Strasburg Rail Road at 60

Steam locomotive hauling a passenger train under a clear sky.

One of the nation’s iconic tourist railroads, Pennsylvania’s Strasburg Rail Road, reached a major milestone in 2020. The railroad reached its 60th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, it returned 2-10-0 Decapod No. 90 steam locomotive to its original tourist paint scheme. It also ran trips with its tiny Plymouth diesel. Join us for a […]

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CSX history including predecessors

Blue and yellow locomotives lead a freight train.

  Join Trains on a locomotive-studded tour of CSX Transportation — the blue and gold railroad — along with predecessors. Trains honored CSX with a full-length DVD in 2020. This segment from the DVD features an overview of CSX and a history of the railroad and predecessors. Only from Trains.com! […]

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Short Line Railroads

Train coming out of a tunnel

    You got it. Railroads covered most of the country with branches, and sidings and house tracks, where one and two car loads of freight could be loaded or unloaded. The local brought coal for the school boilers, fuel for the local distributor, and carried away raw materials that fed industry, and hauled off […]

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Intermodal and the Long-Haul Market

Intermodal car containers

    Yes it is, Brian. In fact, intermodal passed coal in 2013 as railroads’ biggest revenue source. In 2014, U.S. railroads tacked more than a half million intermodal loads onto their 2013 totals, notching a record 13.5 million shipments. Intermodal is likely to become even more significant in coming years as the industry spends […]

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Burlington Northern and the Grain Industry

A train going past a grain site

    Sure thing, Angela. Since the Baltimore & Ohio began hauling flour from Ellicott’s Mills to Baltimore in 1830 — grain, flour, and seeds have been an important part of railroading. Grain moved in boxcars for decades, but in the early 1960s, Southern Railway’s new, 100-ton — Big John — covered hopper revolutionized grain […]

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Steel: a Critical Building Block

Modern steel mill

    For an industry which hauls the heaviest, densest loads overland, no other material has proven itself more useful to railroads than that combination of iron, carbon, and trace minerals.  For more than 150 years, U.S. steelmakers have needed railroads to efficiently haul their heavy iron ore, taconite pellets, and coal, and also to transport […]

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The Persistence of Crude Oil

Tanker cars

    But this new source of revenue has a troubling side.   Rapid growth strains the capacity of railroads to move crude oil.   And, safety has become an even bigger issue following the tragic derailment of a crude oil train in Quebec in July 2013 that killed 47 people and leveled a town.   Other spectacular […]

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The Transportation of Lumber

Lumber being stored on a train

  Thanks, Jim.  Canadian National is the No. 1 lumber-hauling railroad in the U.S.   It takes particleboard out of British Columbia and moves it across the continent to where its needed.   If you see new homes or condos or apartments being built, chances are that the wood for them came by rail.   CN moves about […]

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BNSF’s Needles Division

TRN_locomotive_video_power_chapter_7_0121

This video was originally published by Trains as part of the Locomotive 2017 DVD. BNSF Needles Subdivision stretches from the Arizona/California state line at Needles west to Barstow, California across almost 170 miles of desert that tests man and machine every day in the struggle to keep the railroad moving. For the majority of its […]

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