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Three NP F units lead a 12-car train 2, the Mainstreeter, through Plains, Mont., in summer 1964. The depot’s train-order signal projects above the third unit, while a mail pouch is ready to be snagged by No. 2’s RPO. Bruce Butler In the summer of 1964 I had just about the best summer job that […]
Union Pacific’s City of Denver curves away from North Western Station in Chicago at the start of its run west. Sister streamliner City of Portland once made an unscheduled stop at Oak Park, 9 miles west. Wallace W. Abbey In spring 1955, I was working as a ticket clerk at Chicago & North Western’s Oak […]
At frosty Higgins, Texas, on the Santa Fe, author Metzger’s crane parts sit sidetracked as SD40-2s pass with a freight. Bill Metzger While my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the Seattle Seahawks in the 2007 Super Bowl, I got to thinking about where I was the last time the Steelers won football’s biggest game. It […]
Illinois Central 2-8-2 Mikado 1544 is eastbound at Villa Park, Ill., on a cold day in 1951. Henry M. Stange Some years ago, after a reunion of my old 10th Engineer Battalion at Springfield, Ill., I boarded Amtrak’s Statehouse for Chicago. I’d never ridden the former Chicago & Alton before, but I was eager to […]
A predecessor of this Rio Grande engineer made a daring Chama–Durango run in 1923. A. C. Kalmbach My grandfather, Marvin Rhodes, lived for almost a century, and he spent more than half of his long life working out of Durango, Colo., on the narrow-gauge lines of the Denver & Rio Grande Western. He hired out […]
Anything in the path of fast-moving N&W class J was sure to sustain significant damage. W. A. Akin Jr. Back in the glory days, the speed limit for passenger trains on Norfolk & Western’s Bristol Line was 65 mph. Several of the trains, including 45 and 46, the streamlined Tennessean, did considerable station work en […]
The Katy-Frisco Texas Special, a favorite conveyance for the Katy president’s business car, arrives in St. Louis in 1956. Fred Scott My railroad-related career started in 1941, when I was hired as a stenographer by the South-Western Freight Bureau in St. Louis. It was readily accepted for a young man who had studied shorthand and […]
SP 4229, the cab-forward on which author Anderson was firing as the second engine of a doubleheader when lead engine 4208 threw a rod, hauls L.A.-bound freight 766 up Casamilia Hill on the Coast Line in 1947. Jim Morley As an 18-year-old kid going firing on Southern Pacific’s Coast Division in 1953, my life was […]
Five years after author Dow’s Bangor & Aroostook experience, in March 1955, a 103-car freight waits at snowy West Seboois, Maine, for a meet with the Aroostook Flyer. Allen A. Sharp The temperature on that February 1950 morning at Oakfield, Maine, was a savage 40 degrees below zero. The sky was clear, with little or […]
Models posed in the lounge of a Milwaukee Road Skytop sleeper-observation car appear to be better behaved than some of the soldiers who rode the Olympian Hiawatha after the Korean War. Milwaukee Road When the Korean conflict was halted by a truce in 1953, there was a rush to get most of our troops home. […]
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 […]
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 […]
