An A-B-B-A quartet of Southern Pacific F units dressed in the distinctive “Black Widow” livery lift an eastbound freight up into the town of Tehachapi, Calif., in 1949. Exhaust from a 4-8-8-2 cab-forward helper rises in the distance. Linn Westcott photo […]
An aerial view from the 1940s shows the roundhouse for Cincinnati Union Terminal, opened in 1933. Marsh Photographic Studios photo […]
Crowds swarm around Burlington Route 9901 and 9902, the original three-car Twin Zephyr diesel trains, during a publicity event before the pair entered service between Chicago and the Twin Cities in April 1935. CB&Q photo […]
A crane places one of four 100-foot deck girders between piers 1 and 2 of the Santa Fe’s new bridge over the Colorado River at Needles, Calif. The double-track bridge opened in 1944 to replace a single-track span from 1890. Santa Fe photo […]
Workers load ice blocks into the end bunkers of refrigerator cars at the big ice dock at Roseville, Calif., on the Southern Pacific in 1948. Jim Morley photo […]
A red cap walks past businessmen who’ve just arrived at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station on New York Central’s New England States streamliner one morning in 1952. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
Alco’s initial answer to EMD’s wildly successful FT freight diesel of 1939 was a three-unit locomotive built as a testbed/demonstrator in 1945. Its lines and paint job led observers to dub it “Black Maria,” a slang term for a police wagon. Nos. 1500A, B, and C tested for barely a year on several New England […]
Completed in 1943, this immense Baldwin Locomotive Works product was powered by four of an intended eight crossways-mounted 750 h.p. V8 diesels and had a 2-D+D-2 wheel arrangement. Designed for passenger service, the giant proved unsatisfactory, but its running gear was later used for Seaboard Air Line DR12-8-3000 No. 4500. Baldwin photo […]
Great Northern’s Chicago–Seattle/Portland Empire Builder is seen on the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in a 1929 publicity photo. Amtrak’s Empire Builder does not use this bridge, which, though preserved as a landmark, has been devoid of tracks for years. GN photo […]
Baltimore & Ohio 2-8-2 4594 waits behind horizontal semaphore blades as New York Central E8’s breeze through with a westbound passenger train at Shelby, Ohio, in September 1955. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
A World War II-era view at Chicago & North Western’s 40th Street coach yard in Chicago shows four streamliners. From left: C&NW’s Twin Cities 400, the C&NW-UP City of Denver, the C&NW-UP City of Los Angeles (apparently coupled behind C&NW E3 5001B), and the C&NW-UP-SP City of San Francisco. C&NW photo […]
Santa Fe FP45’s 100 and 102 race west of Gallup, N.Mex., with the inaugural run of the road’s premium piggyback train the Super C on January 18, 1968. Road Foreman of Engines Jack Elwood is at the throttle; he wrote about the trip in Classic Trains‘ Special Edition No. 7, Fast Trains. ATSF photo […]
