Travel could not be more pleasurable

NCL Clark Fork

Great train, great scenery: NP’s North Coast Limited rolls west along the Clark Fork River in Montana. Classic Trains coll. My 1947 journey on Northern Pacific’s North Coast Limited is a treasured memory. I had come to love good trains through numerous trips between Washington, D.C., and my childhood home in Florida. My first ride […]

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History According to Hediger: The DT&I Delta Turn

Yellow diesel locomotive facing camera

Having trouble viewing this video?   Please visit our Video FAQ page Part of Jim’s career included a stint in real railroading, which provided him opportunities to get some great photos and stories. In this episode of History According to Hediger video, Jim rides along on the DT&I’s Delta Turn. Related Topics: railfan […]

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History According to Hediger: The Hiawatha Tour

Model steam locomotives

Having trouble viewing this video?   Please visit our Video FAQ page History According to Hediger is a video series of remaniscence of the good old days of Model Railroader magazine. Senior editor Jim Hediger tells the story of the Hiawatha good will tour, marking Model Railroader’s 50th anniversary. […]

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History According to Hediger: Editors’ Cars

Model boxcars

Having trouble viewing this video?   Please visit our Video FAQ page In this video epsiode of History According to Hediger, Jim shows a few of the custom O scale freight cars featuring MR staff layouts. The cars were made for display at events in the 1970s. Related Topics: o scale […]

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A new way to unload sand

This story was related to me by those personally involved in a new but somewhat less-than-satisfactory method of unloading sand. The time was in the middle of the Great Depression. The locale was the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the “U.P.” The two unloaders were the sons of a local Methodist preacher, long in spirit and […]

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Railroad photography and the lasting influence of painting

FULL SCREEN Édouard Baldus/J. Paul Getty Museum Toulon Station, c. 1861. Édouard Baldus, who trained as a painter and worked as a lithographer, adopted compositional conventions of painting, such as centered motifs and balanced space surrounding the center, to his railroad photographs. FULL SCREEN Édouard Baldus/St. Louis Art Museum Approach to the Mountain Pass at […]

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A South Bend tradition

SSL100

Two of the South Shore Line’s air-conditioned M.U. cars stand at the road’s downtown South Bend, Ind., depot on La Salle Street in 1967. H. G. Goerke; J. David Ingles coll. It was about 14 years before this evocative photo was snapped by my late train-chasing buddy Hank Goerke that I first stepped off a […]

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