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How fast ya’ going? The legendary John Luther “Casey” Jones forever linked the heroic railroad engineer with speed. He was the lone casualty when his train crashed in an attempt to get his “Cannonball” back on schedule. For the most part, steam engines lacked speedometers. Skill and a trusted pocket watch worked aptly for safe […]
Road foreman As a young engineer, age 38, I was appointed road foreman of engines on the Lehigh Valley Railroad working out of Sayre, Pa. My territory ran from Coxton, Pa., to Manchester, N.Y., which is half way to Buffalo, N.Y. It was in 1953 and the job lasted until 1955 when I was fired […]
Abandoned railroads I enjoy traveling to the Hawaiian Islands. For me, it is a peaceful respite. But there is a down side. It’s not a great place to watch trains. At one time, all the islands that made up the 50th state had some sort of rail transportation. There was steam, diesel, signaling, commuter service, […]
Steak and eggs I was working a westbound over the Scenic Subdivision as the conductor on a Wenatchee-to-Seattle drag freight. The East pool ran from our home terminal of Seattle (Balmer Yard) east of the Cascade Mountains to Wenatchee, our away-from-home terminal. This was in December of 1983. It was very cold that day. The […]
Although the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway employed several nicknames — “Dixie Line,” “Nashville Road,” and “Lookout Mountain Route” among them — to former employees and their families, it will always be “Grandpa’s Road.” James A. Skelton was one of those Grandpas. He was 14 in April 1862, and although the War Between the […]
A train with no name… With the world changing at an accelerating pace, there’s something comforting about standing on a station platform, putting your left foot on the standard Amtrak-issue yellow step stool, and climbing aboard a train. Not any old train, mind you, but a passenger train with a name. A train that carries […]
Orphan Trains The orphan train story does not involve a specific train consist, locomotive, route, or even schedule. The story comes from a period that was socially different from today — 1854 to 1930. Attitudes about the idea of family, how parents cared for children, and the dichotomy between well-off and not, were radically different […]
Down memory lane Down memory lane: Ever find yourself bumping into the same locomotive over the decades? I have. For me, it is former Southern Pacific’s Electro Motive Corporation SW1 No. 1000. My first encounter was in the 1960s in Northern California, the only model on the roster not working in the greater Los Angeles […]
Them’s the breaks Late afternoon on Jan. 30, 2007, my conductor and I were called for the SSEALPC — a stack train from Seattle to Logistics Park, Elwood, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. Our train that day was FURX No. 8117 as the lead unit of six, trailing us were 63 loads, zero empties, 5,924 […]
Walking out the 15th Street side entrance to Detroit’s Michigan Central Station last Friday morning, I found myself channeling the great baseball play-by-play man Jack Buck. “I can’t believe what I just saw!” Buck’s epic quote came, of course, when Dodger Kirk Gibson launched his epic home run off A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley in game […]
My first regular assignment as a brakeman on the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad in 1977 was one that no one else wanted. In accordance with my union’s working agreement, when a job could not be filled voluntarily, the most junior employee was “forced” to work it. The morning after being notified by the crew clerk, […]
The Budd Co. and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy went hand in hand in building the streamlined Zephyr fleet, though the Midwestern railroad wasn’t the only customer to the car manufacturer. By 1941, the company produced nearly 500 stainless-steel passenger cars to more than a dozen railroads. The 1939 Silver Meteor and 1941 Empire State Express […]
