As the sun rises over a brutal Chicago morning, Wisconsin Central train T045 stares at a clear signal at Chatham Ave. at CSX’s Barr Yard. The train’s air is slow to come up on a -20 Jan. 17, 1997. William M. Beecher Jr. photo […]
Traffic density changes in the past 30 years on freight railroads’ main lines to Chicago reflect factors both geographic and corporate. Geographic factors include the shift of manufacturing from domestic to offshore; air quality regulations that closed high-sulfur Western mines; and general population and economic growth. Corporate factors include the desire of railroad managements to […]
Before the mega-merger movement of the 1980s, only a few U.S. Class I systems attained route-mileage in five figures. Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Milwaukee Road did so by spanning the transcontinental West, Pennsylvania and New York Central bulked up in the East, and Chicago & North Western and Burlington Route (if you include its […]
Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern SD40-3 no. 6097 is on point of train 486 as it glides through Elm Grove, WI on its way south to Chicago. This train’s counterpart, 487, will head west to the Twin Cities later in the day. Photo by Drew Halverson […]
If you want a glimpse of railroad operations six decades ago, this map of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy provides a window. It’s based on Burlington’s November 1947 freight train operating plan, a chart of schedules furnished to company officers. (Our map was modified to put eastbounds and westbounds on one page and converted to […]
When Al Kalmbach published the first issue of Trains in November 1940, the company’s home state of Wisconsin boasted 6,675 route-miles of railroad, a total that had peaked at 7,500 two decades earlier and was declining. Lingering effects from the Great Depression kept the state’s three largest railroads in bankruptcy — Chicago & North Western, […]
Iowa has been the poster-child state for the overbuilding of railways in the era before paved roads. In his “Iowa: Half Its Trains Don’t Go There Anymore” [April 1986 Trains], author Charles Bohi said Hawkeye State kids were taught “there is no point in Iowa more than 12 miles from a railroad” (a day’s drive […]
This map has been almost 25 years in coming. As soon as Conrail was formed in 1976, Trains readers began requesting a huge “breakdown” map of Conrail coded to predecessor railroads. The project was too big for the limited resources then available to us. Thanks to Curt Richards, though, we now have a good source […]
Compared here are the world’s most important main lines across the most important freight territory on earth, at a time when railroads were the most important of man’s technologies, 1927. These four main lines were the Trunk Lines, a title originally given to any important main line between two great cities, but later reserved almost […]
This Map of the Month appeared in the November 2004 issue of Trains magazine. “Everywhere West” was an appropriate slogan for a railroad that once operated over 12,000 route-miles across America’s heartland. The classically styled 1940 official railroad map at right shows how the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy grew from modest beginnings to become a major […]
Bill Metzger This Map of the Month appeared in the October 2005 issue of Trains magazine. Rock Island Lines serve 14 Western states,” the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific’s map in the Official Guides of 1964 proudly proclaimed, offering “7,849 miles of modern railroad.” Trouble was, Rock Island’s main lines went everywhere its parallel rivals […]
Bill Metzger This Map of the Month appeared in the February 2006 issue of Trains magazine. Mention the Pennsylvania Railroad and iconic images come to mind immediately: passenger trains rocketing down a four-track electrified main line; limiteds scooping water on the fly from track pans; impossibly long coal drags; and mammoth engineering projects, from Horseshoe […]
