Introducing the all-new Trains.com Forum! Become a part of our Community! >>VISIT NOW
The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad is perhaps best summed up by two words: deterioration and reconstruction. Seldom has a railroad managed to survive the number of disasters, both natural and contrived, that befell the Katy. Its 1865 charter was for the Union Pacific Southern Branch. Although it connected with the Kansas Pacific (merged by UP in 1880) […]
Great Northern’s 1951 Empire Builder featured 44-seat, leg-rest coaches for long-haul travelers. Great Northern photo […]
GLENMONT, N.Y. — Red tape, a gas pipeline utility, and a lawsuit have combined to delay and further threaten the rescue of two historic New York Central electric locomotives stranded for three decades along the Hudson River south of Albany. The Danbury Railway Museum of Danbury, Conn., has been working for nearly a year to […]
Some books seem to have a will of their own. Nothing, not the passing of decades, not even the passing of the author, will keep them down. If the story is compelling enough — and if it is blessed with passionate believers — the story will win out. That’s how I feel about “The Diesel […]
We’ll take a look at five details you can add to transition-era cabooses. Some details are railroad-specific, while others apply to many railroads. When in doubt, refer to prototype photos. The steam-to-diesel transition era, roughly 1940 to 1960, is the most popular modeling era. There are several reasons for this. Many people who model this […]
I recently wrote “Burlington Northern locomotive one-offs” featuring five Electro-Motive Division diesels, including unique paint schemes, rebuilds, and test subjects. This time, I dug through my negative collection and found eight Burlington Northern freight car one-offs. Most of the photos are from family travels throughout northwest Minnesota and northeast North Dakota between the early 1980s […]
A four-unit set of EMD F7 diesels leans against a coal drag climbing Baltimore & Ohio’s Cranberry Grade west of Terra Alta, W.Va., in the early 1950s. H. W. Pontin photo […]
STEILACOOM, Wash. — Efforts to save Steilacoom’s 1914 Northern Pacific depot, which remains largely intact though closed since 1972, are being revived, KIRO Radio reports, after having been dormant since prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Current owner BNSF Railway has been prepared to donate the building for several years, says Gus Melonas, a retired BNSF […]
ST. PAUL, MINN. — A Hiawatha “Running Indian” logo from famed Milwaukee Road Skytop lounge observation car Cedar Rapids has been stolen, car owner Friends of the 261 reported. The car was recently used on the Autumn Colors Express excursion trains in West Virginia and had been returned to its home base in St. Paul […]
Central of Georgia passenger trains All through November 2022, Classic Trains editors are celebrating the Central of Georgia Railroad. For this article, please enjoy Central of Georgia passenger trains in images selected from Kalmbach Media’s David P. Morgan Library. This article was first published in December 2017. […]
Central of Georgia locomotives bought a great deal of variety to the South. When the Central of Georgia Railway was organized in 1895, it had 214 steam locomotives of the 4-4-0, 4-6-0, and 2-6-0 types. The roster was expanded in the early 1900s with 2-8-0s, 2-8-2s, 2-10-2s, 4-6-2s, 4-8-2s, and, briefly, 2-6-6-2s. Many of these […]
The builders of the Central of Georgia Railway’s earliest predecessor lines, beginning in my hometown of Savannah, could not have imagined that their railroad would eventually extend across Georgia into Alabama, barely into Tennessee, and, briefly, just inside Florida. But they persisted in assembling smaller roads into “A Hand Full of Strong Lines,” a slogan […]
