Santa Fe 2-8-2 3243 climbs west toward Summit, Calif., in 1952. Chard Walker In the early 1940s, when steam locomotives were supreme, I worked on the Santa Fe around Los Angeles. At Redondo Junction, today the north end of the “Alameda Corridor” to the L.A. and Long Beach harbor facilities, Santa Fe’s Harbor Branch left […]
West of Huntington, Ind., on the Erie Lackawanna, in March 1976, an EL U25B and GP35 back down to an eastbound freight brought in from Chicago by Milwaukee Road F units. Mike Schafer When I started with the Milwaukee Road in 1971, in road service, the railroad was desperately short of motive power. To help […]
Renumbered DL&W E8’s (top) roll into Warren with train 6 in 1962. Earlier that year, E8 833, its livery only slightly altered to reflect the 1960 EL merger, led an ex-DL&W E8 on No. 9. W. L. Gwyer The Erie Railroad served my hometown of Warren, Ohio. During my college years in the early 1960s, […]
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Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes 2-foot-gauge Mogul No. 16 pokes out of the covered depot at Kingfield, Maine. Charlie French, Mallory Hope Ferrell coll. While still a teenager in the early 1950s, I corresponded with a man who had grown up on the 2-foot-gauge lines of Maine. Arthur French, by then elderly, collected Indian Head […]
A 1962 freight derailment spelled the end for the century-old Wabash depot at little Philo, Ill. Glen Brewer My clock-radio came on at the usual morning hour with the local news. The date was Wednesday, October 3, 1962. The announcer reported a train wreck in Philo, Ill., the previous evening, blocking the Wabash Railroad’s main […]
Read more about the Bruce Sterzing era on the D&H in three news articles from Trains magazine. Download each story by clicking on the underlined PDF below. “D&H: 150 Years Old and Still Solvent” by J. David Ingles, published in the May 1973 issue of Trains magazine D&H 150 Years Old DOWNLOAD “Learning the Alphabet” […]
As trackworkers tend to a frozen switch, Northern Pacific 4-6-6-4 No. 5122 prepares to head east out of Livingston, Mont., with a freight sometime in the late 1940s. NP’s Livingston shops, still used by today’s Montana Rail Link, are visible at right. C. W. Jernstrom photo […]
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Horseshoe Curve, 1940: Freight on track 1, passenger on track 2, smoke from a train climbing on track 3 or 4. H. W. Pontin You could not avoid liking my uncle, Matthew McGrail. Matt was a medical doctor in Bradford, Pa., by profession, but he was a full-time rail enthusiast. He befriended many crews of […]
The Santa Fe was a class act, from its Warbonnet diesels to how it dealt with derailments. Gordon Glattenberg Back in 1955, when I was 22, I gained my first post-college newspaper reporting job with the Avalanche-Journal in Lubbock, Texas—not exactly the center of the railroad universe. Little did I know that within a few […]
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