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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 […]
Video clips courtesy of Herron Rail Video. […]
CV M-5-a 461, the same class of 2-8-0 entrusted with atomic loads, nears Amherst, Mass., with a Palmer-Brattleboro local in 1950. Robert P. Brittin, Douglas J. Brittin coll. As a child in the mid-1950s, I was privileged to witness several “secret” military moves on the Central Vermont Railway. Given the high state of security surrounding […]
South of 30th Street Station in September 1980, an Amtrak E60 accelerates a train toward Washington while, in the background, SEPTA Silverliner IV’s head out on a commuter run to either Media/Elwyn or Wilmington. Robert S. McGonigal Bob Trennert, in his article “A West Coast Railfan in Philadelphia, 1967–1974” in the Spring 2013 issue of […]
Watch some of the 16mm films of Big Boys and Challengers Stan Kistler took during his 1956 trip, excerpted from the DVD program Union Pacific Classic Collectors’ Series, produced by Pentrex. […]
The Salton Sea in Southern California was formed in 1907 when men tried to redirect Colorado River irrigation canals and caused a two-year flood. It spans the intersection of two great deserts: the Mojave to the north and the Sonoran to the south and west. Summer temperatures routinely hover at 120 degrees. In the 1950s […]
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 […]
Trains magazine celebrates Grand Central Terminal’s 100th anniversary in our February 2013 issue with a comprehensive look at America’s most famous railroad station, from its planning and construction a century ago, and the thwarted attempts to place a skyscraper above it in the 1960s, to the incredible restoration work completed in recent decades that has […]
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 […]
