Seaboard System Railroad officials inspect the jointly owned Winston-Salem Southbound Railroad (with Norfolk Southern) on Aug. 8, 1985. The train is crossing the Yadkin River near Badin, N.C., behind former Clinchfield Railroad F units Nos. 116 and 117. Photo by Doug Koontz […]
HO scale locomotives General Electric ES44AC diesel locomotive. Fictional paint schemes: Burlington Northern; Delaware & Hudson; Erie Lackawanna; Gulf, Mobile & Ohio; Louisville & Nashville; and Southern Pacific. Two road numbers each. Etched-metal details, wire grab irons, and Kadee knuckle couplers. Direct-current model, $179.95; with SoundTraxx Digital Command Control sound decoder, $259.95. November/December 2012. Ready-to-run. […]
DUNMORE, Pa. – The Erie Lackawanna Dining Car Preservation Society’s ex-Delaware, Lackawanna & Western diner 469 is on its way over Norfolk Southern and Delaware-Lackawanna from Collierville, Tenn. to Scranton, Penn. The Budd Co. built the car in 1949 for the DL&W’s premier train, the Phoebe Snow. Renumbered 769 after the merger forming the Erie […]
In the early 2000s, North America’s 88 automobile assembly plants produced about 15 million new cars and trucks a year. And railroads moved 70 percent of the vehicles built in the United States alone. Most Canadian and U.S. plants are concentrated in a wide corridor stretching from Toronto to Mobile, Ala. Plants in Mexico are […]
Coal is the most important rail commodity in the United States. In the early 2000s, when this map was produced, coal accounted for one of four cars loaded and slightly more than 20 percent of rail revenue. Eighty percent of the coal goes to the generation of electricity at steam power plants, so a map […]
Geographic growth by acquisition or merger, and the elimination of redundant routes by sale or abandonment, are two factors that have been with American railroading from the outset…and are not about to go away. Consider this map of CSX Transportation’s principal ancestors. Shown here are 22 former Class I railroads — in post-World War II […]
Commercial shipping on the Great Lakes follows a 2,300-mile corridor from the St. Lawrence Seaway to the western edge of Lake Superior. Over 200 million tons of cargo a year cross the five lakes and connecting waterways, hauled in some 150 U.S. and Canadian lakers, 50,000 barges, and about 1,000 visits by ocean-going vessels, or […]
Twenty-four years separate these two density maps — a long time in North American railroading. The 1974 Penn Central map uses the last data available for the failed railroad; the 1998 Conrail map likewise is based on the last data before its system was split between CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern. While similarities appear, the […]
This Map of the Month was featured in the March 2007 issue of Trains magazine. Imagine if you were to go back in time and tell Cornelius Vanderbilt that the giant railroad system he had methodically assembled — the powerful New York Central — would one day be carved up by two coal roads from […]
This Map of the Month appeared in the January 2004 issue of Trains. Al first glance, this looks like the route map of an airline. In reality, it’s BNSF Railway’s merchandise freight traffic network (i.e., cars not moving in unit trains from one common origin to one destination). It’s no coincidence they look the same, for […]
HO Scale locomotives Electro-Motive Division F3A and B diesel locomotives. New paint scheme: Denver & Rio Grande (passenger scheme). Five-pole skew-wound motor with dual flywheels, separately applied prototype-specific details, and magnetic knuckle couplers. A unit: Direct-current model, $169.98; with SoundTraxx Digital Command Control sound decoder, $269.98. A-B set: DC models, $309.98; with DCC and sound, […]
Two eastbound movements on Norfolk Southern’s Pittsburgh Line: a stack train pushed by two SD40E helpers is overtaken by another SD40E helper set in Lilly, Pa., on Dec. 27, 2009. Barely three years earlier, Lilly and surrounding communities opened the Central Mainline Sewer Authority — named after the Pennsylvania Railroad, which preceded NS. Photo by […]
