansas […]
I hired out in 1944 with the Santa Fe as an agent/operator apprentice and in August was assigned to the agent/operator pool. In about a year I was 26th up from the bottom of the list, so I was able to successfully bid on some openings. One night in about 1946, I was working relief […]
During my career as an engineman on the Southern Pacific, I ran and fired locomotives carrying from 185 to 300 psi of superheated steam. The engine in this story was a 3700-class 2-10-2 which carried 200 psi of steam at 510 degrees F. Every road locomotive had two water glasses, one on the engineer’s side […]
The year was 1966; I was 19 years old and starting my second summer working on the Great Lakes. This year I was called to be a deckhand on the Leon Falk Jr. of the Hanna fleet. At 730 feet overall, she was one of the largest boats on the Great Lakes, and could haul […]
Merger? What merger? Two tariffs equal one trip By J. David Ingles As railroad mergers were sweeping the land through the 1960’s, passenger services of individual carriers were on a one-way trip to oblivion, culminating in Amtrak’s formation in 1971. For most roads, this couldn’t happen soon enough, and this attitude, couple with the regulatory […]
As an Episcopal priest serving in Iowa in the 1960’s, I was lucky to have Gordon V. Smith as my bishop. Bishop Smith was always eager to do whatever he could to make life easier and happier for us clergy who were in his jurisdiction. He was fascinated with my interest in railroads, and was […]
For many years, the Lehigh Valley maintained some offices in downtown Philadelphia, even though this was an off-line point. In the mid-1940’s, the Valley relocated the offices to its building just west of the Bethlehem (Pa.) Union Station. The LV cushioned the hardship of the move by having a special chartered train run each working […]
Before a 1960 line-relocation project, the two main tracks of the Santa Fe Railway’s transcontinental main line split at Supai, a few miles west of Williams, Ariz. The westbound track followed a more circuitous route, enabling trains to more easily climb the steep Supai hill. Twelve miles west of Williams the tracks met again, at […]
Many years ago, when the Atlantic Coast Line was almost all double track from Richmond to Jacksonville and the passenger-train speed limit was 100 mph, a calamity nearly occurred in an obscure south Georgia swamp. ACL’s raceway occasionally would narrow to single track when encountering a drawbridge over a river, or a wide marsh associated […]
One of the most memorable aspects of my career in railroad maintenance of way is the “outfit.” An outfit was usually a collection of old revenue cars — both passenger and freight — converted to sleeping, cooking, shower, supply, tool, storage, and machinery transport use. An outfit could be one lone car for a signal […]
Water was a problem for both the Clinchfield Railroad and for local residents at Elkhorn City, Ky. The town is in far eastern Kentucky, at the north end of the Clinchfield where it met the south end of Chesapeake & Ohio’s Big Sandy Division, forming a through route for merchandise as well as the region’s […]
