Lackawanna’s great Pequest Fill

20160406

A 4-8-4 leads a freight east across the Lackawanna Railroad’s colossal Pequest Fill. At more than 3 miles long, Pequest was a major feature of the road’s 28.5-mile cutoff across the rough terrain of northern New Jersey. The line below is the Lehigh & Hudson River Railroad. Wayne Brumbaugh photo […]

Read More…

Muskogee memories

Muskogee94

Heavy Mikado of the Muskogee Group poses on the turntable at Muskogee, Okla., in August 1950. Joe Collias photo In the early 1950s, a friend and I traveled extensively in an attempt to photograph as many steam locomotives as possible before their impending destruction by dieselization. On one expedition, we chose a corner of Oklahoma […]

Read More…

Retail railroading

20160311

In a scene far removed from today’s unit and intermodal trains, a small boy watches as a shipment is loaded aboard the Union Transportation Co.’s daily train at New Egypt, N.J., in September 1958. The short line used locomotives and cabin cars leased from the Pennsylvania Railroad. Aaron G. Fryer photo […]

Read More…

PRR’s first passenger diesel

20160318

Pennsylvania E7A 5901, one of the units constituting the big road’s first passenger diesel, teams up with an E7B and another E7A on a “Blue Ribbon” limited departing Chicago. This historic unit is preserved at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. PRR photo […]

Read More…

The mums

MumsSP

A railfan went to Eureka, Calif., to see SD9s, but it’s the flowers at a memorial that made an impression. David Lustig photo It was the lure of the machinery that first attracted me to trains. But technology is nothing without people to operate it, and I suppose it’s a side effect of the aging […]

Read More…

Map of Glenita, Va., and environs

Glenitamap

Because of a production error with our Spring 2016 issue, the map that should have accompanied the article “Calamity at Glenita” — about a 1968 coal train derailment on the Southern Railway — was omitted from the magazine. Here is the map. […]

Read More…

GG1 to the rescue

20160201

Amtrak E60CH 966 on the Washington-bound Murray Hill has become disabled just south of Bowie, Md., on March 26, 1976. Sent out to rescue the one-year-old motor is Penn Central GG1 4885 — a 37-year veteran of the Northeast Corridor. Ray Brubacker photo […]

Read More…

Classic logging Mallet

20160212

The 2-6-6-2T Mallet, exemplified by Weyerhauser No. 9, was perhaps the ultimate development of the logging locomotive. Compact, powerful, and flexible, the type was ideally suited to pulling heavy loads over rough, sharply curved track. Geared locomotives like the Shay also possessed these traits, but could not make the speed of a rod engine. Baldwin […]

Read More…