Trains Presents: Train Festival 2011

We take you trackside for Train Festival 2011 in the Quad Cities! Relive the glory days of Midwest steam excursions and see your favorite locomotives, including Nickel Plate Road 2-8-4 No. 765 and Iowa Interstate’s Chinese-built QJs! Be sure to look for our special issue, Big Steam is Back, available now, along with its companion […]

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Trains Presents: D & I Railroad

Join Trains for a look at the unique D & I Railroad. You’ll see EMD power move heavy stone trains between Dell Rapids, S.D., and Sioux City, Iowa, on this shipper-owned line. Be sure to check out our feature story on the railroad in the September 2017 issue! […]

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Trains Presents: D & I Railroad

Join Trains for a look at the unique D & I Railroad. You’ll see EMD power move heavy stone trains between Dell Rapids, S.D., and Sioux City, Iowa, on this shipper-owned line. Be sure to check out our feature story on the railroad in the September 2017 issue! […]

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Growing up along the Burlington

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An E unit leads a train through Berwyn, Ill., on a lazy day in August 1963. Such scenes were part of daily life along the Burlington’s triple-track main west of Chicago. Larry Kostka It didn’t matter how often you rode the trains, or even if you did at all. Growing up in the postwar era […]

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BNSF trains collide head-on in north Texas w/Video NEWSWIRE

AMARILLO, Texas – Two BNSF Railway trains collided head on near the small town of Panhandle, about 27 miles northeast of Amarillo on Tuesday morning. Preliminary reports from KFDA-TV NewChannel 10 in Amarillo show two double-stack container trains derailed and on fire in a field along the Class I railroad’s main line in the area. […]

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T&P steam revival

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Texas & Pacific ended regular steam operations in 1952. When Red River flooding near Boyce, La., became too deep for diesels to wade through in 1957, T&P borrowed a 2-8-2 from the Fort Worth & Denver to haul trains in the high water. In January 1958, T&P bought a different FW&D Mike, No, 410, and […]

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Muskogee memories

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Heavy Mikado of the Muskogee Group poses on the turntable at Muskogee, Okla., in August 1950. Joe Collias photo In the early 1950s, a friend and I traveled extensively in an attempt to photograph as many steam locomotives as possible before their impending destruction by dieselization. On one expedition, we chose a corner of Oklahoma […]

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Dallas interlocking tower

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An interior view at Tower 19 near Dallas (Texas) Union Terminal shows the track diagram (“model board”) of the territory controlled by the tower and some of the levers that controlled the switches and signals. This is an electro-pneumatic interlocking, in which switches are operated by compressed air. Historic American Engineering Record photo […]

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